Many Thousands Gone

The American Constitution chose slavery...and the nation justified the choice by formulating an ideology that made blacks into something less than human beings. The result, as historian Ira Berlin argues in a new book on slavery, Many Thousands Gone, is that African slavery became "no longer just one of many forms of subordination—a common enough circumstance in a world ruled by hierarchies—but the foundation on which the social order rested." -- Ellis Cose * Newsweek *
Ira Berlin's magisterial [book] is a story of slavery in evolutionary perspective...As a comprehensive study of early North American slavery the work is unexcelled and will be a boon to students and scholars alike. -- Daniel C. Littlefield * Slavery and Abolition *
In [Many Thousands Gone], Berlin emphasises that slavery, too often treated by historians as a static institution, was in fact constantly changing. The range of subjects is impressive—from work patterns to family life, naming practices, religions, race relations and modes of resistance. But by organising his account along the axes of space and time, Berlin gives coherence to what would otherwise have been an account overwhelming by its detail and complexity...Many Thousands Gone is likely to remain for years to come the standard account of the first two centuries of slavery in the area that became the United States. -- Eric Foner * London Review of Books *
Berlin's study is the best account we have of the beginnings of servitude in America. It is also a reminder of slavery's adaptability. The notion that it was necessarily tied to the production of export staples is false. -- Howard Temperley * Times Literary Supplement *
Occasionally we are rewarded with a brave soul willing to impose shape and direction on what has become, for many, a prodigiously confusing historiography. Ira Berlin, like the very best historians who have tackled the problem, brings to the task a formidable record as a researcher and writer in more specialised areas of slave and post-slave studies. The result of Berlin's labours is a vital book, not simply in making sense of historical complexity, but in advancing a new and distinctive argument about the shaping of North America...[Many Thousands Gone has] a sophisticated argument that imposes shape on historical diversity without in the least riding roughshod over the specific local and regional differences that fragment the American slave experience. This is a deceptive book, for it is not simply a general account of slavery in North America. It is a subtle—and beautifully written—argument about the phases of slave history and of that sharp differentiation across time and place that makes slavery so hard to contain within a more generalised format...What emerges is the most original and most persuasive overall study of North American slavery for a very long time...[Many Thousands Gone] is moreover a book with powerful implications for anyone interested in the wider history of America. It is, quite simply, a book of major importance for all historians of North America. -- James Walvin * Times Higher Education Supplement *
Many Thousands Gone will challenge just about everything you thought you knew about slavery, especially its dawning...Through this honest and responsible work, perhaps we can begin decoding our Pavlovian responses to the buried racial and experiential triggers we dare not analyze. -- Debra Dickerson * Village Voice *
Ira Berlin provides a sweeping survey of slavery and black life in North America...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 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. -- Peter Kolchin * Los Angeles Times *
Many Thousands Gone is an imaginatively conceived, brilliantly executed academic history of the experience of African-Americans, from their arrival in Jamestown in 1619, through the early decades of the nineteenth century. With clarity and sympathetic attention, Berlin depicts how, with regional and historical variations, blacks in North America employed a variety of stratagems to confront modify, ameliorate, and even surmount their degraded condition as slaves...Berlin's knowledge of slave life in America is little short of encyclopedic. On virtually every page he illuminates how and to what extent African-Americans in different times and places strove "to negotiate" the terms of their servitude with their masters...This book seems destined to define the terms of discussion for many years to come. -- Haim Chertok * Jerusalem Post *
When Americans think about slavery—and try to work through its legacy—they're operating from a misleadingly narrow image: the cotton plantations of the deep South. So says Berlin, who chronicles the slave experience in the 200 years—1619 to 1819—that preceded the antebellum period. It's a horrific picture, but a complex one too, including the dramatically different lives of the first Creole slaves, the long northern enthusiasm for slavery, and ever-present patterns of resistance and renegotiation. * Globe and Mail *
In Many Thousands Gone, Ira Berlin tells the complex and neglected story of American slavery from 1619 through about 1810. It is a story most Americans do not know...Berlin has written a sweeping history that builds upon the pioneering work of John Hope Franklin, John Blassingame, Eugene Genovese, Herbert Gutman and Edmund Morgan, and shines as both a comprehensive and astute synthesis of current scholarship and as an original contribution to the field. -- James L. Swanson * Chicago Tribune *
In his pathbreaking book on slavery's first two centuries in America, Ira Berlin argues that our historical memory is incomplete, based almost entirely on 19th-century portraits of the "peculiar institution." Underscoring differences within the North American slave experience over time and place, Berlin paints a much more complex picture of slavery's origins and formative years...[and] skillfully unravels slavery's complex evolution. Berlin's foremost contribution is his nuanced analysis of the creolization process. His book is the best study of black life before the "plantation revolution" and its mainspring, slavery, which locked African Americans into an inferior class defined by color...Race, then, as Berlin reminds us, like class, is the product of a particular kind of social construction. It required major demolition—the Civil War—to begin to renovate the structure that slavery and racism built. -- John David Smith * News and Observer *
As Ira Berlin makes abundantly clear, racism was an ideology crucial for creating an intellectual and emotional climate that would allow slavery to exist. It gave an institution, albeit a "peculiar" one, the required veneer of "reason"...Berlin explodes several myths and sets in their place a history that honors the complexity of the American past with an unswerving, unsentimental gaze. One myth that Berlin seizes is that of the Old South, the common belief that slavery was for the most part situated below the Mason-Dixon Line. Slavery became a southern phenomenon only after 200 years of American history. These 200 years are Berlin's subject, as he tracks the black presence throughout early America, emphasizing in vivid detail the diversity of slave existence, urban and rural. He underscores the fact that as America was being constructed by slave labor, slaves were living their own lives and creating their own culture, a syncretic mix of African origins...Berlin's argument, and it is brilliantly posed, is that slavery, with all its resonance, haunts America even as the new century is about to begin. -- Michelle Cliff * San Jose Mercury News *
Berlin offers a complex picture of how slaves etched out small freedoms under dire circumstances in early America. Their existence was defined by religion, family structure and African inheritance—not just the fact that they were slaves. Many Thousands Gone is not an apology for slavery, but a testament to the willpower of a people to define their own lives under the most dismal conditions. -- Ronald D. Lankford * Roanoke Times *
Rather than focus on slavery in the antebellum South, Berlin provides a revealing look at the diverse lives and cultures of the early slaves. * Washington Post Book World *
In this masterly work, Ira Berlin has demonstrated that earlier North American slavery had many different forms and meanings that varied over time and from place to place. Slavery and race did not have a fixed character that endured for centuries but were constantly being constructed or reconstructed in response to changing historical circumstances. Many Thousands Gone illuminates the first 200 years of African-American history more effectively than any previous study. -- George M. Fredrickson * New York Times Book Review *
This meticulous scholarly study demonstrates how and why slavery took different forms at different times in different colonies and states, and describes the kinds of autonomy that slaves were able to wrest from their masters under each variant of the system. Berlin also stresses slaves' skills and acumen, not to palliate the evil of slavery but to show slaves as something other than victims--as competent, often exceptionally able, men and women. * New Yorker *
Ira Berlin, one of this nation's foremost scholars on the slave era...presents a thorough and extensive examination of early slavery...[He] considers the evolution of slavery, and the changing nature of how slaves were treated. Though he never understates the violence and domination practiced by slaveholders, Berlin introduces the notion that slavery during its first two centuries was a "negotiated relationship," even if that relationship was "so profoundly asymmetrical" that most discount even the "notion of negotiation" between the owner and the owned. -- Renée Graham * Boston Sunday Globe *
In Many Thousands Gone, Ira Berlin has produced an intriguing and compelling new interpretation that is one of the most significant books about slavery in several years...Berlin's work is an impressive and masterfully written narrative. He provides a clearer picture of slavery, which has often been clouded by imprecise accounts. As he astutely concludes, slavery's effects still persist as an unwelcome guest in American society. -- John A. Hardin * Lexington Herald Leader *
By concentrating on slavery in North America from the early years of settlement through the Revolution, Ira Berlin restores historical depth and a human face to a field usually mired in angry polemic and narrow quanitification. This rich and well-written narrative—the best book on American slavery since Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll—challenges traditional accounts...Many Thousands Gone shows how we must place American history and the contemporary American dilemma of race and cultural heritage in the hemispheric and Atlantic context to comprehend fully America's peculiarities and uniqueness. * Foreign Affairs *
Today's correct historian can be as guilty of over simplification as yesterday's apologist for slavery, but Berlin scrupulously resists any such temptations. His emphasis is on subtlety and complexity...According to Berlin the history of the first two of slavery's three centuries in North America reveals nothing so much as change, ambiguity and "messy, inchoate reality." For this reason alone his book has great value and importance; it is also lucid, measured and entirely persuasive...Indeed, for all the oppression it documents, Many Thousands Gone can be read not as a chronicle of denial and enslavement but as evidence of the irresistible impulse for freedom. In this sense Berlin's book is an affirmation, not merely of the fortitude and dignity of the slaves (a matter of grave concern to many of today's historians) but of the capacity of American democracy--despite its shortcomings--to live up to its promises. -- Jonathan Yardley * Washington Post *

[Top 10 Pick for 1998, Nonfiction Category, Christian Science Monitor]

[This is] a monumental, sweeping study of the evolution of America's "peculiar institution" from the earliest white settlement through the early Republic period. Berlin, one of the foremost historians of American slavery, has written an addition to the canon of essential works on the subject...Many Thousands Gone makes clear that slavery at no point achieved the "stable maturity" that many historians have ascribed to the 19th century period.

-- Neal M. Rosendorf * Christian Science Monitor *
Ira Berlin has helped to shape the recent literature on slavery in the United States...Many Thousands Gone represents Mr. Berlin's most ambitious undertaking to date and a sharp temporal departure from his previous books, for he has backtracked from the 19th century to write a 200-year history of slavery on the North American mainland that begins with the African background to England's settlement of the colonial Chesapeake in the early 17th century...[He] has written a major synthesis that will surely draw praise from the academy. -- Robert L. Paquette * Washington Times *
In each society and in each generation slaves adjusted and adapted to their conditions. Blacks never were exclusively the hapless victims of the "white devil" of history or the obsequious Sambos of the "Gone With The Wind" model. Berlin's greatest achievement is finally correcting the misconceptions black and white Americans have about how slavery operated in this nation. -- Gregory Kane * Baltimore Sun *
Berlin, who has already contributed significantly to the literature, here brings together in a magisterial synthesis much of what has now been learned about slave life during its first two centuries within the present United States...Berlin's achievement is to order the resulting variety by identifying four different regions with four different economies (the Chesapeake, the eastern tidewater from South Carolina to Florida, the Mississippi Valley, and the North) and by dividing the social developments of two centuries in each region into three periods, which he designates as the charter generations, the plantation generations, and the Revolutionary generations, stopping short of the heyday of slavery in the antebellum decades of the nineteenth century. -- Edmund S. Morgan * New York Review of Books *
Synthesizing a generation of scholarship, Berlin provides a sweeping survey of slavery and black life in North America (the European colo...