Many Thousands Gone Quotes

“Among the first objects of the planters' assault were the names Africans carried to the New World, and with them the lineage which structured much of African life. Writing to his overseer from his plantation on the Rappahannock River in 1727, Robert "King" Carter, perhaps the richest of the Chesapeake's new grandees, explained the process by which he initiated Africans into their American captivity. "I name'd them here & by their names we can always know what sizes they are of & I am sure we repeated them so often to them that every one knew their names & would readily answer to them." Carter then forwarded his slaves to a satellite plantation or "quarter," where his overseer repeated the process, taking "care that the negros both men & women I sent ... always go by ye names we gave them.”
― Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

“There seems to have been little stigma attached to such unions: after Francis Payne's death, his white widow remarried, this time to a white man. In like fashion, free black women joined together with white men. William Greensted, a white attorney who represented Elizabeth Key, a woman of color, in her successful suit for freedom, later married her. In 1691 when the Virginia General Assembly ruled against such relationships, some propertied white Virginians found the legislation novel and obnoxious enough to muster a protest.36”
― Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

“Some patrons acted from respect or friendship for their clients, others from a sense of noblesse oblige, and yet others because the free people's gratitude could be profitable. Vulnerable black people paid premium prices for goods and services that white men and women bought cheaply.
Landlords who rented land to black planters often exacted higher rents from them than they did from white tenants, just as employers who hired free black”
― Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America