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¶ … Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, by Ira Berlin is a book about the first two centuries of slavery and the final part and epilogue discuss the time of revolution in North America, and how it affected the slaves in both the North and the South. The author shows that after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, many Americans began to question the practice of keeping slaves, in their own quest for liberty and freedom. He shows how slavery ended in the North, and the idea of adding free and slave states to the Union came about.
One of the most interesting aspects of these readings were the distinctions the author made among the different slave populations of the South. While it makes sense that slaves who lived in different areas of the South had different experiences and affected society in different ways that is not often discussed in slave histories and it seems many people assume that slave experiences were the same all across the South. This book illustrates that the culture and lifestyle of different groups in different areas helped create the overall culture in that area (such as the Creole slaves in Louisiana), and that further generations of American-born slaves and freedmen helped spread that culture throughout an area and keep it viable.
The epilogue essentially wraps up Berlin's prior points about slavery, and he reiterates how slavery was transformed, as were race relations, after the American Revolution. He maintains that race relations evolved, that the center of slavery had moved from Maryland to the South, and that the stage was set for Civil War. He also notes that the first two hundred years of slavery helped define the role between master and slave, but that was redefined by the white supremacy movement that sprang up in the South, and that would affect race relations in the country for centuries to come.
References
Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1998.
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