Book Review

The culmination of a generation's research on the colonial, revolutionary, and early national eras, Many Thousands Gone demonstrates, more successfully than any previous book, that, far from being a static or monolithic institution, American slavery varied widely across time and space. At the book's heart is a nuanced examination of how slavery and slave culture evolved in three chronological eras in four distinct geographical regions. Developing an argument advanced for Spanish Peru by James Lockhart, Berlin argues that the "charter generation" of slaves, whom he calls "Atlantic Creoles," was surprisingly cosmopolitan. Many had interacted with the Portuguese and Spanish along the African coast, in the West Indies, or other parts of the Atlantic littoral and had experience as traders or interpreters. Many were familiar with Christianity, had Portuguese or Spanish names, and sometimes had mixtures of African and non-African ancestry. Berlin also stresses slavery's fluidity during early colonization, as some slaves purchased their freedom, baptized their children, bore children with whites, acquired land, and took grievances to court. This flexibility, he insists, could be found not only in the Chesapeake but in Spanish Florida, New Amsterdam, and the Carolinas as well.	1
Three "revolutions" subsequently transformed slavery. The first was the "Plantation Revolution." Beginning in Barbados, where tobacco cultivation gave way to sugar production and the slave system overwhelmed indentured servitude and wage labor, planters consolidated their economic and political power. The plantation revolution, which hit the Chesapeake in the late seventeenth century and the Carolinas in the early eighteenth, encouraged massive importation of slaves directly from Africa, adoption of new laws depriving free blacks of their rights and privileges, and increased labor regimentation.	2
The second revolution, the "Democratic Revolution," was intellectual, political, and military. The Enlightenment and the evangelical and pietistic religious movements led to the first sustained opposition to slavery. The political revolution that coincided with these ideological upheavals made it increasingly difficult to govern slaves or to maintain productivity; it also allowed a third of Georgia's slaves and twenty-five thousand South Carolina slaves to escape bondage. The ultimate outcome of the Revolution was contradictory. In the South, slavery became more entrenched (though how this was achieved remains unclear) and was reinforced by pseudoscientific ideologies. In the North and the Old Northwest frontier, the Revolution led to emancipation and adoption of gradual emancipation schemes, accompanied by virulent racism.	3
The third revolution, the "Cotton Revolution," dramatically undercut the illusion—bred by declining productivity and soil exhaustion and the shift to grain production in tobacco regions—that slavery was a dying institution. Ira Berlin's book concludes with the movement of slavery into the Old Southwest and the large-scale christianization of slaves during the Second Great Awakening.	4
American slavery varied by space as well astime. In the North, the Chesapeake, the coastal low country, and the lower Mississippi Valley, slavery took on distinctive demographic, economic, and cultural characteristics. Berlin not only highlights regional differences and differences among urban artisans, domestic servants, and rural slaves; he also draws upon Moses Finley's distinction between "societies with slaves" (where slavery was one of a number of labor sources) and "slave societies" (in which slavery formed the basis of the social order). He shows how parts of New York and New Jersey, where a provisioning trade supplied the West Indies with cattle, grain, and horses, nearly developed into true slave societies, while French Louisiana failed to develop a stable slave regime until the early nineteenth century, due in part to slave resistance.	. . .