41 pages • 1 hour read
Ira BerlinGenerations of Captivity
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Epilogue Summary: “Freedom Generations”
The Civil War functioned at the great catalyst in mobilizing enough people to overturn slavery. As the Union Army moved further South, the disruption of the slave-based economies and societies in those regions presented another new set of conditions for slaves in which they could seize opportunities to negotiate better working and living conditions and, in increasing numbers, escape to Union lines and aid the war effort against their former masters.
The war was a multifaceted effort between soldiers, behind-the-scenes laborers, and assertive abolitionists, particularly from black communities. Berlin notes that “Black northerners signed on quickly” with the slaves’ struggle (247). Many free black Southerners balked at first, fearing that alliances with slaves would result in exile or enslavement (some even joined the Confederacy), but “wartime events linked their own elevation and the slaves’ freedom” (247). Once the Union defeated the Confederacy, different groups of free people of color approached the post-emancipation freedom struggle with different goals and strategies once more.
As the Union army spread throughout enemy territory in 1862, “the trickle of fugitives turned into a flood” (253) as slaves left plantations and joined up with Union troops. Having escaped their bondage, certain paths became possible: relocation to contraband camps where they could worship freely, work for wages, and, in effect, start to realize claims to independence; squat and work on abandoned plantations that fearful owners had fled; or enter into military service. Military service, especially, became “a portal to citizenship” in which black soldiers served their country and won victories over their shared enemy (256).
Slaves who remained in bondage aided the war effort with invigorated tactics of sabotage and refusal. As slavery collapsed around them, remaining slaveowners had to bend to slaves’ demands just to keep operations running. Slaves, like fugitives, sensed and pursued liberation that would usher in previously unimaginable futures.
Berlin explains that “former slaves called upon their experience in slavery to help them construct their lives in freedom” (260). Former slaves did not necessarily wish to shed or deny their pasts, or even create entirely new institutions, goals, and identities. Often, they wanted to capitalize on the items they had long negotiated to secure, like reassembling families and otherwise “restoring that which had been suppressed and publicly denied” (261).
By 1865, black people throughout the country actively pursued full citizenship, again invoking revolutionary ideology and the language in founding American documents to assert their rightful place in the body politic. Many took to political offices to fight for civil rights, property rights, uncollected compensation for labor, access to social services, and numerous other causes. Still others, especially those that had remained in bondage in rural corners of the South for the longest, articulated their enduring desire to secure ownership of the land they had long worked so they could “live on their own surrounded by their families” (270). Berlin ends the Epilogue by again citing the diverse experience of black men and women in slavery and freedom and noting that their efforts, victories, and failures continue to “resonate into the twenty-first century” (270).
Epilogue Analysis
Berlin does not divide the Epilogue into regional analyses, but he instead writes sections about the Civil War as a harbinger of general emancipation and freedom, its revolutionary impact on the future in the imaginations of freed people of color, and the ways struggles for full freedom recalled and built on the past. He doesn’t detail the war itself but assumes a general understanding of the major events: Southern states (the Confederacy) seceded from the US and fought to uphold slavery, the Union (Northern) Army advanced through the South and eventually won the war, and the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery throughout the nation.
Abraham Lincoln developed his reputation as the “Great Emancipator” during the Civil War, but Berlin contextualizes the actions of white allies within a larger setting of abolitionist sentiment aided and expanded most crucially by black activists, particularly former slaves. On the outset of war, “federal soldiers cared little about either slavery or the slaves themselves” (251). Slaves who fled to Union lines provided critical insight into Southern terrain and provided labor that aided the Union war effort, and soldiers valued them for those reasons alone. Sentiment changed, however, when these soldiers saw “frightened men and women who had done nothing but assist them being dragged back to bondage and certain punishment” outlined by property laws (251). In this way, slaves themselves shaped the cause of the war and inspired Union troops to prioritize freedom alongside the preservation of the Union. They also worked as laborers for the Army and fought as soldiers. This perspective enhances the claims Berlin made throughout the book about the strength of slaves’ and former slaves’ agency and the extent to which they shaped their own destinies. Bringing the realities of slavery and the value of their labor to Union lines refocused the war and resulted in Union victory.
The book’s timeline ends in the summer of 1865, just a few months after the Confederacy surrendered to the Union at the Appomattox Courthouse.
By that historic junction, slavery was no longer a formal institution in the United States, but the struggle for citizenship and other quantifiable aspects of social and political equality remained ongoing. Berlin does not extend the story of the black community and the careers of former slaves to include a history of the rise of black republicanism during the early Reconstruction period or even the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments that formally responded to many of the articulated desires of people of color starting with the revolutionary generations.
Ending the analysis at that point makes sense because it reflects the destruction of American slavery, and it illustrates Berlin’s central argument about ongoing negotiations that people of color had to make with the most powerful members of society throughout multiple centuries and in different conditions of slavery and freedom. At the end of any definable historical moment (such as the passage of one generation of captivity into the next), central concerns surrounding labor, family, culture, and political capital endured under a new set of conditions. This general pattern did not cease to exist when slavery met its federally-mandated end on the national scale. Berlin’s final sentence invokes the 21st century, suggesting that a much longer timeline that extends into two additional centuries still bears the marks of the early history of the black experience in the United States.
