The Making of African America

by Ira Berlin

  17 Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge MA, 2003), 170-71.

  18 Baptist, Creating an Old South, 63-65. Susan O‘Donovan’s recent work makes evident the transience of the slave population, not only through sale but also through the system of hire and self-hire and in the nature of the slave’s work, which allowed—even required—that they move from place to place. “Trunk Lines, Land Lines, and Local Exchanges: Operationalizing the Grapevine Telegraph,” courtesy of the author.

  19 John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York, 1999), 225, 398; Rawick, comp., American Slave, ser. 2, vol. 16, pt. 1: 116; Charles Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, or, The Life of an American Slave (New York, 1859), 130-2.

  20 Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, chaps. 1-3, quoted on 141-42.

  21 Rawick, comp., American Slave, supp., ser. 1, vol. 5: 284-85, 320-21; Dunaway, The African-American Family, 33-36; Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce, 93-84, 100-101; Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 68-70, 237-38, 298-300. After more than a century of decline, the slave mortality rate began increasing in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century. Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York, 1989), 127-28, 142-48.

  22 Tadman, “The Interregional Slave Trade,” 126.

  23 Deyle, Carry Me Back, 111, 187, chap. 4, esp. 231, 240; William Wells Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave (Boston, 1847), chap. 6.

  24 Edward E. Baptist, “‘Cuffy,’ ‘Fancy Maids,’ and ‘One-Eyed Men’: Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States,” American Historical Review 106 (2001), 1-55; quoted in John Brown, Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, A Fugitive Slave, F. N. Boney, ed. (Savannah GA, 1972), 95; Deyle, Carry Me Back, 126-27; Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 125-27; Johnson, Soul by Soul, 113-115, 154-55.

  25 Jesse Torrey, Jr., A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery in the United States, 2nd ed. (Ballston Spa MD, 1818), 55-56, 61, 67; Rawick, comp., American Slave, supp., ser. 2, vol. 7B: 24-64; Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown, 45; Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 30; E. S. Abdy, Journal of a Residence and Tour in the United States, 3 vols. (London, 1835), 2: 179-80; Carl David Arfwedson, The United States and Canada in 1832, 1833, and 1834, 2 vols. (London, 1834), 2: 429. One Arkansas planter found her slaves were deeply depressed and “so dissatisfied that they lost all ambition for almost anything” quoted in Donald P. McNeilly, Old South Frontier: Cotton Plantations and the Formation of Arkansas Society (Fayetteville AR, 2000), 51; Abraham Lincoln, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Roy P. Basler, ed., 9 vols. (New Brunswick NJ, 1953-1955), 1: 259-61.

  26 Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill NC, 2007), 65.

  27 Deyle, Carry Me Back, 253-69; Phillip Troutman, “Grapevine in the Slave Market: African American Geopolitical Literacy and the 1841 Creole Revolt” in Johnson, ed. The Chattel Principle, 203-233; Edward D. Jervey and C. Harold Huber, “The Creole Affair,” Journal of Negro History 65 (1980), 196-211; Howard Jones, “The Peculiar Institution and National Honor: The Case of the Creole Slave Revolt,” Civil War History 21 (1975), 28-50; J. Winston Coleman, Slavery Times in Kentucky (Chapel Hill NC, 1940), 173-75; Charles S. Sydnor, Slavery in Mississippi (New York, 1933), 149-50; George William Featherstonhaugh, Excursions through the Slave States (New York, 1844), 37; Gudmestad, Troublesome Commerce, chap. 6.

  28 Quoted in Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 48-49.

  29 Baptist, Creating an Old South, 78-79.

  30 Mrs. George P. Coleman, ed., Virginia Silhouettes (Richmond VA, 1934), Oct. 24, 1842; Rawick, comp., American Slave, supp., ser. 2, vol. 1A: 319; ser. 2, vol. 1: 14, 354-55: ser. 1, vol. 12: 335; Ulrich B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (Boston, 1929), 212; Stevenson, Life in Black and White, 179; James Williams, Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave (Boston, 1838), 32-33; Nehemiah Adams, A South-side View of Slavery (Boston, 1854), 73; Charles Lyell, A Second Visit to the United States of North America, 2 vols. (New York, 1849), 1: 209-10. Also see Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, 13-14.

  31 Rawick, comp., American Slave, vol. 18, 156-57, 288; also ser. 1, vol., 7, 302.

  32 Daina Ramey Berry, “‘We’m Fus’ Rate Bargain’: Value, Labor, and Price in a Georgia Slave Community” in Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle, 54-55; Ira Berlin, Marc Favreau, and Steven F. Miller, eds., Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation (New York, 1998), 149-51.

  33 Coleman, ed., Virginia Silhouettes, Oct. 24, 1842; Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, 96-97.

  34 Todd H. Barnett, “Virginians Moving West: The Early Evolution of Slavery in the Bluegrass,” Filson Club Historical Quarterly 73 (1999), 221-23, 239-43.

  35 Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony, 22-23; Robert S. Starobin, ed., Blacks in Bondage: Letters of American Slaves (New York, 1974), 58; Rawick, comp., American Slave, ser. 1, vol. 6: 72-73; ser. 2, vol. 15: 248-49; Hawkins Wilson to the Chief of the Freedmen’s Bureau at Richmond, 11 May 1867, enclosing Hawkins Wilson to Sister Jane, Letters Received, ser. 3892, Bowling Green VA Assistant Commissioner, RG 105, National Archives.

  36 Mary Furguson, Dec. 18, 1936, Born in Slavery Collection, Library of Congress (http://memory.loc.gov/).

  37 Quoted in Michael Mullin, ed., American Negro Slavery: A Documentary History (Columbia SC, 1976), 214-16; Joan E. Cashin, A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier (New York, 1991), 70 (quoted), 74, 116; Starobin, ed., Blacks in Bondage, 57.

  38 Starobin, ed., Blacks in Bondage, 57.

  39 Quoted in Charles L. Perdue, Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips, eds., Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-slaves (Charlottesville VA, 1976), 206.

  40 O’Donovan, “Trunk Lines, Land Lines, and Local Exchanges,” 21.

  41 Richard H. Steckel, “The African American Population of the United States, 1790-1920” in Haines and Steckel, eds., Population History of North America (Cambridge UK, 2000); also see Richard Follett, “Heat, Sex, and Sugar: Pregnancy and Childbearing in the Slave Quarters,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 28 (2003), 510-539.

  42 Cashin, A Family Venture, 72; T. Lindsay Baker and Julie P. Baker, eds., The WPA Oklahoma Narratives (Norman OK, 1996), 82; Rawick, comp., American Slave, vol. 4, pt. 2: 115, also supp., ser. 2, vol. 5A: 1762-63; McNeilly, Old South Frontier, 31.

  43 Kaye, Joining Places, chap. 3; Campbell, “As ‘A Kind of Freeman’?” and Roderick A. McDonald, “Independent Economic Production by Slaves on Antebellum Louisiana Sugar Plantations” in Berlin and Morgan, eds., Cultivation and Culture, 243-74, 275-302; Charles S. Sydnor, A Gentleman of the Old Natchez Region, Benjamin L. C. Wailes (Westport CT, [1938] 1970), 101-104; Christopher Morris, Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770—1860 (New York, 1995), 75-76; Ball, Fifty Years in Chains, 131-33, quoted on 131, 147-48.

  44 Gutman, The Black Family; Ann Patton Malone, Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-century Louisiana (Chapel Hill NC, 1992). Sally Anne Chambers, who grew up in Louisiana, recalled how slaves turned to the business of family on Saturdays and Sundays: “De women do dey own washing den. De menfolks tend to de gardens round dey own house. Dey raise some cotton and sell it to massa and git li‘l money dat way.” Rawick, comp., American Slave, ser. 1, vol. 4, pt. 1-2, 215.

  45 Gutman, Black Family; Baptist, Creating the Old South, 81-82.

  46 Gutman, Black Family, chaps. 2, 5; Cheryll Ann Cody, “Naming, Kinship, and Estate Dispersal: Notes on Slave Family Life on a South Carolina Plantation, 1786 to 1833,” William and MaryQuarterly 39 (1982), 192-211; Morris, Becoming Southern, 68-83.

  47 Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggle in the Rural South, from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge MA, 2003), 36.

  48 Albert J
. Rabateau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York, 1978); Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill NC, 1998), chaps. 4—5; Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Exodus!: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago, 2000); Berlin, Generations of Captivity, 203—6.

  49 In the early nineteenth century, African Americans touched by the “Second Awakening” attended camp meetings and, given the level of illiteracy, doubtless sang without hymnals. Also many songs were composed on the spot and elaborated in the field or in religious gatherings. They were called “spiritual songs” and the term “sperichil” appeared for the first time in 1867 in William Francis Allen, Charles P. Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, Slave Songs of the United States (New York, [1867] 1951); also see Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Negro Spirituals,” Atlantic Monthly 19 (1867), 685—94; Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York, 1987), chap. 1; Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1977), 17, 19—30, 59,159—70; Gilbert Chase, America’s Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present, 3rd ed. (Urbana IL, 1987), chap. 4, quote on 215. Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana IL, 1977); Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans (New York, 1971), chaps. 6—7.

  50 A good selection of the spirituals can be found on the Internet. See for example www.hymnlyrics.org (although no dates of attribution are provided).

  51 James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York, 1982), 77; Donald Schaefer, “A Statistical Profile of Frontier and New South Migration: 1850—1860,” Agricultural History 59 (1986), 563—578; Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York, 1986), 25. Analysis of the records of the Freedman’s Bank and Trust Company, courtesy of Susan O’Donovan, “Mapping Freedom’s Terrain: The Political and Productive Landscape of Wilmington, North Carolina,” 16.

  52 Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York, 1979); Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863—1877 (New York, 1988), esp. chap. 3; Ira Berlin et al., eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation [hereafter cited as Freedom], 5 vols. (Cambridge UK and Chapel Hill NC, 1983—), ser. 3, vol. 1, esp., chap. 5.

  53 W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay toward the History of the Part Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860—1880 (New York, 1935), chaps. 1—5; Foner, Reconstruction, chaps. 1—3; Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, chaps. 1—4; Freedom, quoted in ser. 2, 615—16; ser. 1, vol. 1: 23—27.

  54 Foner, Reconstruction, chap. 5; Freedom, ser. 3, vol. 1.

  55 U.S. Census Bureau, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington DC, 1975), I: part 2, p. 22.

  56 Freedom, ser. 3, vol. 1: 23—24, and docs. 6, 15—22, 23 (quoted), 36, 67, 132, 162.

  57 William Cohen, At Freedom’s Edge: Black Mobility and the White Southern Quest for Racial Control, 1861—1915 (Baton Rouge LA, 1991), 28—38; Theodore B. Wilson, The Black Codes of the South (Tuscaloosa AL, 1965), chap. 5; Freedom, ser. 3, vol. 1, 29—30, 81—84, also docs. 28, 33, 37, 43—45.

  58 Gerald D. Jaynes, “Blacks in the Economy from Reconstruction to World War I” in William R. Scott and William G. Slade, eds., Upon These Shores: Themes in the African American Experience to the Present (New York, 2000), 168. Between 1860 and 1910, the south Atlantic states’ share of African Americans declined from 46 to 42 percent, while the southwestern states increased from 15 to 20 percent. U.S. Census Bureau, Negro Population of the United States, 1790—1915 (Washington DC, 1918), table 13; James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago, 1989), 22—23. The northward movement of black Southerners was also small and selective: Elizabeth H. Pleck, Black Migration and Poverty: Boston, 1865—1900 (New York, 1979), 89.

  59 U.S. Census Bureau, Negro Population, 1790—1915 (Washington DC, 1918), 65; Steckel, “African American Population of the United States” in Haines and Steckel, eds., Population History of North America, 465; Simon Kuznets, ed., Population Redistribution and Economic Growth in the United States, 1870—1950, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1957—1964), 3: 90; Edward L. Ayers, Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York, 1992), chap. 3, pp. 68—72; Cohen, At Freedom’s Edge, chap. 9, p. 254; Edwin S. Redkey, Black Nationalist and Back-to-Africa Movements, 1890—1910 (New Haven CT, 1969), 57; James T. Campbell, Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787—2005 (New York, 2006), chaps. 3-4, esp. p. 103; Thomas C. Cox, Blacks in Topeka, Kansas, 1865—1915: A Social History (Baton Rouge LA, 1982); Hahn, A Nation Under our Feet.

  60 Kuznets, ed., Population Redistribution and Economic Growth, 3: 90; Cohen, At Freedom’s Edge, 295—296.

  61 Negro Population, 64; Karl E. Taeuber, “The Negro Population in the United States” in John P. Davis, ed., The American Negro Reference Book (Englewood Cliffs NJ, 1966), 107; Thomas J. Woofter, Negro Migration: Changes in Rural Organization and the Population of the Cotton Belt (New York, 1969), 134; O‘Donovan, “Mapping Freedmen’s Terrain,” 16.

  62 Historical Statistics of the United States, 22.

  63 David Barrow, “A Georgia Plantation,” Scribner Monthly 21 (1881), 830-36; D. W. Meinig, The Shaping ofAmerica, 4 vols. (New Haven CT, 1986—2004), 3:190—95; Charles S. Aiken, “New Settlement Patterns of Rural Blacks in the American South,” Geographical Review 75 (1985), 383—404; Milton B. Newton, Jr., “Settlement Patterns as Artifacts of Social Structure” in Miles Richardson, ed., The Human Mirror: Material and Spatial Images of Man (Baton Rouge LA, 1974), 339—61; Joel Williamson, After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina During Reconstruction, 1861—1877 (Chapel Hill NC, 1965), 278.

  64 Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill NC, 2003), 158; Julie Seville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Worker in South Carolina, 1860—1870 (Cambridge UK, 1994), chap. 1.

  65 Quoted in Freedom, ser. 3, vol. 1: 25, 46—52 and chap. 9; Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveler’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., ed. (New York, 1984), 81; Ira Berlin et al., eds., “The Terrain of Freedom: The Struggle over the Meaning of Free Labor in the U. S. South,” History Workshop 22 (1986), 127—28.

  66 Quoted in Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (Urbana IL, 1984), 42—43; Freedom, ser. 3, vol. 1: chap. 3—4; Foner, Reconstruction, 102—110, 153—170; Claude F. Oubre, Forty Acres and a Mule: The Freedmen’s Bureau and Black Land Ownership (Baton Rouge LA, 1978); quoted in Major [James Roy] to Bvt. Lieut. Col. W. L. Berger, 9 Dec. 1865, filed with Major James P. Roy to Bvt. Lieut. Col. W. L. M. Burger, 1 Feb. 1866, Letters Received, Dept. of SC, RG 393, Pt. 1 [C-1385], National Archives. Bracketed number refers to the files at the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland.

  67 Freedom, ser. 3, vol. 1, chaps. 3—4. The outlines of the new labor system appeared even before the war was over in the occupied South; see Freedom, ser. 1, vol. 1, chaps. 1—3; Freedom, ser. 1, vol. 2; Louis S. Gerteis, From Contraband to Freedman: Federal Policy toward Southern Blacks, 1861—1865 (Westport CT, 1973); Foner, Reconstruction, 78—84; Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, chaps. 4—6.

  68 Freedom, ser. 3, vol. 1, chaps. 1—5, 7—8; Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long, 4-8; Gerald David Jaynes, Branches Without Roots: Genesis of the Black Workingclass in the American South, 1862—1882 (New York, 1986), chaps. 2—4; Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences ofEmancipation (New York, 1977), chaps. 3-4; Thavolia Glymph, ”Freedpeople and Ex-Masters Shaping a New Order in the Post-Bellum South, 1865—1868” in Glymph
and John J. Kushma, eds., Essays on the Postbellum South Economy (College Station TX, 1985), 48—72.

  69 Harold D. Woodman, New South, New Law: The Legal Foundations of Credit and Labor Relations in the Postbellum Agricultural South (Baton Rouge LA, 1995); Jaynes, Branches Without Roots, chap. 10.

  70 Quoted in Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and its Legacy (Baton Rouge LA, 1983), 61; Harold D. Woodman, “Post-Civil War Southern Agricultural and the Law,” Agricultural History 53 (1979), 319—37; Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York, 1999), chap. 3.

  71 Litwack, Trouble in Mind, esp. chap. 4.

  72 Litwack, Trouble in Mind, esp. chaps. 5—6; Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South (New York, 1984), chap. 6; Alexander C. Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (London, 1996); Pete Daniel The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901—1969 (Urbana IL, 1972); Martha A. Myers, Race, Labor, and Punishment in the New South (Athens OH, 1998).

  73 Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 128; C. Vann Woodward, The Origins of the New South (Baton Rouge LA, 1971), 205—6; Neil Fligstein, Going North: Migration of Blacks and Whites from the South, 1900—1950 (New York, 1950), 131; Joe William Trotter, Jr., The African American Experience (Boston, 2001), 303. Quoted in Grossman, Land of Hope, 109.