Shared from https://bayareaintifada.wordpress.com/2015/04/22/6547/
One of the most pernicious allegations made against the
African-American people was that our slave ancestors were either
exceptionally “docile” or “content and loyal,” thus explaining their
purported failure to rebel extensively
So, did African-American slaves rebel? Of course they did. These
are considered the five greatest slave rebellions in the United States.
1. Stono Rebellion, 1739. The Stono Rebellion was
the largest slave revolt ever staged in the 13 colonies. On Sunday,
Sept. 9, 1739, a day free of labor, about 20 slaves under the leadership
of a man named Jemmy provided whites with a painful lesson on the
African desire for liberty. Many members of the group were seasoned
soldiers, either from the Yamasee War or from their experience in their
homes in Angola, where they were captured and sold, and had been trained
in the use of weapons.
They gathered at the Stono River and raided a warehouse-like store,
Hutchenson’s, executing the white owners and placing their victims’
heads on the store’s front steps for all to see. They moved on to other
houses in the area, killing the occupants and burning the structures,
marching through the colony toward St. Augustine, Fla., where under
Spanish law, they would be free.
As the march proceeded, not all slaves joined the insurrection; in
fact, some hung back and actually helped hide their masters. But many
were drawn to it, and the insurrectionists soon numbered about 100. They
paraded down King’s Highway, according to sources, carrying banners and
shouting, “Liberty!” —
lukango in their native Kikongo, a word that would have expressed the English ideals embodied in liberty and, perhaps, salvation.
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.
2. The New York City Conspiracy of 1741. With about
1,700 blacks living in a city of some 7,000 whites appearing determined
to grind every person of African descent under their heel, some form of
revenge seemed inevitable. In early 1741, 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. Another identifiable and suspect group
was known among the conspirators as the “Cuba People,” “negroes and
mulattoes” captured in the early spring of 1740 in Cuba. 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. Having been
“free men in their own country,” they rightly felt unjustly enslaved in
New York.
A 16-year-old Irish indentured servant, under arrest for theft,
claimed knowledge of a plot by the city’s slaves — in league with a few
whites — to kill white men, seize white women and incinerate the city.
In the investigation that followed, 30 black men, two white men and two
white women were executed. Seventy people of African descent were exiled
to far-flung places like Newfoundland, Madeira, Saint-Domingue (which
at independence from the French in 1804 was renamed Haiti) and Curaçao.
Before the end of the summer of 1741, 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.
3. Gabriel’s Conspiracy, 1800. Born prophetically in
1776 on the Prosser plantation, just six miles north of Richmond, Va.,
and home (to use the term loosely) to 53 slaves, a slave named Gabriel
would hatch a plot, with freedom as its goal, that was emblematic of the
era in which he lived.
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 1789. 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.
Regardless, Gabriel persevered, aiming to rally at least 1,000 slaves
to his banner of “Death or Liberty,” an inversion of the famed cry of
the slaveholding revolutionary Patrick Henry. With incredible daring —
and naïveté — Gabriel determined to march to Richmond, take the armory
and hold Gov. James Monroe hostage until the merchant class bent to the
rebels’ demands of equal rights for all. 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. Twenty-five African Americans, worth about
$9,000 or so — money that cash-strapped Virginia surely thought it could
ill afford — were hanged together before Gabriel went to the gallows
and was executed, alone.
4. German Coast Uprising, 1811. If the Haitian
Revolution between 1791 and 1804 — spearheaded by Touissant Louverture
and fought and won by black slaves under the leadership of Jean-Jacques
Dessalines — struck fear in the hearts of slave owners everywhere, it
struck a loud and electrifying chord with African slaves in America.
In 1811, about 40 miles north of New Orleans, Charles Deslondes, a
mulatto slave driver on the Andry sugar plantation in the German Coast
area of Louisiana, took volatile inspiration from that victory seven
years prior in Haiti. He would go on to lead what the young historian
Daniel Rasmussen calls the largest and most sophisticated slave revolt
in U.S. history in his book
American Uprising. (The Stono
Rebellion had been the largest slave revolt on these shores to this
point, but that occurred in the colonies, before America won its
independence from Great Britain.) After communicating his intentions to
slaves on the Andry plantation and in nearby areas, on the rainy evening
of Jan. 8, Deslondes and about 25 slaves rose up and attacked the
plantation’s owner and family. They hacked to death one of the owner’s
sons, but carelessly allowed the master to escape.
That was a tactical mistake to be sure, but Deslondes and his men had
wisely chosen the well-outfitted Andry plantation — a warehouse for the
local militia — as the place to begin their revolt. They ransacked the
stores and seized uniforms, guns and ammunition. As they moved toward
New Orleans, intending to capture the city, dozens more men and women
joined the cause, singing Creole protest songs while pillaging
plantations and murdering whites. Some estimated that the force
ultimately swelled to 300, but it’s unlikely that Deslondes’ army
exceeded 124.
The South Carolina congressman, slave master and Indian fighter Wade
Hampton was assigned the task of suppressing the insurrection. With a
combined force of about 30 regular U.S. Army soldiers and militia, it
would take Hampton two days to stop the rebels. They fought a pitched
battle that ended only when the slaves ran out of ammunition, about 20
miles from New Orleans. In the slaughter that followed, the slaves’ lack
of military experience was evident: The whites suffered no casualties,
but when the slaves surrendered, about 20 insurgents lay dead, another
50 became prisoners and the remainder fled into the swamps.
By the end of the month, whites had rounded up another 50 insurgents.
In short order, about 100 survivors were summarily executed, their
heads severed and placed along the road to New Orleans. As one planter
noted, they looked “like crows sitting on long poles.”
5. Nat Turner’s Rebellion, 1831. Born on Oct. 2,
1800, in Southampton County, Va., the week before Gabriel was hanged,
Nat Turner impressed family and friends with an unusual sense of
purpose, even as a child. Driven by prophetic visions and joined by a
host of followers — but with no clear goals — on August 22, 1831, Turner
and about 70 armed slaves and free blacks set off to slaughter the
white neighbors who enslaved them.
In the early hours of the morning, they bludgeoned Turner’s master
and his master’s wife and children with axes. By the end of the next
day, the rebels had attacked about 15 homes and killed between 55 and 60
whites as they moved toward the religiously named county seat of
Jerusalem, Va. Other slaves who had planned to join the rebellion
suddenly turned against it after white militia began to attack Turner’s
men, undoubtedly concluding that he was bound to fail. Most of the
rebels were captured quickly, but Turner eluded authorities for more
than a month.
On Sunday, Oct. 30, a local white man stumbled upon Turner’s hideout
and seized him. A special Virginia court tried him on Nov. 5 and
sentenced him to hang six days later. A barbaric scene followed his
execution. Enraged whites took his body, skinned it, distributed parts
as souvenirs and rendered his remains into grease. His head was removed
and for a time sat in the biology department of Wooster College in Ohio.
(In fact, it is likely that pieces of his body — including his skull
and a purse made from his skin — have been preserved and are hidden in
storage somewhere.)
Of his fellow rebels, 21 went to the gallows, and another 16 were
sold away from the region. As the state reacted with harsher laws
controlling black people, many free blacks fled Virginia for good.
Turner remains a legendary figure, remembered for the bloody path he
forged in his personal war against slavery, and for the grisly and
garish way he was treated in death.
The heroism and sacrifices of these slave insurrectionists would be a
prelude to the noble performance of some 200,000 black men who served
so very courageously in the Civil War, the war that finally put an end
to the evil institution that in 1860 chained some 3.9 million human
beings to perpetual bondage.
