Generations of Captivity

Ira Berlin’s Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (2003) is an analytical work of historical research and synthesis that traces the development of American slavery from the 17th century to national Emancipation. Berlin compares the development and conditions of slavery across regions including the North (usually New England and the Mid-Atlantic states), the coastal South (or sections of it most relevant to the corresponding timeline), and the Southern Interior, particularly in the Lower Mississippi Valley. The regional focus illustrates the great diversity of experience in this history. Berlin’s central argument is that American slavery was contingent and heterogenous. Slaves continually negotiated their circumstances and maintained control over important aspects of their lives, most notably kinship relations, religious identities, and other markers of culture and community.

This central claim is a response to a theme that Berlin noticed in contemporary histories of slavery that treat the institution as static and homogenous across time and space. The intervention that Generations of Captivity makes in studies of slavery is therefore a corrective to a misinterpretation of a foundational American institution. Berlin illustrates how slavery developed from peripheral labor into an all-encompassing societal structure over the course of three centuries and in relation to transatlantic histories of the New World, Europe, and Africa.

The most important aspects of this history are the slaves themselves. Berlin recreates the history by characterizing the lives and experiences of enslaved people of different eras, particularly the ways slaves resisted their oppression. He organizes them into different generations with unique (though occasionally overlapping and intersecting) circumstances. He pays close attention to the plights of free people of color throughout the book as well, a story which illustrates the making of race in the United States and the changing nature of boundaries between freedom and bondage.

Berlin first details the “charter generations” of North American slaves, transplanted from multi-racial communities along the African coast to the coast of the American colonies in the 17th century. These early slaves had considerable leverage in their social standing and property accumulation despite their bondage. Because of their familiarity with multiple languages, religions, and transatlantic systems of commerce, they acted as intermediaries and brokers for the ruling class. With these unique skills came a degree of autonomy that later generations of slaves could not easily replicate, and a porous boundary between slavery and freedom that disappeared over time.

These more flexible circumstances steadily gave way to the plantation system, much more centrally reliant on slavery versus other forms of labor. An influx of slaves from the African interior rewrote the demographics of the institution as slaveholders consolidated their power through tightening legislation and racialized ideology that defined whiteness as superior and blackness as subordinate. Berlin characterizes this era as the “plantation generations.”

A series of challenges to the ideology and realities of human bondage (most notably the language of the Declaration of Independence that stressed universal quality and the successful Haitian revolution that ended slavery on the island of Hispaniola) indicated slavery’s systematic instability. “Revolutionary generations” of slaves aimed to capitalize on the spirit of republicanism and win freedom. In the regions in question, however, slaveholders reinforced their powers in crueler and even more restrictive ways.

“Migration generations” suffered the expansion of slavery into the Southern Interior. Thousands endured the “Second Middle Passage” that marched individuals over hundreds of miles in dangerous and dehumanizing conditions. This internal slave trade and emergent brutal slave regime in the Deep South characterized the Antebellum period. Slaves won emancipation during and following the American Civil War in the 1860s. Berlin closes the book by exploring the contested meaning of freedom in the African American community as black communities struggled for formal citizenship and social equality.