american slavery american freedom the ordeal of colonial virginia

To make these points, Berlin crafts a deft synthesis of the many regional studies that have slowly been changing our understanding of slavery. Further, because slavery became so closely identified with African ancestry, race was significant not only as a way to justify the heritability of slavery, but also in the persistence of its legacy long past phases of emancipation that began in the north and then would-slowly and with violence-continue into the antebellum era. In contrast, criticism of slavery was scattered, amorphous, and took too many different forms to build toward any effective assault on the institution. Slaves (and free blacks) lived everywhere, from northern cities to Louisiana plantations. Berlin’s goal is to demonstrate that, in early North America, slavery was a pervasive and little questioned institution whose increasingly close association with concepts of race made it difficult to root out its legacy. He therefore traces two patterns: how slavery came to be equivalent with enslavement of Africans, and how freedom did not guarantee racial equality. Why have the scales not fallen from our eyes? To trace the tenacity of racism, Berlin’s examination of slavery’s genesis necessarily also has to explain the emergence of racism. The new understanding of race has changed behavior little if at all” (p. Now, because that transformation has not entirely been achieved, scholars are looking more carefully at the early history of slavery, in order to understand why racial inequality may be so persistent.īerlin opens his book by addressing this concern: “Of late, it has become fashionable to declare that race is a social construction.” The problem, Berlin points out, is that this scholarly contention “has won few practical battles. During the era of the civil rights movement, comprehension of the racism that had survived the Civil War seemed to support an ideal of the radical transformation of American society toward racial equality. But this shift toward the early-modern period probably also represents a different generation’s examination of slavery.

The shift away from the nineteenth century is evidence of the maturation of the field, in which origins of the peculiar institution and its global dimensions are of greater interest because they are still less understood than the forms of slavery which were dismantled during and after the Civil War.

These monographs take up the work pioneered by Winthrop Jordan and David Brion Davis to see how slavery and prejudice toward blacks were embedded in western European and then American culture. Morgan’s Slave Counterpoint (1998) in a recent spate of books about early slavery. Ira Berlin’s Many Thousands Gone joins Hugh Thomas’s The Slave Trade (1997), Robin Blackburn’s, The Making of New World Slavery (1997), and Philip D. Thirty years ago, ambitious, doorstopper books on slavery concentrated on the antebellum era today, they tend to focus on the colonial period.

American slavery american freedom the ordeal of colonial virginia