Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

"In the 1970s, a great efflorescence in the study of slavery began which produced a series of great books, among them Roll, Jordan, Roll and Many Thousands Gone . Ira Berlin helps us understand that many tributaries flowed into what became American slavery. After Virginia established this system of slavery, enslaved people were brought into South Carolina, Maryland, and Georgia from many different regions of Africa. Each had a different experience of what it was like to be ripped out of their homes and brought to British North America. Ira Berlin shows us that slavery was a vast and complex system. In the Presence of Mine Enemies is a story of the American Civil War that includes Black and white people, men and women, soldiers, and civilians, and Northerners and Southerners in the same story. It focuses on two communities in the Shenandoah Valley who were alike in every way, except one. They had the same soil, the same climate, the same ethnicities, the same religions, but there was a line on the ground and south of that line there was slavery and north of that line, there was not. I asked: How could Americans who shared so much have a difference on the issue of freedom which was so great that they would engage in a war that ended up killing the equivalent, if it happened today, of 8 million people? All this was a way to show the human side of the Civil War. Everybody knows that slavery ended with the Civil War. But if you read polls today, 40% of Americans still believe the Civil War was caused by a battle over states’ rights. We were taught the Civil War was a conflict between an industrial North and an agrarian South. That’s a gross distortion. At the time of the Civil War, 75% of Northerners were farmers. In 1860, Southern agricultural meant agribusiness based on the bound labor of 4 million people."