Ira Berlin's "Many Thousands Gone."

Berlin traces the evolution of black society from the first arrivals in the early seventeenth century through the American Revolution, reintegrates slaves into the history of the American working class, and reveals the diverse forms that slavery and freedom assumed before cotton was the mainstay of the slave economy. You witness the transformation that occurred as the first generations of Creole slaves, free blacks, and indentured whites gave way to the plantation generations, whose exhausting …

…dehumanizing slaves was one that took time and varied from region to region, and he goes into specific economic and cultural factors that played the role in establishing and keeping slavery in the states. Berlin argues that the north did not have fewer slaves because northerners were more conscientious or less racist than southerners (as many would like to think), but because the majority of them simply could not profit as well from slave labor.