Tapestry of Shame

The reinterpretation of American slavery continues at a dizzying pace. At first concentrated primarily on slavery in the Southern states during the decades leading up to the Civil War, it has in recent years assumed a broader focus as scholars have turned their attention to slavery in an earlier period and have sought to place it within the context of developments on both sides of the Atlantic. Ira Berlin’s “Many Thousands Gone” and Eli Faber’s “Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade” are--in very different ways--fine examples of this broadened focus.

Berlin’s “Many Thousands Gone” is the bigger of the two, both in length and scope. Synthesizing a generation of scholarship, Berlin provides a sweeping survey of slavery and black life in North America (the European colonies that became the United States) from the early 17th into the early 19th centuries. The result is the best general history we now have of the “peculiar institution” during its first 200 years.

Many notable themes characterize Berlin’s book. Of these, the most pervasive is the extent to which slavery and race relations were historically constructed and hence varied over time and space. Although this theme is now widely accepted by historians of slavery, Berlin uses a striking new historical framework to structure his book and delineate slavery’s diversity, tracing the evolution through three chronological eras of four geographically based slave “societies”: the Chesapeake region, the Lowcountry of coastal South Carolina (and later Georgia and East Florida), the Lower Mississippi Valley and the North. In doing so, he presents an impressive panorama, even as he inevitably loses some of the detail and nuance of a more narrowly focused work.

Central to Berlin’s argument is the distinction between a “society with slaves,” that is, one in which some slaves happen to be present, and a true “slave society,” in which slavery provides the underpinnings of the economy and social order. “Many Thousands Gone” is divided into three parts, each devoted to a distinctive (if vaguely defined) era. The first era, lasting roughly until the end of the 17th century, was characterized by the existence of societies with slaves. The second era, in the early and mid-18th century, saw the triumph of plantation-based agriculture and the emergence (in varying degrees) of slave societies. The third, or Revolutionary, era produced a major challenge to slavery, a challenge that was played out differently in the four geographic regions.

Indeed, one of Berlin’s central points is the variation among the four societies in the way this basic chronological progression unfolded. The establishment of plantation agriculture occurred earlier in the Chesapeake, for example, where it was based on tobacco, than in the Lowcountry, where it involved cultivation of rice. The shift from a society with slaves to a slave society was incomplete in the North and in the Lower Mississippi Valley. The Revolutionary-era challenge led to the abolition of slavery in the North and the growth of a large body of free blacks in the Chesapeake, but it ultimately proved unsuccessful in the three Southern regions.

Berlin’s second major theme is the extent to which slavery and race were continually reshaped through a class struggle whose precise outcome depended on local conditions. The evolution of slavery was never linear; “rights” enjoyed by slaves--such as growing their “own” produce on their “own” land--could be won, lost and won again in a never-ending renegotiation of slave relationships.

In setting forth this complex process, Berlin provides especially valuable information on people he terms “Atlantic Creoles”: cosmopolitan men (and less often women) who were frequently of mixed race, multilingual and familiar with several cultures. At first the products of European trading enclaves in Africa, Atlantic Creole communities soon spread to Europe and the Americas (in cities such as Lisbon, Seville, Havana and Mexico City) and were prevalent in the societies with slaves that characterized North America in the 17th century when race relations were more flexible and access to freedom greater than they were later. The transition to true slave societies ushered in by the plantation revolution brought sweeping changes to the lives of blacks in America. As Atlantic Creoles gave way to increasing numbers of imported Africans, the exploitation of slave labor reached a new intensity: Mortality rates surged, fertility rates plunged (in part because planters imported far fewer women than men) and blacks were subjected to sharply higher levels of physical violence. At the same time, however, the swelling of the black population created the preconditions for creation of a new African American culture. Rather than a simple process of Africans becoming African Americans, there occurred a complex progression of Atlantic Creole to African to African American.

Any book as bold--and boldly argued--as this one inevitably generates questions and invites criticism. Berlin never quite specifies how prevalent Atlantic Creoles were, for example, among slaves in 17th century America. The idea of “cosmopolitans, for whom the Atlantic was a vast thoroughfare for commercial opportunity and a crucible for cultural interaction” is appealing, but one wonders whether the term accurately describes most slaves in Virginia or South Carolina in the 1670s. Part of the problem is that Berlin is not very interested in numbers. His observations certainly hold for some slaves and are therefore important, but it is not clear for how many.

At times, too, it seems that Berlin strains too hard to make his four societies conform to his three-stage chronological model. His thesis that a “tobacco revolution” led to the emergence of a slave society in the Chesapeake region at the turn of the 18th century, just as a “rice revolution” did in the Lowcountry, is appealing in its simplicity but ultimately doesn’t work. The transition to a slave society in the Chesapeake occurred not because of an increase in tobacco cultivation--in fact tobacco production had surged during the second and third quarters of the 17th century, before the massive importation of slaves, and was stagnant between 1680 and 1715--but because white indentured servants stopped migrating from Europe in numbers sufficient to meet the demand for labor, causing planters to turn to Africa instead.

Berlin’s model also encounters difficulties in the North, where the transition to a slave society was at best very partial, and in Louisiana, which never developed a flourishing plantation economy under the French. Despite his welcome emphasis on variation over space, Berlin never quite resolves the tension between his overall argument and the way in which slavery evolved differently in his four regions.

Finally, and most important, an appraisal of this book must confront its ambiguous focus. Although Berlin presents his study as a history of slavery (as indicated in its subtitle), on the very first page he also describes it as “a history of African-American life.” These two subjects are closely related, of course, but they are not identical, and Berlin never really decides where his focus should lie. The result is a study in which slavery at times gets lost in the shuffle. Emphasizing the ways in which blacks struggled to augment their social autonomy and resist dehumanization, Berlin is more interested in African American life and culture than he is in the master-slave relationship that stood at the heart of slavery. He pays as much attention to his Atlantic Creoles, who lived in America in relatively small numbers before slavery became entrenched, and to the free black communities that emerged in the Revolutionary era as he does to the slaves who toiled in the tobacco and rice plantations. As it progresses, this book seems less a history of slavery and more a history of blacks in America.

One reason that this is so is the striking contrast between Berlin’s emphasis on black agency and his inattention to the whites who helped make slavery what it was. Too often, those whites come across as one-dimensional exploiters rather than as real human beings. This is perhaps most evident in Part III, which is the least compelling section of the book. Berlin shows how slaves took advantage of the Revolution to press for their interests, but he gives short shrift to the important change in ideology that occurred among many whites in the North and upper South. Although noting their “hand wringing” over slavery, he dismisses whatever antislavery principles they enunciated as self-serving hypocrisy. This approach is not so much wrong as it is insufficient: Slave owners were hardly the only humans in whom principle and self-interest were closely intertwined, and the tangled relationship between the commitment to “liberty” enunciated by men such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Patrick Henry and their experiences as slave-owning “gentlemen” is worthy of careful exploration. Surely the changing values of slave owners is an essential part of the history of slavery.

None of this is meant to detract from Berlin’s achievement. “Many Thousands Gone” is a remarkable book, one that beautifully integrates two centuries of history over a wide geographical area. It is a benchmark study from which students will learn and with which scholars will grapple for many years to come.

Faber’s brief volume (with only 146 pages of text) is designed as a response to repeatedly heard allegations that Jews were responsible for--or at least played a major role in--foisting slavery on the Americas. This has not been an issue of contention among historians; indeed, no reputable expert on slavery has supported such charges. Nevertheless, their widespread currency among certain segments of the public justifies the effort to “ascertain what the historical record provides by way of empirical evidence.” Focusing on the British empire, where Jews were relatively easy to identify because the great majority had Spanish or Portuguese surnames, Faber provides persuasive evidence of the small role Jews had in providing slaves to, or owning slaves in, the American colonies.

Faber’s painstaking research provides more detail than any but the most committed reader will want on Jewish involvement with slavery in the British empire. In 107 pages of appendixes, he lists every known Jewish investor in English slave-trading voyages, as well as every Jewish resident in Jamaica and Barbados at varying times from the late 17th to the early 19th centuries. His approach is quantitative, with little effort to ascertain Jewish attitudes toward slavery. He does provide overwhelming evidence, however, that “Jewish involvement in the institution of slavery in the British empire was . . . exceedingly limited.” Not only did Jewish merchants in England take little part in the slave trade, but Jewish settlers in Barbados, Jamaica and the mainland colonies were a highly urbanized group who worked most often as shopkeepers and traders and thus were relegated to the margins of the slave-owning economy.

Of course, some of these settlers did own slaves, but because there were very few Jews in England or the English colonies, their overall share of slave-trading and slave-owning was tiny. In 1695, for example, there were only about 800 Jews in all of England. In 1817, Jews owned less than 2% of all the slaves in Jamaica and less than 1% of those in Barbados. In 1790, Jews owned 157 (or 0.15%) of South Carolina’s 107,094 slaves. Through these and hundreds of similar statistics, Faber provides exhaustive documentation of the extremely limited nature of Jewish involvement in the British slave trade and in British-American slavery. “Jews, Slaves and the Slave Trade” thus serves as a useful footnote to recent scholarship detailing the size and character of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. For anyone in search of ammunition to refute farfetched claims about Jewish culpability for the enslavement of Africans in America, this is the place to look.