Plantation generations
In the historiography of the United States, the plantation generations are those generations of slaves of African descent who appeared in the United States or in the colonies from which the state territory of the United States emerged with the emergence of the plantation economy . The historian Ira Berlin (1941–2018) coined this term .
Characteristic
First of all, the plantation generations differ from the previous charter generations in terms of their origin. While the charter generations were made up of Atlantic Creoles , the plantation generations were recruited from men, women and children who were stolen directly from Africa and came to America via the so-called Middle Passage .
Second, the conditions under which these slaves were kept on the plantations had far-reaching consequences for their economic, social and cultural life. They rarely owned property or traded on their own account, for example in agricultural or handicraft products they had made themselves. When they entered slavery, they were mostly torn out of all existing family connections; few members of these generations had blood relatives or were married. They knew little about white society and wanted nothing to do with it; as a result, they did not profess Christianity, nor did they appeal to the white courts in disputes . The religious customs that they brought with them from their African homeland were perceived and devalued by the white clergy as idolatry, devil worship and as a sign of a lack of civilization.
Third, these generations lived secluded from the cosmopolitan Atlantic world that had been common to the charter generations, mostly on large, inland estates where they were isolated.
The slaves of the plantation generations also no longer spoke Creole , but instead spoke African languages, probably especially various Igbo dialects. When they arrived on the American markets, deliveries of slaves consisted mostly of ethnically highly heterogeneous groups of people, whose individual members initially hardly felt themselves to be compatriots. About half of the slaves who came to Virginia with the Royal African Company from 1683 to 1721 came from Senegambia . In the 1720s and 1730s, the ratio shifted in favor of calabars from the Nigerian hinterland, which now made up about 40% of the newcomers to Virginia. In the following decades, the focus shifted further south; a large proportion of the slaves - admittedly still not the majority - came from Angola . Most of the slaves imported directly from Africa came from the inland and were farmers or came from predominantly rural village communities.
The slave owners hardly worked side by side with their slaves any more, as was the case with the charter generations. As a result, there was hardly any informal communication between the two sides. In their place came fear and contempt.
Another difference to the charter generations was that the slave owners either gave the slaves of the plantation generations names that were supposed to reflect their insignificance - in the British colonies names like Jack or Sukey were common, in Spanish names like Pedro or Francisca , in French names like Jean or Marie - or, on the contrary, eccentric or pretentious names that made their bearers seem ridiculous. The slaves of this generation rarely had nicknames or family names .
background
This change in slave life had several causes. The most important of these, however, was the emergence of the plantation economy and the associated reorganization of work processes. As a result, not only the way of working changed fundamentally, but also the social and cultural life of the slaves. The plantation owners, who offered extremely high profit opportunities on the export market, so that their need for cheap labor became insatiable, were mainly responsible for transforming the "society with slaves" that existed up to that point into a "slave society" (Ira Berlin). As Ira Berlin has described, in the process of this transformation the terms “ blacks ” and “ whites ” were also redefined and placed at the center of racial ideologies , the ideas of which are still widespread in the United States as white supremacy ideology.
Schedule
The replacement of the charter generations by the plantation generations took place in the various regions of what would later become the US territory at very different times. The earliest, namely in the late 17th century, it took place in the Chesapeake region ( tobacco ). From there, the plantation economy and with it the plantation generations spread across the North American mainland in uneven bursts that took a total of a century and a half. In the early 18th century, the change reached the South Carolina and Georgia lowlands ( rice ) and eventually the Mississippi Valley ( sugar cane , cotton ). The charter generations lasted the longest in Florida .
After the American War of Independence and the United States' Declaration of Independence (1776), the plantation generations were followed by the revolutionary generations , whose living conditions did not differ fundamentally from those of the plantation generations, but in some characteristic details.
Individual evidence
See also
literature
- Ira Berlin : Many Thousands Gone. The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA et al. 1998, ISBN 0-674-81092-9 .
- Ira Berlin: Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA et al. 2003, ISBN 0-674-01061-2 , pp. 53-56.