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Many Thousands Gone
Today most Americans, black and white, identify slavery with
cotton, the deep South, and the African-American church. But at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, after almost two hundred years
of African-American life in mainland North America, few slaves grew
cotton, lived in the deep South, or embraced Christianity. Many
Thousands Gone traces the evolution of black society from the
first arrivals in the early seventeenth century through the
Revolution. In telling their story, Ira Berlin , a
leading historian of southern and African-American life,
reintegrates slaves into the history of the American working class
and into the tapestry of our nation. Laboring as field hands on
tobacco and rice plantations, as skilled artisans in port cities,
or soldiers along the frontier, generation after generation of
African Americans struggled to create a world of their own in
circumstances not of their own making. In a panoramic view that
stretches from the North to the Chesapeake Bay and Carolina
lowcountry to the Mississippi Valley, Many Thousands Gone
reveals the diverse forms that slavery and freedom assumed before
cotton was king. We witness the transformation that occurred as the
first generations of creole slaves-who worked alongside their
owners, free blacks, and indentured whites-gave way to the
plantation generations, whose back-breaking labor was the sole
engine of their society and whose physical and linguistic isolation
sustained African traditions on American soil. As the nature of the
slaves' labor changed with place and time, so did the relationship
between slave and master, and between slave and society. In this
fresh and vivid interpretation, Berlin demonstrates that the
meaning of slavery and of race itself was continually renegotiated
and redefined, as the nation lurched toward political and economic
independence and grappled with the Enlightenment ideals that had
inspired its birth.
eBook
Slavery, resistance, freedom
Americans have always defined themselves in terms of their freedoms--of speech, of religion, of political dissent. How we interpret our history of slavery--the ultimate denial of these freedoms--deeply affects how we understand the very fabric of our democracy. This extraordinary collection of essays by some of America’s top historians focuses on how African Americans resisted slavery and how they responded when finally free. Ira Berlin sets the stage by stressing the relationship between how we understand slavery and how we discuss race today. The remaining essays offer a richly textured examination of all aspects of slavery in America. John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweinger recount actual cases of runaway slaves, their motivations for escape and the strains this widespread phenomenon put on white slave-owners. Scott Hancock explores how free black Northerners created a proud African American identity out of the oral history of slavery in the south. Edward L. Ayers, William G. Thomas III, and Anne Sarah Rubin draw upon their remarkable Valley of the Shadow website to describe the wartime experiences of African Americans living on both borders of the Mason-Dixon line. Noah Andre Trudeau turns our attention to the war itself, examining the military experience of the only all-black division in the Army of the Potomac. And Eric Foner gives us a new look at how black leaders performed during the Reconstruction, revealing that they were far more successful than is commonly acknowledged--indeed, they represented, for a time, the fulfillment of the American ideal that all people could aspire to political office. Wide-ranging, authoritative, and filled with invaluable historical insight, Slavery, Resistance, Freedom brings a host of powerful voices to America’s evolving conversation about race.
eBook
