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Dr. Berlin's answers to questions sent in advance of the session.
| Question | Were there any points along the way from capture to plantation when interpreters were normally used? |
| Berlin | Yes. There were certainly interpreters, generally knowledgeable Africans, also Europeans, who served as interpreters in the African baracoons or factories and on ship. On the plantations of the new world, the same function was served by knowledgeable slaves -- although planters doubtless picked up a few words of various African languages. More important in this process was the creation of new languages or so-called "pidgins" or "creoles" which were shared by Africans of many nations -- indeed all the peoples who shared the Atlantic. |
| Question | Were any African languages maintained for any length of time after arriving in America? If not, was that because of insufficient numbers of speakers of any particular language, or because English was forced on the slaves? Who taught them English? |
| Berlin | Yes, we know African languages survived the middle passage from runaway advertisements -- which designate fugitives by the languages they spoke. African languages could be heard along the docks and in the port cities of colonial America -- which were extensions of the larger Atlantic world. And doubtless such African tongues were the language of choice within the slave quarter. However, very soon the languages began to mix, creating creoles -- some of which survive today, as with the Gullah language in South Carolina and so-called Creole in Haiti. But African languages also influenced the development of Spanish, French, and English -- their vocabulary, syntax, and grammars. Who did the teaching? Slaves taught themselves and each other. |
| Question | If the Mayflower had ended up in Virginia after all, would slavery have developed in a different way or at all? |
| Berlin | Sure it would be different. Any event or action changes the course of history. Would there still be slavery? Doubtless. Remember there was slavery in New England and that slavery in the Northern states lasted well into the nineteenth century. |
| Question | Was chattel slavery created only because we failed to reflect on the moral issues? Were there other choices that could have been made, other opportunities, which would have allowed the South to prosper without the institution of slavery? |
| Berlin | Although some moral qualms about enslavement of fellow men and women (most especially the slaves themselves) always existed, no one seriously questioned of the morality of slavery into the mid eighteenth century. Until that point, slavery was fully accepted in much the way we accept inequality today -- something to be regretted but natural. It was justified by the Bible, both Old and New testaments; by the Koran, and every other authoritize moral text. In short, at the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade, the enslavement was not a moral choice for either Africans or Europeans. It was, however, a choice. And there were other choices in finding a labor force for the New World: the enslavement of Native Americans or Europeans rather than Africans; the use of short term slaves or indentured servants of various nationalities, and the use of wage workers. This too would have made a difference in the development of the New World. Certainly the South could have prospered under another system -- meaning there would have been economic growth. Would the same people have prospered, and to the same extent? (Would there have been a class of very rich and powerful planters?) That is another question. In the middle of the eighteenth century, slavery -- as above -- was viewed as a normal way of extracting labor and ordering a society by most in the Atlantic world. By the middle of the nineteenth century, most viewed it has a moral outrage, as a height of economic inefficiency, and an exemplar of political tyranny. What happened? How did this change? BIG QUESTION! |
| Question | Countries stemming from French, Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the New World and those areas of the U.S. heavily influenced by the French and Spanish seem to have a great deal of cultural and "racial" mixing compared to those areas of the U.S. and Canada settled by the British. Is there something particularly British which contributed to chattel slavery, intolerance and segregation? |
| Berlin | No. Probably the mixing -- physical -- of Europeans and Africans, slaveowners and slaves -- was the same in the areas of the New World settled by Spain, France, and Britain. What was different was the willingness to recognize the products of that mixing. On mainland North America -- what became the United States (although not other British colonies) -- there was an unwillingness to recognize the product of these matches. This had more to do with patterns of settlement and demography, than proclivity to cultural intolerance. |
| Question | I love the story of Tony Johnson, an African who enjoyed equality with Europeans of many nationalities on Virginia's Eastern Shore. Jone, his daughter, married an Indian who also appears to have been treated as an equal. So, in the 17th century there was the start of an ethnically diverse, relatively tolerant society. How could the move to chattel slavery have been avoided? |
| Berlin | I love the story of Anthony Johnson too. But Johnson, recall, was a slave and when he gained his freedom, became a slaveowner. The story of Anthony Johnson is neither one of the creation of an egalitarian society nor of a tolerant one. Seventeenth-century Virginia was neither. It is, however, the story of a different kind of slave society. That is important. Things could have been different, although we may have been unhappy with that too. |
| Question | What were some of the differences between slaves on tobacco plantations and cotton plantations? |
| Berlin | Lots of difference, but how that difference is understood depended upon when. The labor demands were different, the size of plantation unit was different, and organization was different -- which made for differences in the slave family, degree of independence the slave enjoyed, and so on. In general, however, eighteenth-century tobacco slaves lived in isolation, on small units call "quarters," and enjoyed a degree of autonomy that that isolation allowed; nineteenth-century cotton slaves worked on large estates -- still small by New World standards -- under masters who intruded into all aspects of their lives. |
| Question | What was the life expectancy for a slave? |
| Berlin | The life expectancy of slaves -- like all of the history of slavery -- changed greatly over time and place. Anthony Johnson lived to know his grandchildren. Most slaves who arrived in the new world during the height of the plantation revolution did not live to have children. Indeed they rarely had children of their own. They rarely survived a decade. |
| Question | What percentage of southerners were slaveholders? |
| Berlin | In 1860, the south had a population of 12.5 million, of whom some 4 million were slaves. Meaning the vast majority of the population was white, but of those white people only 400,000 owned slaves. Again, meaning that if the average slaveholding family was five individuals, only 2 million of the eight million whites owned slaves or lived as part of slaveholding families. Most of these, of course, were small holders, only one or two slaves. Only 50,000 individuals owned more than 20 slaves (minimum definition of a plantation); only 10,000 over 50 and could qualify as "great" planters. |
| Question | Our class just watched "Amistad" together. Was the uprising and trial a big thing at the time or only in this movie? |
| Berlin | Yup. A big thing, because abolitionists -- who are portrayed very unfairly in the picture -- made it a big thing. |
| Question | Was beating and whipping of slaves a common practice? |
| Berlin | Yes. Probably every slave experienced a beating in his or her life or knew of a slave who experienced the lash. |
| Question | I heard somewhere that African drums were banned because it was feared they could be used to communicate across plantations. Is this true? How concerned were southerners or other slaveholders with intercommunication among slaves? Are there other examples? |
| Berlin | Drums were banned in some places in the new world because slaveholders were preoccupied with the threat of insurrection. This is different than communication, which they -- of necessity -- encouraged. The purpose of slavery was not to isolate slaves, but to make them work efficiently -- for this, communication was essential. Such communication could be revolutionary -- and this, of course, was the slaveholders' dilemma. |
| Question | How many slaves escaped? |
| Berlin | Many. |
| Question | I have heard that at one time the slavery issue was debated openly in southern legislatures and that there were many moderates who wanted change. Do you think it possible that slavery could have been brought to an end by moderates rather than war? |
| Berlin | Given what we know about American politics, slavery could not have been ended in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century without violence. |
| Question | Our teacher told us in class that at one time there was a serious movement to ship slaves back to Africa and even Latin America. How big was this movement? How many slaves left the country? Want happened to this movement? |
| Berlin | There were many attempts to remove slaves from the United States and return them to Africa. The most important of these movements was called "colonization" and organized as the American Colonization Society, founded in 1817. the ACS would eventually found Liberia as a home for former slaves. However, the Colonization Society, in trying to gain the support from slaveholders, emphasized the deportation of free blacks -- not slaves -- which earned them the enmity of free blacks, who viewed the United States as their country too and wanted no part of Africa and came to think of the ACS as a slaveholder's scheme to make the U.S. safe for slavery. Few slaves were sent to Africa, probably no more than several hundred a year. Still, many white people thought deportation was a great idea -- that the U.S. should be a country for white people only. The ACS lasted well into the twentieth century. |
| Question | What did Lincoln think about African Americans? |
| Berlin | Abraham Lincoln, in his public statements, shared the white-supremists views of most of his countrymen. That is, be believed white people were superior to black ones. He was a politician and it is would have been political suicide for him to say otherwise. There are a few shreds of evidence that he personally held different views, but the evidence is not strong. However, even in his public guise, Lincoln insisted that just because -- and perhaps because -- blacks were inferior to whites they should not be made into slaves. That they, like every other man and woman, should have an equal chance to support themselves, raise their families, practice their religion that was promised by the Declaration of Independence. It was this later view which brought him to the Republican Party and eventually to his historic role. |
| Question | When did slavery die out in the northern states? Were there any slaves living in the north at the time of the Civil War? |
| Berlin | The northern states began to end slavery during the American Revolution, and, by 1801, every northern state had committed itself to emancipation. However, it was a gradualist process. There were still thousands of slaves in the north in the 1820s and still a handful in the 1840s and 1850s. |
| Question | Could you tell me the role religion played in the lives of slaves? Were slaves ever allowed to go to church? |
| Berlin | Religion played a large role in slave life, especially the religion they carried from Africa and which they maintained in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries -- most refusing to accept the attempt to convert them to Christianity. When, at the end of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, they embraced Christianity, they infused it with their own sacred African heritage. |
| Question | "Uncle Tom's Cabin" opened northern hearts to the cruelty of slavery. Was it allowed in the south? Could it have made a difference? |
| Berlin | The appearance of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" at first received a warm welcome in the south, but as southerners came to understand its implications, they shut it out, denouncing it, banning it, and often writing novels in opposition to it. In short, there was a kind of double-take in the reaction to the book. |
| Question | Looking at the slave codes that banned slaves from reading and writing, were these devised to limit the slaves' ability to communicate or from a desire to keep the two cultures separate? |
| Berlin | In their origins, the anti-education clauses of the slave codes were an attempt to stem insurrectionary activities, prevent the creation of an educated cadre among the slaves, and deny slaves knowledge of the world-wide movement against slavery -- especially the growth of abolition in the north. |
| Question | What was it like for a free African-American in the south? Could they shop in town, interact with whites, own property? Didn't they have to be scared of bounty hunters? |
| Berlin | Yes to all of the above. Free blacks in the south lived constrained lives. They were denied the right to vote, sit on juries, testify in court, travel freely, carry guns, and so on. They were also subject to kidnapping by slave stealers. But they had the right to work, accumulate property, marry, practice their own religion -- and with these rights they created lives of their own even on this dangerous terrain. |
| Question | I'm curious about the homogeneity of the black slave community. Were there ever cultural variations between the slave communities of various plantations? Did slave owners make a choice not to purchase slaves with the same cultural backgrounds or languages? Were slaveholders even aware of cultural differences? |
| Berlin | Slaves were not a single homogenous group, any more than black people today are a single homogenous group. Their society was as complex as any, and of course carried by nationality, occupation, religion and all of the other markers of diversity within our society. Slaveholders exploited these differences when they could, but of course all slaves recognized a common enemy. |
| Question | After the Civil War, what exactly did white America expect African-Americans to do? What did they do immediately after they were made free? |
| Berlin | White Americans had many ideas about emancipation. Those from an abolitionist tradition hoped for the full integration of former slaves into American society. But even abolitionists were divided as to how this might be done -- give former slaves land and a share of the wealth their work as slaves had created, give them the vote, give them civil rights? All, some, many? Not all white Americans shared these ideals in whole or part, and many opposed them. Not surprisingly, the leading opponents were the former slaveholders. |
| Question | I really like American history and am thinking about studying it in college. My parents say that I won't make any money if I study history and they think I would be wasting my time. What do you think? |
| Berlin | Nothing is more interesting and important than understanding the past. Because it is so important, many people want to know about it, and because so many people -- like yourself -- are so interested, there are lots of ways to earn a living doing it. Some teach, some work in museums, some make movies, some lead tours, some write books -- and some combine all of these interests with others -- as today, combining knowledge of history with a knowledge of computers. There is a lot of evidence that historians will continue to eat in the twenty-first century. |
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