Generations of Captivity

Berlin reveals the moments that steadily constructed the concept of race, particularly blackness and whiteness, in the American context. Initially, color alone did not define a person’s, even a slave’s, status in society. It was through generations of ideology surrounding labor and social subordination that racialized hierarchies emerged.

In the charter generations of Atlantic creoles, black laborers often worked alongside Europeans and Native Americans. While they built a distinct black culture in their negotiations and efforts with powerful colonizers, black slaves navigated a nuanced landscape of transatlantic cultures, languages, and trade networks. Berlin concludes that “race—like lineage and religion—was just one of many markers of the social order” (33).

Once the plantation revolution transformed societies with slaves into slave societies, however, planters “redefined the meaning of race, investing color—white and black—with far greater weight in defining status than heretofore” (54). This emphasis on color as a determining factor in a person’s societal status represented a permanent shift in racial ideologies in the United States, though specific ideas about race and the contours of racial discrimination would continue to evolve. Planters aimed to establish “the equation of black with slavery” so that they could “treat all black people the same” and avoid sharing any social prestige with a class of free blacks (67).

The general plight of free people of color in general illustrated the hardening of racial boundaries. Freedom was potentially a precarious state, and the danger of re-enslavement was particularly pronounced for free people of color in the Seaboard South once the internal slave trade took off in the late-18th century. In other conditions of freedom, former slaves relied on their former masters for livelihood. Societies rarely made spaces for free people of color to confidently and safely publicize community goals or obtain wealth and respect equal to that of their white counterparts. Even free society in the North initially shunted free people of color aside. Berlin explains, “In liquidating slavery, white northerners tried to rid themselves of black people as well” (232), barring them entry to public spaces and access to preferred vocations.

When the national government finally abolished slavery, all free people of color, former slaves and otherwise, had to continue to fight for citizenship and the rights therein. Social and legal practices had never equated freedom with these larger, more concrete aims. Instead, they were partially color-coded enterprises. 

In addition to directing the process of race-making, the history of slavery also included a steady development of black culture as a distinctive and powerful entity in the United States. Berlin traces the roots of black culture with the earliest enslaved migrants, the Atlantic creoles, who arrived in particular enclaves in North America in the 17th century. He refers to this generation as “cosmopolitan” and stresses their multilingualism and keen knowledge of transatlantic trade networks and cultures (6). Despite their status in bondage, Atlantic creoles navigated permeable boundaries between slavery and freedom, exercised inclusion in mainstream religious and legal circles, and even accumulated possessions and property. This fluidity represented the “popular understanding of black life in the era prior to the plantation” (49).

Basic tenants of culture, such as family formation and kinship ties, personal names, religion, and leisure time for chosen activities deteriorated or fell victim to increased surveillance on plantations in the late-17th, 18th, and early-19th centuries. Berlin suggests that the plantation revolution was the most significant “degradation of black life in mainland North America” (54).

As the plantation revolution transformed societies with slaves into slave societies, the resultant influx of slaves came from diverse cultures throughout Africa’s interior. As they replicated components of their former lives and landscapes on plantations, segregated in living quarters with other forced migrants and away from planters, they “began to forge new communities as ‘Africans,’ an identity none had previously considered or even knew existed” (67). The knowledge of vast African lands and traditions imbibed plantation communities with new cultures from the Eastern hemisphere. Berlin introduces the new concept of “African-Americans” who had consciousnesses rooted in life on both continents and saw their own lives shaped by the meeting of Africa and America mainly throughout the 18th century. They “infus[ed]” black society with knowledge of the African homeland and homeways” (86).

At the same time that slaves “had begun to create a new African-American culture” on plantations, urban slaves constituted an “emerging colored elite” (81) that dressed, worked, spoke, and worshiped differently than slaves in the countryside. The contrast created a “fissure within black society” (80). In the North, no single “distinctive African-American culture emerged” by the late 1700s.

Berlin continually stresses divisions within black society before and after freedom, though the disparate classes of black people with sometimes competing goals shared certain significant developments. Berlin notes that the rhetoric within Northern society following the War for Independence solidified the shared concept of African heritage and identity, no longer bifurcated according to nationality or ethnicity. Many regional free blacks, however, mutually disliked each other, based largely on class divisions. 

While heavily dependent on region, the contours of black life everywhere changed with the rise of the internal slave trade (Second Middle Passage). According to Berlin, “the colossal transfer cast a shadow over all aspects of black life, leaving no part unaffected” (162). As the trade throughout the South ripped apart families and supplied plantations exercising increased brutality and dehumanization in slave surveillance and discipline, free people of color coalesced around abolitionism and worked towards universal freedom for all black people in the US. The political aftermath of the Civil War realized this shared vision, but different sectors of black society kept up the fight for citizenship and otherwise measurable equality.

By war’s end, divisions that were centuries in the making continued to exert their influence in shaping freedom. Berlin explains:

The formerly free and the formerly slave were just two among many who claimed to know the true interests of black people. The urban and the rural, the skilled and the unskilled, the literate and the illiterate, the propertied and the impoverished each believed that their own experience best represented the experience of former slaves and former free people of color (260).

Experiences among both enslaved and free people of color always varied by general region and era, and by any other specifics of time and place that influenced working conditions and visions of and paths toward freedom.