Gabriel's Rebellion

The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802

Douglas R. Egerton

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780807864180
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Gabriel's Rebellion tells the dramatic story of what was perhaps the most extensive slave conspiracy in the history of the American South. Douglas Egerton illuminates the complex motivations that underlay two related Virginia slave revolts: the first, in 1800, led by the slave known as Gabriel; and the second, called the 'Easter Plot, ' instigated in 1802 by one of his followers. Although Gabriel has frequently been portrayed as a messianic, Samson-like figure, Egerton shows that he was a literate and highly skilled blacksmith whose primary goal was to destroy the economic hegemony of the 'merchants, ' the only whites he ever identified as his enemies. According to Egerton, the social, political, and economic disorder of the Revolutionary era weakened some of the harsh controls that held slavery in place during colonial times. Emboldened by these conditions, a small number of literate slaves--most of them highly skilled artisans--planned an armed insurrection aimed at destroying slavery in Virginia. The intricate scheme failed, as did the Easter Plot that stemmed from it, and Gabriel and many of his followers were hanged. By placing the revolts within the broader context of the volatile political currents of the day, Egerton challenges the conventional understanding of race, class, and politics in the early days of the American republic.

Appendix 1 Gabriel’s Religion

Of all the myths and legends surrounding the events of the summer of 1800, surely the most durable is the idea that Gabriel was a messianic figure, an early national Nat Turner who wore his hair long in imitation of his hero, Samson. Perhaps Gabriel’s biblical name has given longevity to the idea. Perhaps the myth is fueled by the historical knowledge that radical Christianity has always carried an implicit message of earthly equality and the understanding that the Virginia countryside of 1800 was deep in the midst of religious fervor. Perhaps also, the legend has been sustained by the knowledge that Gabriel recruited after Sunday “preachings”—although the fact that he also searched for followers after funerals and barbecues has not given rise to the tale that the black revolutionary was an undertaker or a caterer.

Compelling logic there may be for such a view, but the simple fact is that it is wholly untrue. Evidence does exist that Gabriel and his brother Martin were familiar with both the Bible and the evangelical brand of Christianity practiced by the Baptists and the Methodists. Gabriel’s ability to obtain benefit of clergy in 1799 indicated the capacity to recite a passage from the Bible. But the single reference to religion in the vast trial testimony comes from Martin, not Gabriel. It implies only that like most Virginians, white and black, Martin had a working knowledge of the Bible, and that like most slaves, he was particularly fond of the Old Testament. There is not a single extant primary document that supports the contention that Gabriel was a deeply religious slave or that Martin was a slave preacher. What exists instead is Thomas Henry Prosser’s 1800 description of his twenty-four-year-old property: a tall young man with “short black knotty hair.”¹

The Samson myth is of uncertain origin. Three scholars writing in the mid- to late nineteenth century—Robert R. Howison, Joshua Coffin, and Thomas W. Higginson—made no mention of either Gabriel’s religion or a Samson complex.² But in the last decades of the century Marion Harland published a novel titled Judith: A Chronicle of Old Virginia. Even by the standards of the late 1800s, Judith was an astonishingly racist epic. Perhaps designed to counteract the somewhat more sympathetic view of Gabriel put forth by Coffin and Higginson, Harland made her slave rebel a bit of a religious charlatan: “His hair was long and thick, and had never been cut. He wore it generally in a cue [sic], like a gentleman’s, but this night he let it hang loose on his shoulders to remind his men of Samson’s hair, Vherin his great strength lay.’“³

The first modern scholar to support the myth in print was Joseph C. Carroll in his pioneering (if careless) Slave Insurrections in the United States (1938). Carroll’s Gabriel was “a careful student of the Old Testament, where he believed that he found his own prototype in the picturesque and legendary figure of Samson.” No citation was given for this assertion; perhaps by this time Harland’s fictional embellishment had become a part of the popular historical consciousness.⁴

Since Carroll’s work, which is still in print, the Samson story has appeared in virtually every reference to the conspiracy. It has been repeated by Philip S. Foner, William J. Kimball (twice), Lerone Bennett, Jr., Barbara Clark Smith, George P. Rawick, and Nicholas Halasz. Each writer has added his or her own twist to the legend; Halasz certainly has contributed the most color: “[Gabriel] thought himself a man of mission, put to a hard test by an exacting divinity. He spoke little and his words sounded like paraphrases of the Scriptures.”⁵ In point of fact, Gabriel’s words—peppered as they were with references to merchants and property—sounded like no such thing. Yet the more the story was repeated, the more there existed works for still other unsuspecting scholars to build upon.

A handful of more cautious historians, however, have carried on the substance of the story while dropping its more dramatic elements. In Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, Eugene D. Genovese mentions only that Gabriel “relied on Christian preaching but stressed secular themes,” a careful pronouncement that does not go far beyond the primary sources. The same author’s important From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World drops even this minor reference to Gabriel’s faith. Equally reserved are Winthrop D. Jordan and Albert J. Raboteau. The former relishes the “compelling irony [that] some of the slaves seem to have been influenced by Christian training,” while the latter merely notes that Gabriel recruited at prayer meetings. (Raboteau does, however, repeat the fiction that Martin was a plantation preacher.)⁶ No historian, of course, can ever check every primary source. One naturally tends to trust in the accuracy of previously published works, which makes the healthy skepticism of Genovese and Jordan all the more admirable.

Less admirable, but more curious, is the rise of a second religious corollary to the Samson myth, what may be called the Moses myth. The Samson of legend was an Israelite warrior, but unlike Moses he did not lead his people out of bondage. Still, the Gabriel described by Harvey Wish in a 1937 article was inspired by “the emancipation of the ancient Israelites from Egypt.” Joanne Grant made much the same point in 1968 in her Black Protest: History, Documents, and Analysis. The most highly developed version of this twist appears in John W. Blassingame’s The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. This Gabriel inspired “the faint-hearted with apocalyptic visions from the Scriptures of God delivering the Israelites from the hands of their oppressors.” In an example of how ingrained the religious myth has become, Blassingame cites only Higginson, who made no mention of Gabriel’s religion.⁷

In recent years several scholars have returned to the original sources, and so the image of the messianic Gabriel does not grace the pages of two excellent monographs: Gerald (Michael) W. Mullin’s Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (1972) and Philip J. Schwarz’s Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Law of Virginia, 1705–1865 (1988).⁸ Neither, however, explicitly denounced the myth, and so it has not vanished yet. Mechal Sobel takes Mullin to task in Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith, 2d ed. (1988) for deemphasizing the role of religion in Gabriel’s plot. Program notes to a 1987 Smithsonian Institution symposium, “Race and Revolution: African-Americans, 1770–1830,” describe Gabriel as a “deeply religious slave.” The revised edition of Sidney and Emma Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution (1989), refers to the rebel leader as a preacher. Elliott J. Gorn, Constructing the American Past: A Source Book of a People’s History (1991), commits the same error. In all three cases the only source cited is Mullin.⁹

Appendix 2 The Frenchmen

Historians who are determined to uphold the myth of Gabriel as a religious zealot are equally determined to characterize as myth one story here described as fact: the involvement of two white Europeans known to the slaves as the Frenchmen. In a critical way, the legend of Gabriel’s religion and the story he told of white men who would aid in the uprising are interlocking. If Gabriel is viewed as an unsophisticated preacher whose power emanated from his shaggy locks, it is easy to believe that his claims of aid from two white radicals, one of them knowledgeable in soldiering, was nothing but an irrational dream. But if Gabriel is understood to be a literate artisan whose breadth of vision was truly international and whose pragmatic decisions were based upon information drawn from the urban press, the claim is not so easily dismissed. Scholars who accept the Samson myth as fact, however, naturally tend to brush aside the factual story of the two Europeans as myth, discounting with it a great deal of supporting evidence.

To deny the story is also to patronize the conspirators, for one must conclude that these were foolish men who believed outlandish tales. But the list of prominent scholars who have done so is surprisingly long. William Joel Ernst, in his 1968 master’s thesis, “Gabriel’s Revolt: Black Freedom, White Fear,” explicitly denounces the story, as do Harry Ammon, Barbara Clark Smith, Richard R. Beeman, and, inexplicably, Gerald (Michael) W. Mullin. Herbert Aptheker argues that the “alleged implication of two Frenchmen in the Gabriel Plot [was used] to embarrass the Republicans in the political campaign of 1800.” The fact, however, that the Federalists tried to use the information hardly makes it false in itself.¹

Only a very few writers have been willing to take the conspirators at their word. James H. Johnston, in a 1931 essay, accepted the slaves’ testimony at face value and supported their claims of white involvement. Philip J. Schwarz agrees that the story might be true: “Gabriel and his followers perhaps relied on at least one Frenchman for military advice.” Arna Bontemps’s 1936 novel, Black Thunder: Gabriel’s Revolt Virginia 1800, which was loosely based on trial testimony, depicts Frenchmen “M. Creuzot” and “Alexander Biddenhurst” as being on the periphery of the conspiracy.²

The evidence relating to the two men is circumstantial yet compelling. Almost all of the insurgents, even those outside of Richmond, knew of the two men, although only the rebel leadership knew who they were. To discount the story as nonsense is therefore to discount the nearly unanimous testimony of the slaves. Jack Ditcher, for example, told Ben “that two White Frenchmen” were deeply involved in “the Insurrection.” Wisely, he refused to divulge their names. On the night the conspiracy collapsed, a Petersburg slave informed his owner, Benjamin Harrison, that “two white men” were “concerned” in the aborted rising.³

It is even possible to piece together a picture of the two men. Gabriel told more than a few of his followers that “a man from Caroline” County who had fought on the American side during the Revolution was to meet him at Brook Bridge on the night of the assault and help to organize the men. Several slaves informed William Young’s Gilbert that the man in question was Charles Quersey, who had lived in Caroline with Francis Corbin two years earlier. Quersey himself previously told Gilbert, who at the time was hired out in Caroline, that “he would help them & shew them how to fight,” and several conspirators now observed that Quersey and another white man were “very active” in “this late Business” in Norfolk.⁴

Unfortunately, the mysterious Quersey, never having become a property owner, remains a shadowy figure in the public records. But Francis Corbin, with whom the slaves insisted he had lived, is not. County records indicate that at the time Quersey was said to have been living with Corbin, the Virginian did indeed rent a room to an unidentified adult white male.⁵

Charles Quersey’s name, however, was given in oral testimony, and neither white nor black Virginians were particularly adept at pronouncing or spelling French names. (Perhaps the correct spelling was “Quercy,” taken from the French town of the same name.) The imprecision in spelling thus provides a number of potential suspects. A Charles Quary lived in Hanover County at the turn of the century. But Quary appears in the Hanover tax records every year from 1788 to 1802. He could not, therefore, have been living in Caroline with Francis Corbin when Gilbert said he was.⁶

A Guillaume Querenet was an engineer with the French army at the siege of Yorktown, but his first name varies too greatly from “Charles” for him to be a likely candidate.⁷ Equally unlikely—even impossible—is Alexander Quesnay. The grandson of the celebrated physiocrat Francois Quesnay, Alexander arrived in Philadelphia in 1780. He tried his hand at teaching but enrolled few pupils. He moved his failing academy first to New York and then, in early 1786, to Richmond.⁸ But success eluded him in Virginia as well, and in December 1786 he sailed for home. Quesnay died in 1820 without ever returning to America.⁹ No other name found in the public record comes close. Surely the simple answer is the best: the man’s name was Charles Quersey, and he was one of the many French soldiers who landed in the Chesapeake with Rochambeau’s army and remained in the region but lived on the margins of society.

The second Frenchman, Alexander Beddenhurst, remains equally shadowy, yet here as well can be seen the outline of a man far too substantial to be the figment of so many slaves’ imaginations. As noted in the text, Beddenhurst was probably not French at all but had arrived in Virginia with the German-speaking Fourth Regiment under the Duke of Deux-Ponts.¹⁰ According to an anonymous correspondent for the Fredericksburg Virginia Herald, John Scott, a Petersburg rebel, even had a Philadelphia address for Beddenhurst: “the corner house of Coats’ Alley.” This tiny street appears as a line, with no name given, on a contemporary street map. Therefore Scott could not have designated the street by randomly picking a name from a Philadelphia map; he must have gotten the address elsewhere.¹¹

The simple address captured with Scott neglected to mention...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Gabriel’s Rebellion
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• I Richmond 1800
• II Halifax 1802
• Appendix 1 Gabriel’s Religion
• Appendix 2 The Frenchmen
• Appendix 3 Virginia Slaves Executed in 1800 and 1802
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index