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 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Revolutionary Generations”
A ripple of democratic revolutions throughout the Americas and Europe ushered in new ideologies and paths towards freedom, plus vehement efforts by slaveowners to maintain the status quo or expand power.
The chaos of war in the North provided cover for slaves to escape bondage. It also produced ideology. Touting commitments to equality and freedom, white revolutionaries popularized a vocabulary that slaves could readily adopt in their own bids for freedom, aided by evangelical faiths that proclaimed equality in the eyes of God. Many slaveholders “yielded to the logic of the Revolution and freed their slaves” (104). All state legislatures north of the Chesapeake passed plans for gradual emancipation by 1800. Emancipation, however, was delayed, conditional, and usually partial at best. Post-revolutionary society replicated itself on the earlier model: Blacks worked in positions of direct servitude to whites, at the very “bottom of the occupational hierarchy” (107).
In the Chesapeake (or “Upper South”), “slavery […] did not crack under the blows of revolutionary republicanism and evangelical egalitarianism” (111), largely because the region was only ever a peripheral theater of war. It did change significantly, though. A growing slave population enabled an Upper-South-controlled internal slave trade—the “Second Middle Passage” (113). A new economy rooted in several different crops led slaveowners to hire out their slaves to other worksites. These changes gave rise to a more “active community life” and “a fuller knowledge of the world beyond the plantation’s borders” (116). Slaves and free blacks often relocated to cities, where they became “the backbone of the Chesapeake’s urban industrial workforce” (119). This urbanization expanded the free black population, which Berlin notes as the most significant development of black life in the region in this era. Often, free blacks became active abolitionists.
American independence reified and strengthened slavery in the Lower South. Planters not only “repaired the damage the war had wrought,” they “expanded their domain […] reopened direct trade with Africa, and consolidated their status as the region’s ruling class” (124). After the war, cotton production boomed, planters collected new slaves, and the plantation order surged westward through new channels of American territorial expansion. Freed slaves, trying to climb the existing social ladder, occasionally purchased slaves of their own, in stark contrast to the spirit of abolitionism further east. Slaves in the Lower Mississippi Valley attempted to “seize their freedom” during the war with passing American, British, and Spanish forces (141). Expansion of sugar and cotton plantations, however, created a higher demand for slaves and ushered in a new regime with intensified labor.
Never willing to accept brutality, slaves challenged the regime by running away, forming maroon communities, and plotting to take up arms (the most significant militant conspiracy was in 1795 at Pointe Coupée and rooted in the democratic language of the revolutionary French Declaration of the Rights of Man). As the 19th century got underway, “as in the Upper and Lower South, African-American slavery grew far more rapidly than freedom” (157), towards some of the worst brutality in the history of slavery.
Chapter 3 Analysis
Berlin distinguishes between the mental and material world of slaves. For example, in the post-war North, freed slaves made symbolic changes (like acquiring new names and addresses) that bore great weight in elevating self-esteem and instilling a sense of optimism, but in most cases, freedom brought few measurable benefits in terms of available professions and prospects for wealth accumulation. The North was the only place that freedom actually expanded faster than slavery. In the decades following the American Revolution, the country by and large remained firmly committed to slavery and actively diminished the domain of free people of color. Earlier chapters explored the power of colonial and imperial governments in dictating slave life. The American revolution and the political reorganization that followed established the national government that upheld and expanded slavery to new proportions.
This fact confirms that revolutionary ideology, with all of its articulations of the rights to freedom and liberty, did not stamp out ideas about black racial inferiority among whites. Racial divisions hardened. Because free blacks worked for wealthy whites in such similar capacities to the ones they had before the war, whites in the North “encouraged the notion that black free people were little more than slaves without masters” (105). Free blacks in the Lower South depended on white patronage for their livelihood and independence. Freedom, like slavery, was racialized. In many practical ways, it was also controlled and policed by whites. The rigid power structures would endure in some places for nearly another century, but revolutionary ideology provided a new language through which to express rights to freedom.
More divisions within black society emerged among the revolutionary generations. In the North, many public black figures aimed to project respectability and inspire racial uplift, or positive valuations of free blacks that could convince white society to extend legal privileges and citizenship. A black leadership emerged in the Upper South, comprised of artisans and shopkeepers and dedicated to obtaining full citizenship. Newly freed slaves in the same cities were likely to be less concerned with pleasing white society and more interested in accessing new opportunities that freedom granted. Sometimes at direct odds and sometimes mutually apathetic, black Americans developed distinct communities in different regions.
The extent to which freed slaves physically separated themselves from their former masters also varied by region. In the North and Upper South, freed slaves moved to cities when they wanted to avoid continued dependence on their old masters. In the Lower South, former slaves “did not stray far from the site of their enslavement” and relied on white patrons to navigate society (137). Manumitters (planters who freed their slaves) “maintained an active interest in the welfare of their former slaves,” helping them access new jobs and supporting their urban shops. Freed slaves in the Lower Mississippi Valley often continued living with their former masters because independent housing was too expensive. These facts further illustrate the diversity in the experience of both slaves and also former slaves. They also reveal that black America was never a monolith, even when common experiences (like the knowledge of world events that ushered in emancipation and republicanism) conveyed distinct possibilities for challenging white supremacy.
The Second Middle Passage looms on the periphery of Berlin’s analysis in this chapter, but it is yet to take center stage. Instead, we see the collapse of the former world order defined by direct European imperial control in many pockets of North America and the official end to the international slave trade. These conditions inspired the growth of the internal slave trade, which Berlin analyzes in the next chapter.
