Slave Rebellions

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  The British and French in the Atlantic 1650-1800

  Comparisons and Contrasts

  • Gwenda Morgan, Peter Rushton(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The title of this chapter requires some discussion, as the differences between these categories may seem either too obvious or too arbitrary to be useful. The debate nevertheless goes to the heart of the problem of how to interpret the nature of popular opposition to the unjust and oppressive social relations created in the early modern colonies of the British and French empires. The three terms may be usefully applied to different situations; to distinguish the numbers involved, the level of threat to the established social systems, and whether those opposing the status quo had in mind a complete restructuring of society. One difficulty for historians is that a word like ‘rebellion’ may have been used casually by those in control at the time to characterise everything from personal protests to incidents of collective rioting and large-scale violence, whether aimed at political change or reclamation of conquered territory. Moreover, the level of rhetoric is at times extreme, as it serves the purpose of those favouring brutal reprisals to exaggerate the level of threat. The same might be said of the word ‘conspiracy’, whose use in a given situation may reflect the level of fear pervading the ruling authorities rather than the actual organisation of those opposing them. Paranoia may be a feature of all controllers of unequal societies – the fear of conspiracy between, for example, black slaves and poor whites. The result is that historical documents often throw around words such as ‘rebellion’ or ‘revolution’ in casual ways that can be deceptive. For historians, though, it might be a valid approach to distinguish:

  • Resistance – refusal to conform or obey: this could be collective, but is most likely to be small-scale and personal
  • Rebellion – a threat to the established order, attack on the ruling class or controlling authorities of an unequal society
  • Revolution – following much the same violent process as a rebellion, but with an alternative social or political order in mind to be created at the end of the process

  These distinctions are probably over-neat, because one may turn into another and all may occur simultaneously. Perhaps all revolutions begin with one person refusing an order, resisting arrest, or fighting back, but revolutions in the end depend on creating an organisation and undertaking deliberate, sustained conflict rather than random individual acts. Certainly there is some evidence that North American slave revolts often began with a spontaneous, almost accidental, act – of arson or theft – which turned into more seriously organised opposition. Above all, full-blown revolutions, in contrast with mere rebellions, depend on a plan to replace current social or political structures, and this was always the crucial weakness of many insurgencies in colonial societies.

  5.1 Resistance

  The colonial structures set up by Europeans in the colonies were deeply unequal and exploitative, and inevitably generated resistance and conflict at both personal and collective levels. The native defence of land and rights was just one aspect, providing a permanent external threat for settlers and colonial authorities. Internally, servants, slaves, small landowners, women, and the young asserted themselves against social forces of exclusion and exploitation. This does not mean that these actions should all be seen as part of a common struggle or that they should be perceived as a collective movement, though clearly some actions took the form of common revolt. Asserting their own identity and wishes against the controlling forces alone constituted a challenge, and could be subjected to suppression. For servants and slaves, maintaining memories and traditions from their country of origin, whether it was Catholic Irish servants or African slaves, was a means of asserting their cultural identities against a society that denigrated or feared them. If African slaves buried one of their own with rites and symbols derived from African religious customs, then they were in effect defying their reduction to mere chattels. When servants and slaves ran away they challenged both their subordinate status and the working of the economic system that relied on it. Everywhere in the Anglophone Atlantic, vocal women were in court because their words had assaulted others in the community and their insults provoked legal responses from their victims or from the alarmed authorities. Patriarchy had its limits, communities were finding. Whether there were similar limits to other systems of inequality is a key question for this chapter.

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  A Concise History of the Caribbean

  • B. W. Higman(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  and American revolutions – could not be confined easily to a select group of free white men. The consequence was a broader debate about the right to resist tyrants – is it just to spill the blood of oppressors and how high should the price of freedom be set? Resistance and Rebellion in Slave Societies For enslaved people, unwillingness to bow to authority or be cowed by coercion took many forms. Some committed suicide rather than live in slavery. Individual enslaved workers on sugar plantations found numerous less self- destructive ways of fighting back: temporary or long-term escape (marronage), sabotage, destruction of property, arson, and the murder of their masters. Groups of enslaved people Plate 5.1 Maroons in ambush at Dromilly Estate, Jamaica, 1795. Aquatint from a painting by F.J. Bourgoin, 1810. Source: British Library/The Image Works Resistance and Rebellion in Slave Societies 171 acting together could achieve more, but attempting con- certed resistance made it harder to keep secrets from the slave owners. As was the case before 1770, the most success- ful forms of resistance were the permanent escape of indi- viduals, generally overseas as ‘maritime maroons’ or simply disappearing among the crowds of a large town or, on the other hand, by the establishment of autonomous commu- nities in special geographic niches such as the Cockpit Country in Jamaica and the palenques of Puerto Rico. Few new autonomous communities of successful Maroons were established after 1770. In Jamaica, the Second Maroon War of 1795 was fought in order to maintain settlements already established rather than to extend or multiply them. This hard-fought conflict involved only one community, the Maroons of Trelawny Town, and was apparently provoked by the British gov- ernor of Jamaica, who sided with other Maroons.

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  The Haitian Revolution

  Capitalism, Slavery and Counter-Modernity

  • Eduardo Grüner, Ramsey McGlazer(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  universal questioning of the system.

  The (Uncertain) Logic of Slave Rebellions

  Let me approach my argument from another perspective. The rebellions of African American slaves in modernity took place in the context of a capitalist mode of production that was already in a state of advanced globalization. Consequently, these rebellions contributed to a radical emancipatory movement. Although, as I have said, this movement generally remained within the limits of what might be called the “left wing” of democratic-bourgeois thought, it also anticipated a more profound critique of capitalism, and thus of democratic-bourgeois thought as such.

  On the other hand, slave systems in the Americas had arisen at the complex conjuncture of international, regional, and local developments, developments that arose in response to the demands of the global market. To be sure, there were sometimes important differences between the colonies held by metropolitan powers that were still anchored in sovereign or semi-feudal economies (as in Spain and Portugal), on the one hand, and, on the other, those controlled by societies that were more clearly bourgeois (England, the Netherlands, and, to a degree, France). In this context, Slave Rebellions were bound to express these differences in their own ways, but as a whole they were part of a political opposition to the bloody conquest of the world by European capitalism. As the end of the eighteenth century approached, the historical content of these revolts changed decisively: far from being mere reactions against slavery and manifestations of a search for communitarian freedom or efforts to recover (real or imaginary) cultural and identitarian roots, Slave Rebellions began to seek (without necessarily abandoning these first impulses) the demolition of the slave system as a whole. The great revolution fought by the slaves of Saint-Domingue/Haiti was the culmination, as well as the most conscious example, of this effort, this displacement of one set of objectives by another. Of course, this process was, like any such social and political process, marked by all kinds of nuances, hesitations, and contradictions, including ideological contradictions. In order to attempt to understand these, we need to ask what the situation in Haiti was like before

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  Black Southerners, 1619-1869

  • John B. Boles(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  I thought she meant freedom from slavery. It was precisely this belief that one was in the ultimate sense free that allowed countless slaves to persevere so eloquently. In ways masters never suspected, the Christianity of blacks mitigated against slave uprisings and supported the essential humanity of a people defined as property. Community, Culture, and Rebellion 169 In part because slaves' religion, along with other manifestations of cultural independence, provided them a safe way of revolting against psychological enslavement, more physically risky kinds of rebellion were far less common in the Old South than in any other New World slave community. Yet many other factors entered into the equation of slave rebellion. Rebellion itself consists of a broad spectrum of activities ranging from subtle efforts to maintain in-dividual cultural autonomy to armed insurrection. The many forms of slave revolt, and their relative frequency in the antebellum South, have constituted a topic of sustained research in southern studies. Human struggles for freedom are intrinsically interesting, but in the case of southern slavery the subject is especially worthy of close examination for what the frequency and form of slave re-bellion reveal about the nature of the peculiar institution itself. One of the difficulties in making broad generalizations about slave rebellion, as with other aspects of the slave experience, is that the institution changed dramatically over time. Most discussion of rebellion has centered on the period after about 1800, when the slave population was greatest, yet the very factors that served to set the Old South apart from the Caribbean and Latin America situations were most prominent in the final half-century of slavery in the United States. Particularly after 1808 when the foreign slave trade to the United States was closed, planters realized that slave living conditions had to be such as to allow population growth.

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  Haitian Revolutionary Studies

  • David Patrick Geggus(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Indiana University Press

    (Publisher)

  were felt in the colony, expectations were rising in the slave quarters faster than they could be satisfied. In the literature on slave rebellion in the Americas, two overarching typolo-gies are of particular interest. In From Rebellion to Revolution, Eugene Genovese contrasted restorationist and bourgeois-democratic slave revolts in the his-tory of the Americas. He depicted the Saint Domingue insurrection as a turning point between secessionist rebellions and true revolutions that, under the in-fluence of the French Revolution, aimed for the first time to eradicate slavery. Slave resistance was thus incorporated into a programmatic history of world revolution. 64 In contrast, Michael Craton, writing on the British Caribbean, ar-gued that structural change within slave society rather than the transmission of ideas was the chief influence in fashioning new forms of armed resistance. He proposed that the transition from an African to a locally born Creole ma-jority in slave communities entailed significant changes in the aims and tactics of rebels. An initial escapist or maroon phase gave way to violent attempts to overthrow the colonial regime and, in the last years of slavery, to Creole-led re-bellions that aimed to achieve freedom within plantation society, mainly through passive resistance and limited use of violence. 65 Where Genovese saw increasing radicalism, Craton saw increasing moderation. Such divergent views are possible because of the extreme difficulty of deci-phering rebels' intentions. Apart from problems of evidence, the large-scale re-volts appear to have been multilayered affairs which expressed a diversity of aims. This makes classification especially tricky. Each of the two models is open to certain objections.

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  Politics in Captivity

  Plantations, Prisons, and World-Building

  • Lena Zuckerwise(Author)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Fordham University Press

    (Publisher)

  37 This of course relies on a thin, ungenerous con- cept of resistance, one that is generally dismissive of rebellions that did not “successfully” abolish slavery altogether. 38 Genovese states, “the slaves of the United States always faced helpless odds. A slave revolt anywhere in the Americas, at any time, had poor prospects and required organizers with extraordinary daring and resourcefulness.” 39 His account is hotly contested by more recent historians, including Stephanie Smallwood and Marcus Rediker, both of whom have written ex- tensively on rebellion in Middle Passage. 40 Ship ledgers reveal that resistance was common in the form of hunger strikes, refusal of medicine, suicide, and Erasures of Slave Resistance 73 armed insurrection. Public records attest to this as well, including a hearing on the slave trade in the House of Commons in 1790–1791: “Mr. Towne says, that inquiring of the slaves into the cause of their insurrections, he has been asked what business he had to carry them from their own country. They had wives and children whom they wanted to be with.” 41 Such testi- mony reveals that rebellion was frequent enough to be considered relevant in a debate on the abolition of the slave trade in Britain. Also indicating this is the introduction of a special form of insurance during this period, to recoup losses resulting from insurrections aboard ships.

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  Pathways from Slavery

  British and Colonial Mobilizations in Global Perspective

  • Seymour Drescher(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  6

  CIVILIZING INSURGENCY: TWO VARIANTS OF SLAVE REVOLTS IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

  Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it and I shall move the world. –Archimedes

  How was slavery abolished? João Pedro Marques sets his sights on deflating a new master narrative that places insurgent slave revolts at the center of the story. Both the traditional and new narratives agree that the successful and climactic assaults on this perennial institution began at the end of the eighteenth century. However, in the new narrative, African slave resistance long preceded Euro-American abolitionism. Slaves themselves instigated incessant and often massive revolts for centuries before the emergence of political abolitionism. They were also the primary and principal catalysts in the two major stages in the emancipation process: ending the intercontinental slave trade and the dismantling of the institution itself.

  The temporal extension of the new approach is clear. The process began long before the pivotal “age of abolition,” in the 1770s. Various forms of slave resistance must be re-imagined as one long uninterrupted struggle against the institution. One should include in the process all flights from enslavement and all autonomous communities formed by ex-slaves beyond the zone of slavery.1 The final stage of the emancipation process was introduced by a series of massive collective uprisings, forcing the closure of the institution. All forms of collective resistance, before and after the age of revolution (c. 1775–1830), thus eroded the institution and portended its destruction. The great slave uprisings in Saint-Domingue in 1791 and Jamaica in 1831 were only the climactic and decisive moments in the process.

  Marques challenges this narrative both logically and empirically. You cannot explain a variable by a constant. Slavery was a millennial institution that produced millennial resistance of every type catalogued in its later New World embodiments. The level of revolts in both ancient Roman and Medieval Muslim slavery produced uprisings of scale and durability that matched or exceeded similar conflicts in the Americas. Against the catalogue of day-to-day resistance, flight, and marronage must be set the robustness of the institution over centuries and its flexibility in using manumission and maroon communities to stabilize the institution. Three centuries after the founding of the Atlantic system, the cumulative effect of slave revolts on both sides of the Atlantic had neither eroded the imperial commitment to the institution nor halted its expansion. On the contrary, as Marques concludes, for three centuries Western colonial slaves struggled for individual or group freedom, just as Old World slaves had done before them. But they neither sought nor succeeded in eliminating the institution. Nor did they formulate “an antislavery conception of human relations.” Slave rebellion was not synonymous with anti-slavery, either in intention or impact.2

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  Civil War and Agrarian Unrest

  The Confederate South and Southern Italy

  • Enrico Dal Lago(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Ultimately, for Steven Hahn, the largescale rebellion of slaves in the Confederacy resembled the Haitian Revolution yet “was even more far reaching . . . [because] it took place in and transformed a slave society that was by far the largest, most economically advanced, and most resilient in the Americas.”  Similarly, for Stephanie McCurry, the contemporary sources written by both Confederate and Union officials leave no doubt to the fact that “evidence that the Civil War became a massive slave rebellion is to be found in every Confederate state where slaves seized the opportunity to rise against their masters.”  In this respect, an important complement to this interpretation is Thavolia Glymph’s work, which has accurately described the resistance put up by female house slaves, who “drama- tically reshaped the terms of their labor during and after the war by Myself: African American Self-Emancipation in the Civil War Era (New York: Cam- bridge University Press, ); Mark A. Lause, Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, ).  Williams, I Freed Myself, p. .  W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro and social reconstruction []” in Herbert Aptheker (ed.), Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, and Addresses, – (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts, ), p. .  See Lorien Foote, “Rethinking the Confederate home front,” Journal of the Civil War Era, () (), –.  Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), p. .  Stephanie McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power Politics in the Civil War South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), p. . Civil Wars and Agrarian Questions  refusing to work, destroying their mistresses’ property, and eventually running away.”  More recently, Erroll A.

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