Generations of Captivity

Whereas the presence of slaves in societies with slaves is removed from the epicenter of regional economy, slave societies entirely rely on slavery as their main source of labor. The influence of the institution also extends beyond labor and economy. At every level of society, in private and public spheres alike, “the master-slave relationship provided the model for all social relations” (9). This replication delineated clear lines of power with a ruling master class and their subordinates (including wives, employees, children, and slaves).

Typically, societies with slaves turned into slave societies when this emergent elite seized control of production that contributed to an international market. The details and totality of these transitions varied widely by location and era. It was especially within these slave societies that public intellectuals developed racial ideologies that justified white domination and black insubordination. 

This is the term that Berlin uses to categorize the people within the “charter generations” of North American slavery in the early chronology of the book (the 17th century). Atlantic creoles were people of mixed European and African (or Caribbean) ancestry, the product of the merging of Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Berlin defines this group as knowledgeable and cosmopolitan because they were intimately familiar with the languages, commerce, and larger cultures that resulted from the meeting of the hemispheres in this historical context. 

The plantation revolution replaced “the open, porous slave system” (49) of the charter generation with a more rigid and brutal system of chattel bondage. Regional economies shifted from transatlantic company-based economies into monocrop producers of rice, sugar, and cotton, depending on geography. Planters grew these crops on plantation farms and utilized slave labor for cultivation. This growing reliance on slaves to carry out economic production transformed societies with slaves into slave societies. The plantation revolution, which took different forms and developed across various timelines, terminated the charter generations of Atlantic creoles and ushered in new plantation generations. Plantation slaves had far less room to mobilize and bargain. 

To codify planters’ supreme authority over their material and human property, local legislatures passed a series of restrictive laws that limited slaves’ mobility and independence. Berlin cites a few specifically: the Virginia slave code in 1705 and South Carolina’s in 1740. Just some of the restrictions in these codes, or laws, were the requirement for “slaves to carry a pass when they left the estate of their owner” and the denial of “the right to meet in groups of more than four” (58). These laws also resulted in the elevation of whites of any class to relative superiority over their black counterparts as “the social distance between white and black became all but unbridgeable” (59). Slave codes were tools to make skin color a decisive organizing principle in slave societies. Legislatures recreated the spirit of these laws following emancipation in the 19th century. 

When societies with slaves transformed into slave societies, plantation owners envisioned themselves as all-powerful father figures over their many inferiors, including their other family members, their employees, and their slaves. Paternalism stressed the authority of these select male planters in the image of benevolence. The supposed all-knowing “metaphorical fathers” offered “harsh retribution [that] would chasten and humble those who challenged it” (63). The idea that this social dynamic was beneficial for slaves fueled societal commitments to slavery for multiple generations of lawmakers. 

This term describes African slaves who arrived in the Americas via the Middle Passage between the West African Coast and the Eastern shores of the Americas. African traders captured most of these slaves from the African interior and transporters packed them in close, disease-ridden quarters as human cargo across the Atlantic Ocean. The voyage and subsequent physical and mental anguish sharply inclined slaves’ death rates, though those that survived imbued plantation settings with distinct markers of various African cultures. Their influence shaped black community and culture following the plantation revolution. Saltwater slaves arrived in the Americans all throughout the 18th century; the international slave trade officially ended in 1808.

This term refers to the forced mass internal migration of slaves within the United States in the antebellum period (early-19th century). The first Middle Passage was the forced relocation of Africans from Africa across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. The Second Middle Passage relocated about 1 million slaves from the Upper South to the Lower South and Southern Interior, an altogether traumatizing and life-changing transition that broke apart families and disrupted established slave communities and cultures. Berlin suggests that this internal slave trade was the central event in the lives of slaves between the American Revolution (1765-1783) and the American Civil War in the 1860s. The movement often required slaves to walk hundreds of miles in chains. It is from this period that many enduring popular notions of slavery emerged, though as Berlin illustrates, it was one defining historical moment among many in the history of slavery in North America.