Slave Insurrections

SLAVE INSURRECTIONS. The vast merchant capital accumulation that motivated and sustained early modern slavery around the Atlantic world also prompted the struggles of the enslaved to free themselves. Marxist scholars have long viewed these as class struggles in racial form.
Beginning in the 1930s, Herbert Aptheker, a member of the Communist Party USA began interpreting slave revolts in this way. His work challenged the sanitized, romanticized, and often racist views of American slavery that had depicted slave insurrection as extremely rare. He counted at least 250 slave revolts before the 1860s and emphasized the importance of extreme material hardship, not only the existential predicament of enslavement, as a key catalyst of uprisings. Other Marxist historians such as Eugene Genovese disputed the statistics in Aptheker’s findings but did little to alter the basic premise: enslaved people engaged in class warfare when they rebelled.

In the United States as in other societies with large numbers of enslaved people, the threat of violent insurrection and rebellion lurked in the background of daily life. Insurrections haunted the imaginations of slaveowners and other whites of the region, but the same specter could also inspire enslaved people to act to free themselves. Violent insurrection and full-scale rebellion, attracting sensational attention, amounted to a small part of slave resistance. Insubordination, running away, and sabotage took place regularly.

When slaves slowed their pace of work, broke tools, stole, ran away, committed arson, or poisoned their captors, they undermined slavery as an institution in ways as meaningful as insurrections. Historians of slavery have worked to recover these discrete moments of rebellion, and some patterns have emerged. Running away stands out as the most effective non-violent mode of slave resistance. Scholars consider it likely that most enslaved people resorted to it, if only temporarily, at some point in their lives. Advertisements in newspapers across the Americas searching for runaways testify to the disruptiveness and persistence of this form of personal insurrection over time. Indeed, in the largest slave societies, places like Jamaica, San Domingue, Virginia and South Carolina, runaways often successfully formed maroon communities in swamps, forests, or mountain ranges. In Jamaica during the 1730s in particular, maroons waged an effective war against British authorities and succeeded in gaining a concession of their freedom from the Crown, a distinct history that continues to define the culture of these mountain communities on the island today. In the United States, the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia hosted generations of maroon communities, and the presence of such groups in Florida played a major role in the conflicts of the First Seminole War (1817-1818) and in US interest in purchasing the territory from Spain.

Prior to the nineteenth century, enslaved people also staged organized rebellions that required military action on the part of colonizers to suppress, throughout the Americas. In the British colonies, the rebellion at Stono in South Carolina (1739) and Tacky’s Revolt in Jamaica (1760) came closest to achieving their aims and left indelible marks on both places. In Antigua (1736) and New York (1741), colonial authorities uncovered alleged slave conspiracies that led to widespread newspaper coverage and heightened white anxieties. During the chaos of the American Revolution, hundreds of enslaved people seized opportunities to liberate themselves, in some cases responding to Dunmore’s Proclamation (1775), which promised liberty to slaves who enlisted in the British army. The slave rebellion par excellence occurred on San Domingue, the most valuable colony of any European power in the New World, during the tumult of the French Revolution. The war enslaved people waged against the French there led to the creation of the Republic of Haiti and set the stage for Napoleon’s sale of Louisiana to the United States in 1803, hollowing out France’s once expansive empire in North America.

Away from land, slave ships played host to violent insurrections from the very beginning of the trade in the sixteenth century forward. European slave ships on the coast of Africa first saw opportunities of slaves to rise up against their captors. Few of these rebellions succeeded in the end. The most iconic, aboard the Portuguese slaver La Amistad, took place near the end of the Atlantic trade in 1839.

During the decades before the Civil War, insurrections ending in bloody suppression and public executions gave fresh reason for conversation about the injustice of slavery among a growing group of American abolitionists. In northern cities, Black edited newspapers began to appear (e.g. New York City’s Freedom’s Journal, 1827) alongside other abolitionist literature challenging slavery directly, such as David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored People of the World (1829) and William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator (1831). The same year that the Liberator appeared, Nat Turner led a massive uprising in Virginia that killed more than sixty whites and led to the combat deaths or executions of 160 enslaved people. In abolitionist circles, insurrection also raised questions about the morality of violence used by slaves. Activists such as William Lloyd Garrison opposed the use of force and argued for moral persuasion alone to bring about the end of slavery. Others, among the most forceful John Brown but also Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, and Wendell Phillips, justified violence as the only meaningful tool of the oppressed and enslaved. By the 1850s, this proposition gained wide acceptance among abolitionists.

It was perhaps the darkest tragedy of slavery, however, that self-destruction often offered enslaved people their last and most immediate option. In a system that attempted to reduce human beings to property, slave suicides and the murder of infant offspring asserted the fundamental futility of that system while undermining the abilities of slaveowners to reap profits. Suicides denied slaveowners the produce and value of enslaved bodies and in many contexts compelled local legislatures to pass laws authorizing the use of public coffers to compensate the owners.

From individual to collective action, slave insurrection took many forms. While only a minority of those enslaved in the Americas ever participated in a full-scale violent uprising, these moments gave voice to the universal desire of all captives to be free. In quieter times, the struggle against slavery continued in often more quotidian yet no less meaningful moments, from flight to sabotage to suicide.

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