Slave Uprisings and Resistance

Slave Uprisings and Resistance. Slave revolts, conspiracies, and resistance have been problematic for all Americans, and buffeted by emotional and ideological considerations, ever since the beginnings of slavery in North America in the seventeenth century. Historians agree that far fewer and much smaller actual revolts occurred in North America than in the West Indies, Surinam, and Brazil. The crucial reason for this difference was that the ratio of blacks to whites was much higher in those regions than in most of North America. But historians also emphasize that slaves in North America engaged in a great deal of “day‐to‐day” resistance that took the form of sabotage, malingering, running away, and creative shamming, as well as acts of individual violence.

At least two outright revolts in the Colonial Era were organized by specific African ethnic groups—by Akan‐speaking people in New York City in 1712 and by Angolans at Stono, South Carolina, in 1739. Later, after the Revolutionary War, important conspiracies involved slaves who were culturally much further removed from Africa, such as Gabriel's in Virginia in 1800, Denmark Vesey's in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822, and Nat Turner's uprising in Virginia in 1831. During the era of the French Revolution, the massive and successful slave revolt in Haiti profoundly affected both blacks and whites in the United States. It sparked a wave of unrest among American slaves for a generation and an even longer‐lasting fear among slaveholders in the South.

The mere idea of a slave uprising frightened whites, yet over the long term their reactions changed dramatically. In the eighteenth century, slave revolts appeared to northern and southern whites as both natural and nearly inevitable. In the nineteenth century, southern whites came to view such revolts as both improbable and unnaturally fomented by outside agitation. Yet when historians began retrospective discussion about slave revolts in about 1940, they unconsciously reverted to the eighteenth‐century view.

Much less is known about how African Americans reacted to outright revolts, though it is clear that many felt a deep‐seated ambiguity because of the vicious suppression they knew would follow. American slaves well understood that even individual acts of defiance almost always had dire consequences.

During the second half of the twentieth century, historians argued about the extent of slave resistance. In general, they stressed the substantial resistance to slavery among American slaves, but they differed about the nature of the myriad forms those activities took, which in fact ranged all the way from killing masters, mistresses, and overseers, through breaking tools, faked pregnancies, and folktales about the clever and resourceful Brer Rabbit.

Long after the end of slavery in the United States, historians still debated questions related to slave uprisings and to what slaves actually felt and did. By the end of the twentieth century, however, a broad consensus had emerged that enslaved African Americans frequently resisted slavery, and that they did so in highly diverse and often creative ways.

Bibliography

Eugene D. Genovese , From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro‐American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World, 1979.

Winthrop D. Jordan