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.
Chapter 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Migration Generations”
The Second Middle Passage forcibly transported over 1 million slaves in the first half of the 19th century, rupturing black life and relocating the epicenter of slavery to the “Southern Interior” away from the coast (163). The implications were national: Black people left the coastal South for free states or new plantations as far west as eastern Texas while black Northerners ushered in the first free society in the country.
Berlin devotes the longest subsection in the book to an analysis of the Southern Interior that contained cotton and sugar plantations, an area brought under US control with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and expanded by the 1848 conquest of Mexican territory. Cotton had a long growing season and “demanded unceasing attention” (176), which lengthened workdays and “dismantled […] independent production” of crops that slaves previously tended for their own gains. Planters organized slaves into gangs supervised by often brutal white overseers.
Sugar cultivation was even more arduous and dangerous, relying on heavy machinery, “a killing pace,” and unrelenting physical labor (180). The Louisiana hinterland, previously a society with slaves that offered the best regional opportunities for robust slave economies and emancipation, transformed into a brutal slave society that contributed to the breakup of thousands of slave families, horrible acts of violence against individual slaves, and increased slave mortality. Planters attempted to extend their influence into every aspect of slave life under the guise of benevolent paternalism, “regulating sanitation, health, religion, marital relations, and child-rearing” (205).
Slave resistance started on the long marches of the Second Middle Passage, when captives might attempt mutiny or escape. Once on plantations, slaves sabotaged cultivation equipment and ran away. Slave bargaining power with masters differed between industries. Masters relied on sophisticated skillsets among slaves in sugar production who managed production and developed artisan skills that masters had to honor with concessions. Gang laborers harvesting cotton had much less leverage. Some free blacks lived in cosmopolitan enclaves where they intentionally distanced themselves from a lower class of plantation slaves. Demand for slaves in the countryside resulted in the capture and enslavement of free black Americans across the East.
Slavery declined in the “Southern Seaboard” as coastal states attempted to overcome soil depletion and new market demands. The growth of towns and cities created a mixed manufacturing and agricultural regional economy. Slaves worked new jobs, often relatively independently. Especially in the Upper South, slaveholders envisioned “slavery’s eventual demise” (220), and reorganized the institution, giving slaves “ambiguous status” that “[attenuated] the line between slavery and freedom” (224). That transformation was not always to the benefit of slaves: Planters drove them harder than ever, rendering the mortality rate the highest in any region in mainland North America at the time (211).
The institution became less profitable all along the coast, especially in light of the opportunity to export slaves further west. Supplying traders “shattered approximately one slave marriage in three and separated one fifth of all children under fourteen from one or both of their parents” (214). The potential to sell slaves and create such devastation and trauma became “owners’ most powerful weapon in their struggle with the slave” (217), even as the region became a society with slaves.
Regions throughout the North progressed from societies with slaves to free states (an imperfect term that fails to acknowledge the enduring tendrils of slave society that gripped the North until national emancipation). Berlin explains that “Limitations on liberty marched lock-step with liberation from bondage” (231). Laws and common practices prohibited black people from participating in court proceedings, traveling, arming themselves, and more. Abolitions and “southern fugitives, refugees, and deportees” kept “the memory of slavery” alive in public (235), while regular kidnapping ignited an “omnipresent fear of re-enslavement” (236). Despite growing divisions in the black community between the bourgeoise leadership and the impoverished, a shared disdain for slavery coalesced around a degree of impassioned abolitionism that constituted a “war between black northerners and slaveowning southerners” (240).
Chapter 4 Analysis
This chapter ruminates centrally on the Second Middle Passage, which was introduced earlier but not described in detail because its main effects accelerated in the early- and mid-19th century. Key topics from earlier chapters come back as the internal slave trade transported over 1 million slaves to new corners of the inland South: plantation revolutions (in cotton and sugar production), the advent of new slave societies, and the steady development of black culture (including internal divisions) throughout the country. In this chapter, Berlin extends his analysis of these historical patterns into the final century of American slavery.
Before he discusses life on new plantations, Berlin reconstructs the process of the passage itself. The internal slave trade focused most acutely on young, strong, healthy adults, male and female, for transport. Traders forced these enslaved migrants to walk in chains for hundreds of miles, a practice that diminished the health that traders had sought to showcase. Unwilling to accept this grim fate, slaves resisted on the journey as well as in their destinations. Berlin has, by this point in the book, communicated that slaves resisted every single stage of development in the history of slavery, no matter their relative bargaining power or chance of success. Resistance took different forms under different conditions, but slaves kept it a constant in their long history.
Berlin suggests that the most significant negotiations between slaves and slaveowners in this period were over religion, specifically the adoption of Christianity among slaves. Against the intentions and wishes of planters, many slaves found solace and empowerment in Christianity and used it to justify their bids for freedom, citing Exodus, the biblical story of the Israelites wresting their freedom from chains of bondage in Egypt, as an analogy to their own circumstances and destinies. The Church also shaped abolitionist sentiment and structured black life in free territory, supporting “schools, libraries […] fraternal and benevolent societies, trade associations, and political alliances” (237). Different generations of slaves previously discussed in the book engaged with or rejected Christianity to various extents, but in the migration generations that came of age in the early-19th century, Christianity was a bedrock of African-American life across regional and class divides.
Berlin’s geographic categories are notably different in this chapter: Instead of discussing an Upper and Lower South, he defines the Southern Interior versus the Seaboard South, the former housing the most slaves and biggest 19th-century plantations, the latter witnessing an erosion of the whole institution. He devotes a much shorter section to an analysis of the third and final region at stake in this chapter, the North, which in this period became a (tenuously) free society. The character of slavery in each of these regions perhaps varied the most within the migration generations, with the Southern Interior displaying efforts at complete and utter control of the most intimate aspect of slaves’ lives and the North slowly articulating a commitment to abolitionism and organizing activism. Berlin is careful not to cast the regions in too stark contrast, though.
The federal government that linked the entire country was “the agent of slavery’s expansion during the nineteenth century and its surest source of security in a world that was turning against chattel bondage” (233). Though pronounced change altered Northern society and created the first “free states,” Berlin reinterprets the post-emancipation North as a place still rooted in slavery, part of this larger unyielding network, not a beacon of equality that modern Americans often imagine in popular historical narratives. The decline of slavery in the Seaboard South directly fueled the expansion and increasing brutality of slavery in remaining slave societies. Regional divides allow for nuanced analysis and the identification of conditional patterns, but the numerous histories contributed to the functioning of a single country.
Berlin ends the chapter by tracing the long history of the pursuit of freedom among slaves, beginning when the charter generation advocated for themselves in court in the 17th century. By 1850, three centuries later, slaves in the American South and West suffered greatly with precious few rights, but they knew about the growing conflict between slavery and abolition, even articulating the hope for Lincoln to get elected in 1860. With their knowledge of history and politics, slaves on the eve of the Civil War imagined futures marked by freedom and equality at the national level. The chapter ends on this hopeful note.
