Why enslaved failed

But many were drawn to it, and the insurrectionists soon numbered about The slaves fought off the English for more than a week before the colonists rallied and killed most of the rebels, although some very likely reached Fort Mose. Even after Colonial forces crushed the Stono uprising, outbreaks occurred, including the very next year, when South Carolina executed at least 50 additional rebel slaves. The New York City Conspiracy of With about 1, blacks living in a city of some 7, whites appearing determined to grind every person of African descent under their heel, some form of revenge seemed inevitable.

In early , Fort George in New York burned to the ground. Fires erupted elsewhere in the city — four in one day — and in New Jersey and on Long Island. Several white people claimed they had heard slaves bragging about setting the fires and threatening worse. They concluded that a revolt had been planned by secret black societies and gangs, inspired by a conspiracy of priests and their Catholic minions — white, black, brown, free and slave.

Certainly there were coherent ethnic groups who might have led a resistance, among them the Papa, from the Slave Coast near Whydah Ouidah in Benin; the Igbo, from the area around the Niger River; and the Malagasy, from Madagascar. They had probably been brought to New York from Havana, the greatest port of the Spanish West Indies and home to a free black population.

In the investigation that followed, 30 black men, two white men and two white women were executed. Before the end of the summer of , 17 blacks would be hanged and 13 more sent to the stake, becoming ghastly illuminations of white fears ignited by the institution of slavery they so zealously defended. Born prophetically in on the Prosser plantation, just six miles north of Richmond, Va. A skilled blacksmith who stood more than six feet tall and dressed in fine clothes when he was away from the forge, Gabriel cut an imposing figure.

But what distinguished him more than his physical bearing was his ability to read and write: Only 5 percent of Southern slaves were literate. Other slaves looked up to men like Gabriel, and Gabriel himself found inspiration in the French and Saint-Domingue revolutions of He imbibed the political fervor of the era and concluded, albeit erroneously, that Jeffersonian democratic ideology encompassed the interests of black slaves and white workingmen alike, who, united, could oppose the oppressive Federalist merchant class.

Spurred on by two liberty-minded French soldiers he met in a tavern, Gabriel began to formulate a plan, enlisting his brother Solomon and another servant on the Prosser plantation in his fight for freedom. Word quickly spread to Richmond, other nearby towns and plantations and well beyond to Petersburg and Norfolk, via free and enslaved blacks who worked the waterways.

Gabriel took a tremendous risk in letting so many black people learn of his plans: It was necessary as a means of attracting supporters, but it also exposed him to the possibility of betrayal. He planned his uprising for August 30 and publicized it well. But on that day, one of the worst thunderstorms in recent memory pummeled Virginia, washing away roads and making travel all but impossible.

Undeterred, Gabriel believed that only a small band was necessary to carry out the plan. But many of his followers lost faith, and he was betrayed by a slave named Pharoah, who feared retribution if the plot failed.

The rebellion was barely under way when the state captured Gabriel and several co-conspirators. German Coast Uprising, Ask students: When the enslaved slowed their work or broke tools, were they resisting the overall institution of slavery or just the work of slavery?

Can these be distinguished? Remind students that slave masters sometimes begrudgingly tolerated these everyday forms of resistance and even responded positively to slave workplace demands. These negotiated compromises provided slaves with incentives to work, ultimately bolstering the institution. For slave masters, acknowledging these small pin pricks of resistance were a small price to pay in order to secure the survival of the overall institution.

Some students likely will not buy the argument that everyday forms of resistance reinforced the institution. Encourage them to unravel exactly why they think this. The best students will recognize that even the smallest acts of resistance pushed the boundaries of freedom, slowly eroding the institution.

Smile at them and then turn to an even more obvious example. What about theft? Of course, stealing from the master MUST have been resistance. Even some of the enslaved seemed to acknowledge that this was the case.

Or were they cleverly manipulating the contradictions inherent to the institution? Finally, as one last consideration of everyday forms of resistance, you might ask your students whether cultural forms like the speaking of African languages, the formation of families, or the practice of religion constituted resistance to slavery.

Embedded in each of these were the potential for overt forms of resistance. For instance, those speaking African languages might plan conspiracies or revolts in those languages, thereby hiding their intentions from whites. The formation of families defied notions of property, sometimes making it difficult for masters to sell husbands, wives, and children, who vehemently protested separation from their loved ones.

Some slave masters recognized the potential dangers in these cultural expressions and attempted to curb their practices. Others viewed African and African-American cultural practices as vital ways of appeasing slaves so they would be more efficient workers. Did the master have to prohibit a particular cultural form in order for its practice to be considered resistant?

Or were all cultural expressions a form of resistance? Certainly there is an argument to be made that any assertion of humanity in an institution that defined one as non-human was an expression of resistance. At the same time, slaves were ultimately human beings and expressed themselves naturally as such, even within the confines of slavery.

Students probably will end up disagreeing about the precise definition of slave resistance. Considerations of whether certain behaviors were resistant or not will continuously run into conceptual dead ends.

Ultimately, students will turn to the instructor to place some closure on these debates. As a group, slaves constantly pushed their masters and overseers to grant them greater freedoms. This was only natural. When masters refused, slaves punctuated everyday forms of resistance with more overt expressions like running away or rebellion. The threat of flight or violence always hung over the institution, despite the infrequency of such acts.

Ultimately, the moral bankruptcy of slavery meant that even the smallest, most mundane acts could be considered resistant, but the enslaved did not live in a constantly reactionary state, awaiting their white masters before determining their next resistant move. The vast majority coped, endured, and lived their lives, avoiding the slings and arrows of white power as best they could. The study of slave resistance gained its contemporary impetus from works published in the s and s.

Aptheker, who never held a permanent academic position in the United States, was rejected by many as a radical communist. Widely criticized at the time of its publication, the work is now acknowledged as the platform upon which all other studies of slave resistance have been built. The idea of slaves as submissive and content dated as far back as Ulrich B. Elkins did not argue that slaves were naturally this way; rather, he argued that the institution of slavery transformed their personalities in much the same way as occurred among prisoners in Nazi concentration camps.

By the late s and s, a number of scholars began assaulting the Sambo monolith. There was one small region in the United States where the social conditions of slavery approached those prevailing in the sugar islands. In the South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands and low country, slaves outnumbered whites about nine to one.

By southern standards, plantations were unusually large. Many wealthy rice and long-staple cotton planters spent months away from their plantations.

The area was sufficiently African that many slaves spoke their own language, Gullah. Yet for nearly two hundred years only one major revolt occurred in the area, the Angolan-dominated Stono Rebellion of Appreciable activity by runaway slaves took place only after federal forces invaded the area during the Civil War. His thesis is best stated in his own words, since his point of view has its own somewhat specialized vocabulary. Until the Age of Revolution the slave revolts did not challenge the world capitalist system within which slavery itself was embedded.

Rather, they sought escape and autonomy—a local, precapitalist social restoration. When they did become revolutionary and raise the banner of abolition, they did so within the context of the bourgeois-democratic revolutionary wave, with bourgeois-democratic slogans and demands and with a commitment to bourgeois property relations.

Genovese does not always write this way. The thesis hinges upon questions about rebel perceptions, intentions, and rhetoric. Genovese makes his case briefly, for the book is the published version of three Fleming Lectures at Louisiana State University. The shift in rebel rhetoric is indisputable, and it probably reflected a real shift in goals.

Yet that decision precludes detailed examination of rebel aims in particular situations and thereby, in my opinion, allows his general theme to override the complex realities of slave rebellion. There is nothing surprising or contemptible in this tense confusion, given the situations in which slave rebels found themselves.

But there is much evidence to show for it, and Genovese slights it while emphasizing the development of high political consciousness and purposefulness during and after the Haitian Revolution. The second difficulty arises from the same emphasis. Creole slaves, for example, were much more likely to have quasi-industrial skills such as blacksmithing, and they were also more likely to have access to and familiarity with firearms. Surely this kind of knowledge affected both the mood and planning of potential rebels in ways that were neither political nor ideological.

The social circumstances of the creoles did not always work in their favor; their planning was considerably more open to betrayal, and they were aware of this fact. Finally, Genovese appears merely to take for granted an important cultural change without which the creoles could never have developed the political consciousness which he emphasizes. In any given region they spoke a common language, which many of the Africans did not, either the language of their owners or a creole language based on it.