Slave Insurrections

Resistance to slavery in the early national United States took a form very different from the large-scale slave insurrections that arose in South America and the Caribbean. Massive slave rebellions were far less common than day-to-day resistance or individual acts of violence for a combination of reasons: the presence of a heavily armed white majority in every state except South Carolina (and, toward the very end of the antebellum period, Mississippi); the lack of an impregnable hinterland to accommodate Maroon colonies from which runaway slaves could besiege plantations; the relatively dispersed nature and small size of slaveholding; and the fact that the landlord class was in residence, not absentee. In the years after the Revolution, slaves achieved living space enough to build stable families and rich spiritual communities. Given the odds against success, it is hardly surprising that the handful of slaves bold enough to rise for their freedom found their rebellions reduced to unsuccessful conspiracies and their fellows doomed to die in combat or on the gallows.

Insurgent slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, far from uniformly sharing the same vision and goals, differed from one another as much as did white Revolutionaries in the same era. Jemmy, an Angolan who led an agrarian uprising in 1739 near Stono River, South Carolina, tried to hasten his African followers to freedom across the border into Spanish Florida. Caesar Varick, who only two years later conspired to burn New York City and flee with other bondmen to French Canada, which was then at war with the colonies, lived in one of North America's largest urban centers with an Irish wife. In 1800 Gabriel, a young, secular rebel who had turned away from African traditions, hoped to stay and work in a more egalitarian Virginia. Denmark Vesey, an aged free black who bought his freedom the year before Gabriel died, expected to achieve a limited exodus for his family and followers by leading them out of Charleston to Haiti. In 1822 Vesey and his chief lieutenant, "Gullah" Jack Pritchard, an East African priest, fused African theology with the Old Testament God of wrath and justice, whereas in 1831 Nat Turner relied on Christian millennial themes and hoped to bring on the day of jubilee for black Virginians. Beyond their obvious abilities as leaders and their equally obvious desire to breathe free, bond rebels in America fit no simple pattern.

methods and aims

If slave rebellions in North America correspond to any single model, it is that they proliferated during times when the white majority was divided against itself. Colonial insurgents in South Carolina and New York City turned to violence at a time when their masters were at war with France and Spain. Gabriel, the most politicized of all the slave rebels, formulated his plans during the divisive election of 1800, when Federalists and Republicans threatened to take up arms against one another. The rebels in the Tidewater area of Virginia, despite the memory of the repression that followed Gabriel's death, began to organize again during the chaos of the War of 1812. Having read of the Missouri debates in Charleston newspapers, Vesey prayed that Northern whites would prove tardy in riding to the rescue of the estranged Southerners. Slaves near Natchez, Mississippi, began to plan for their freedom in 1861, following the outbreak of the Civil War.

Most of all, slaves, who well knew what they were up against and rarely contemplated suicidal ventures, plotted for their freedom only when safer avenues had been closed to them. For most of the seventeenth century, for example, when the high death rate in the southern colonies made inexpensive white indentured servants far more numerous than costly African slaves, enterprising bondpersons relied more on self-purchase than the sword. It was only after landless whites and hard-used white indentured workers under the command of Nathaniel Bacon burned Jamestown in 1676 that southern planters made a concerted effort to replace white servants with African slaves. The comprehensive Virginia Slave Code of 1705, the first of its kind in colonial North America, crushed the hope of industrious slaves that they might be upwardly mobile. Only then, as North American racial walls rapidly hardened, did desperate slaves turn to physically hazardous paths toward freedom. In April 1712 twenty-five Coromantee Africans burned several buildings in New York City and killed nine whites. Several rebels committed suicide before they could be captured, but those taken alive were broken on the wheel and hanged in chains as a warning to future rebels.

In the early eighteenth century, mainland revolts rarely posed much real danger to the slaveholding regime. Because the Atlantic slave trade was at its peak, every colony included large numbers of native Africans who sought to escape from bondage by building isolated Maroon communities in remote areas. There they tried to re-create the African communities they had lost. Even the two most significant rebellions of the period—the 1739 Stono River uprising and Varick's 1741 plan to torch New York City—were led by Africans who dreamed only of ending their own bondage, not of ending unfree labor in general. The price of failure was high. New York authorities ordered Varick and twelve of his followers burned alive; eighteen others were hanged and seventy more bondmen were banished from the colony.

slave rebellion in the age of revolution

The American Revolution alternately discouraged and stimulated slave rebellions. Although the British invasion and the animosity between Patriots and Loyalists presented slaves with a unique opportunity to organize, most slaves chose instead to take advantage of the dislocation of war to escape with their families into the growing cities or behind British lines. (The Revolution was the one time in North American history when equal numbers of female and male slaves ran away.) The aggressive bondmen who cast their lots with the military forces of King George were precisely the sort of bold, determined slaves who tended to organize slave conspiracies; thus the bloody fighting in the southern states after 1778 actually diminished the prospect that a mainland counterpart of Toussaint Louverture, the Haitian liberator, would rise out of the tobacco plantations.

Nonetheless, as Eugene D. Genovese suggests in his influential study From Rebellion to Revolution (1979), the age of revolution, and especially the slave revolt in Saint Domingue (Haiti) in 1791, marked a change in patterns in black resistance. The Caribbean rebels under the leadership of Boukman and Toussaint Louverture sought not only to destroy the power of their Parisian absentee masters but also to join the societies in which they lived on equal terms. For black Americans determined to realize the egalitarian promise of the American Revolution, the news from the Caribbean reminded them that, if they dared, the end of slavery—not only their own freedom—might be within reach. Born in 1776, the blacksmith Gabriel, who with his lieutenants in 1800 instigated the most extensive plot in Virginia history, hoped to force the white patriot elite to live up to its stated ideal: that all men were created free and equal. Leading a small army of slaves in Henrico County, he planned to march into Richmond under a banner proclaiming, "Death or Liberty." Governor James Monroe and other white authorities did not doubt that Louverture's victories had an enormous effect on blacks in the early national South.

In several cases, bondmen who had been carried from revolutionary Saint Domingue by their masters participated in North American slave revolts. In 1792 slaves on Virginia's Eastern Shore proposed to "blow up the magazine in Norfolk, and massacre its inhabitants." Although the rebel leader Caleb, a favored servant and driver, was evidently Americanborn, several of his recruits were Haitian refugees, and all—according to trial testimony—had been inspired by the example of Saint Domingue. Two decades later, in 1811, one of the most extensive conspiracies in the history of the United States erupted in southern Louisiana, only a few miles upriver from New Orleans. Slaves led by a mulatto driver named Charles Deslondes, reputedly aware of events in Saint Domingue, announced their intention of marching on the city "to kill whites." Eyewitness accounts placed the number of rebels at 180 to 500.

isolated rebellions

After Gabriel's execution and the death of twenty-five of his followers in the fall of 1800, slave rebellions on the eastern seaboard became both less common and less politically conscious. Slaves who worked along the rivers in southern Virginia and Halifax County, North Carolina, under the leadership of Sancho, a ferryman, formed a loosely connected scheme to rise on Easter Monday of 1802. But Sancho, despite having been involved in Gabriel's plot, shared little of Gabriel's dream of a multiracial republic. Even when the dislocations of the War of 1812 and a second British invasion of the Chesapeake once more gave bondmen in Virginia an opportunity to rise for their liberty, an ideological dimension was lacking. Gloucester County authorities jailed ten slaves in March 1813, and the following month found rebels in Williamsburg "condemned on a charge of conspiracy and insurrection." By the late summer and early fall, rumors of revolt unnerved inhabitants of Norfolk and Richmond as well.

White authorities crushed these isolated rebellions with relative ease, reminding leaders in the slave community that the determined white majority in the American South posed a formidable obstacle to insurgents. Denmark Vesey of Charleston, perhaps the most pragmatic of all the rebel leaders, realized that Gabriel's dream of forcing mainland elites to accommodate blacks' aspirations to freedom and economic justice was impossible. Vesey plotted, therefore, not to end slavery in South Carolina, but instead to lead a mass escape from Charleston to the Caribbean, where he had lived and worked as a boy. Hoping to take control of the city on the night of 14 July 1822, Vesey's recruits—many of them Africans—intended to slaughter the inhabitants of the city and seize bank reserves before fleeing to Haiti, an embattled black republic sorely in need of capital and skilled labor.

Despite the overwhelming amount of evidence testifying to black rebelliousness, some historians attribute servile conspiracies to white paranoia, or even to Machiavellian plots on the part of white authorities to eliminate potential black leaders. One scholar suggests that insurgents never planned for their freedom in New York City in 1741, Antigua in 1736, the Chesapeake in the 1790s, and southern Virginia in 1802. Another historian, Michael Johnson, argues that "the evidence cannot sustain a credible interpretation that the Stono Revolt was a slave rebellion," and he also doubts that Gabriel's conspiracy and Vesey's plot constituted "incipient rebellion[s]."

No modern scholar, however, has challenged the reality of Nat Turner's bloody revolt. Fifty-seven dead white Virginians are hard to explain away. Yet the Southampton uprising of-1831 stands as the least practical of the nineteenth-century revolts. Unlike Gabriel, who believed it possible to fight his way into Richmond's political society, or Vesey, who simply planned to flee the country, the isolated geography of southern Virginia raises questions as to what the black general planned to do with his soldiers. Quite possibly, Turner hoped to march east and establish a Maroon colony in the Dismal Swamp. Equally possible is the prospect that the evangelical Turner avoided careful planning and preparation as he expected to leave the aftermath of rebellion in the hands of God.

More than four decades later, by the end of the Civil War, 180,000 African Americans (one out of every five males in the Republic) had served in Union forces. Those former slaves who marched back toward the plantations of their birth singing "General Gabriel's Jig" rightly understood themselves to be a part of the largest slave rebellion in the history of the United States.

See alsoAntislavery; Fugitive Slave Law of 1793; Gabriel's Rebellion; Haitian Revolution; Law: Slavery Law; Revolution: Slavery and Blacks in the Revolution; Vesey Rebellion; War and Diplomacy in the Atlantic World; War of 1812 .

bibliography

Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. New York: Columbia University Press, 1943.

Egerton, Douglas R. Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Frey, Sylvia R. Water From the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Genovese, Eugene D. From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979; New York: Vintage Books, 1981.

Greenberg, Kenneth S., ed. Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory. Oxford, U.K., and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Hoffer, Peter Charles. The Great New York Conspiracy of 1741: Slavery, Crime, and Colonial Law. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003.

Douglas R. Egerton