Professor Ira Berlin: Slavery |
U.S. History: Pre-Columbian to the New Millennium
Meet the Historians
1999-04-12
Ira Berlin, Distinguished University Professor of History
University of Maryland
These renowned historians and experts chatted with students online. Read the transcripts.
Ira Berlin is a leading historian of southern and African-American life. He is Professor of History at the University of Maryland. Most recently he has published a book “Many Thousands Gone,” which is a history of African-American slavery in mainland North America during the first two centuries of European and African settlement. He is also the editor of “Remembering,” a book-and-tape set, which incorporates poignant voices of people who had been slaves. The recordings of interviews with former slaves were conducted by the Federal Writers Project in the early 1930s. The interviewers included such luminaries as Zora Neale Hurston and John Lomax, who talked to the ex-slaves about their relationships with their former owners and their relationships with other slaves. In addition, Professor Berlin has written or edited numerous other books on African-American history including, “Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South,” “Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era” and “Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War.”
US: It’s a little after 10 in the morning on April 12, 1999, in College Park, Maryland. We are here with Professor Ira Berlin.
Ques: How long was the average time interval between capture in Africa and arrival in the plantation?
Berlin: There is no meaningful average. The Atlantic slave trade lasted over 4 centuries. And, of course, connected very different places in Africa and America. But throughout the trade’s long history, the Atlantic crossing rarely took less than a few weeks. And, sometimes, it took many months. If viewed from the point of capture, travel from the interior of Africa to a plantation in the New World could be well over a year.
Ques: What percentage of Southerners were slaveholders?
Berlin: In 1860, the South had a population of 12-1/2 million. Of those, 4 milliion were slaves. The vast majority of the population was white. Of the whites, only 400,000 owned slaves. If the average slave-holding family contained 5 individuals, then only 2 of the 8 million whites held slaves or were members of families that held slaves.
xena: How about Northern percentages?
Berlin: First, slavery in the North was largely a 17th and 18th century phenomenon. The largest concentration of slaves in parts of the Middle Colonies: New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island never reached above 20% of the population. The vast majority of Northerners did not own slaves, either…
…xena: How were mixed-raced children looked upon?
Berlin: By law, children followed the status of their mothers. So that a descendant of a free man (white or black) and a slave woman would be a slave. Meaning many people of equal white or European descent were slaves and they were treated as slaves by their parents and other white people. However, throughout the period of slavery, the black community always accepted people of mixed descent a s part of their own community and incorporated them into African-American society…
Read the entire transcript here.
Tags: Ira Berlin, U.S. History: Pre-Columbian to the New Millennium