41 pages • 1 hour read
Ira BerlinGenerations of Captivity
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “Plantation Generations”
The lives of slaves became more intimately controlled on plantations beginning in the late-17th-century Chesapeake. They spread throughout the continent “in fits and starts” (54) over the 18th century and into the 19th century. Slaves’ situations worsened in all areas that previously afforded hopes of mobility or material improvement. Large plantations were usually far removed from the Atlantic world that had been central to charter generations. Planters represented “a class of men whose appetite for labor was nearly insatiable,” and they reinvented “social organization and commercial production” to supply unfree laborers in droves to these sequestered estates (54).
A mass importation of slaves from Africa’s interior altered dynamics of black life in North America as newcomers brought diverse languages and religions. Most of these incomers were male. As a result of the sexual imbalance and geographic displacement, African slaves struggled to reproduce and died in high rates from disease and invigorated brutality in slave discipline, including “dehumanizing affronts” and “grotesque mutilations” (61). Formal law (slave codes) granted power to planters and stripped slaves of most of the rights they had previously exercised. Hardening racial hierarchies also casted out free people of color.
South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida were similar in many respects to the Chesapeake, though plantations further South grew rice and indigo, particularly labor-intensive crops that caused profound suffering for slaves. While racial lines hardened in these slave societies, planters noted differences and articulated preferences among African nationalities. These preferences allowed “specific African cultures to reconstitute themselves” on plantations (70), rendering slave cultures in these settings specific and nuanced, not flattened into a more nebulous “African” image. Another difference in the Southern colonies was the ascension of cities, particularly the port of Charles Town, where slaves entered American markets and where planters resided during malaria season, leaving the operations of the plantation to overseers and black slave drivers. Berlin suggests that “mastership-at-a-distance” benefitted slaves (77), who worked with black drivers to establish a pace of work that satisfied plantation owners without overtaxing slaves.
The other major result of the urban/rural divide was a division between slave lives in each region. Slaves working as domestic servants in the city “were free in everything but name” (79), dressing in fine clothes, associating among themselves, and selling artisanal services and goods. Slave labor expanded and become more important to regional economies in the North as well, as the grain-producing hinterlands came to rely on it. Northern slave owners could be just as cruel as Southern planters and similarly endeavored to limit the number and liberty of free blacks. Black Americans resisted by visibly displaying new African-American pastimes, such as carrying out large African holiday celebrations in American cities. Though these dynamics were mirrored elsewhere, the North remained a society with slaves.
Slavery actually weakened in the lower Mississippi Valley, where French and Spanish regimes relied on black militiamen and needed slaves for comparatively independent labor like lumbering and cattle ranching. Slaves also gathered in cities like New Orleans, where they maintained a sophisticated market economy of homemade goods that could potentially buy them freedom.
Chapter 2 Analysis
The regional approach again demonstrates the variety in slavery that developed, in this case, mostly throughout the 18th century. Where large numbers of slaves from the African interior populated plantations, foreignness no longer helped slaves negotiate better circumstances for themselves—planters feared and distrusted them, unlike the way mercantile businessmen had regarded creoles of the charter generations in coastal ports. Cultural influence from Africa shaped new generations of slave culture that, in pockets throughout the colonies and early states, aimed to emulate diverse African communities. Berlin begins to use the term “African American” to describe slaves on many plantations because of this coming of African culture to an American context.
The place of state courts in the lives of slaves changed drastically between the early- and late-18th century. Whereas the charter generations accessed the law to their advantage, plantation slaves suffered from slave codes that diminished their legal standing altogether. Courts in the 18th century in slave societies like the Chesapeake and Carolina country ensured that “planters assumed absolute sovereignty over their plantations” (62). This elevation of power and prestige extended beyond the slave-master relationship. Interpersonal relationships, in general, “emphasized deference and authority” (63). This dynamic solidified a strong sense of paternalism among planters who viewed themselves as “prime movers of all things, fathers writ large” (63), in charge of their own lives and the lives around them. They employed greater surveillance and claimed that their actions were benevolent.
Despite the consolidation of power within the plater class, slaves resisted “the new regime at every turn” (64). They could feign ignorance and slow down production or make bids for freedom by temporarily or permanently running away. In the regions that remained societies with slaves, slaves continued to build and maintain their own economies and accumulate wealth in the fashion of earlier generations. In a few cases (Berlin references the 1739 Stono rebellion in South Carolina), slaves attempted violent insurrection, often with the result of planters responding with stricter slave codes and “near total power over their human property” (74).
In this section, we see divisions emerge among slaves along geographic lines. Most pronounced among these divisions was the urban domestic service class versus the rural plantation class. The city slaves, which also included far more women than the plantations, could access finer clothes and material possessions. In New Orleans, slaves even maintained the possibility of establishing sufficient personal wealth to buy their freedom. No single black culture or sense of community emerged that could breech these divisions. Black culture continued to develop, like the rest of the history of slaves, according to regional contingencies.
Berlin notes in each section what the changes in the slave system meant for free people of color. As racial distinctions hardened in societies with slaves, free blacks typically moved further to the margins of society. Some attempted to “[pass] into white society, a difficult task at which only a few succeeded” (66), while others fled. Even in the North, legislators and white residents alike diminished the world of free blacks, often denying them the right to vote or own property. Only in the lower Mississippi Valley did officials “[encourage] the growth of the free colored population” (93) to supply enough loyal militiamen to protect the colony.
The lower Mississippi Valley stands out in this section as the outlying example in many ways. Though Berlin discusses many contingencies that set the region apart, it was particularly significant that the French controlled the region until 1769, when the Spanish took over. These imperial powers interacted with slaves differently than the English, who controlled all of the other regions in Berlin’s analysis.
