From Rebellion to Revolution

Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World

Eugene D. Genovese

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 1992
• ISBN:
  9780807148136
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In perhaps his most provocative book Eugene Genovese examines the slave revolts of the New World and places them in the context of modern world history. By studying the conditions that favored these revolts and the history of slave guerrilla warfare throughout the western hemisphere, he connects the ideology of the revolts to that of the great revolutionary movements of the late eighteenth century.
Genovese argues compellingly that the slave revolts of the New World shaped the democratic character of contemporary European struggles just as forcefully as European struggles influenced New World rebellion. The revolts, however, had a different purpose before as well as after the era of the French Revolution. Before, their goals were restoration of African-type village communities and local autonomy; after, they merged with larger national and international revolutionary movements and had profound effect on the shaping of modern world politics.
Toussaint L'Ouverture's brilliant leadership of the successful slave revolt in Saint-Dominique constitutes, for Genovese, a turning point in the history of slave revolts, and, indeed, in the history of the human spirit. By claiming for his enslaved brothers and sisters the same right to human dignity that the French bourgeoisie claimed for itself, Toussiant began the process by which slave uprisings changed from secessionist rebellions to revolutionary demands for liberty, equality, and justice.
Those who have taken issue with Genovesse before will find little in From Rebellion to Revolution to change their minds. The book is sure to be widely read, hotly debated, and a major influence on the way future historians view slavery.

ONE

Slave Revolts
in Hemispheric
Perspective

The deceptively simple question “What was a slave revolt?” has one compelling answer: a struggle for freedom. But it has other answers that point toward an understanding of the special character of particular revolts and of the historical process within which the revolts occurred. Resistance of one or another type, visibility, and magnitude marked slavery elsewhere. But everywhere slaves who took the insurrectionary road had to display extraordinary heroism in the face of difficulties—extraordinary even by revolutionary standards. Nothing could be more naive—or arrogant—than to ask why a Nat Turner did not appear on every plantation in the South, as if, from the comfort of our living rooms, we have a right to tell others, and retrospectively at that, when, how, and why to risk their lives and those of their loved ones. As the odds and circumstances become clearer, there is less difficulty in understanding the apparent infrequency of slave revolts throughout history and less difficulty in appreciating the extent of the rebels’ courage and resourcefulness and the magnitude of their impact on world history.

The revolts of black slaves in the modern world had a special character and historical significance, for they occurred within a worldwide capitalist mode of production. Accordingly, they contributed toward the radical though still bourgeois movement for freedom, equality, and democracy, while they foreshadowed the movement against capitalism itself. That foreshadowing, however, necessarily remained an immanent tendency; it could not manifest itself as such in an epoch in which a socialist alternative had not yet matured. Hence, the revolts must be understood primarily as part of the most radical wing of the struggle for a democracy that had not yet lost its bourgeois moorings.

The slave systems of the New World arose from a conjuncture of international and regional developments, themselves generated primarily by the exigencies of the world market. But some systems, most notably the Iberian, had roots in seigneurial metropolises, whereas others, most notably the English, had roots in the worlds most advanced bourgeois metropolis. Regionally, conditions varied enormously. Paradoxically, the English colonies of North America generated the slave system in which the master-slave relationship most profoundly affected regional history, for there the slaveholders most closely approximated a class-for-itself with considerable political power and autonomous aspirations. The English colonies in the Caribbean, in contrast, generated the slave system most thoroughly bourgeois and subservient to world capitalism. Having discussed these problems elsewhere,* I shall here restrict myself to the point most directly relevant to the revolts in the New World as a whole: Whatever else may be said of the revolts, they everywhere formed part of the political opposition to European capitalism’s bloody conquest of the world and attendant subjugation of the colored peoples.

By the end of the eighteenth century, the historical content of the slave revolts shifted decisively from attempts to secure freedom from slavery to attempts to overthrow slavery as a social system. The great black revolution in Saint-Domingue marked the turning point. To understand this epoch-making shift, the revolts in the United States, or in any other country, must be viewed in a hemispheric, indeed world, context. I hope, however, that no one commits the mechanistic error of reading the argument to mean that no hints of the bourgeois-democratic character of the post-Haitian slave revolts appeared prior to the late 1790s or that no revolts of a primarily pre-Haitian character appeared afterwards. I hope, too, that no one interprets the argument for a decisive ideological shift to mean that it came clean, fully conscious, or without innumerable contradictions. A full history of the revolts would have to explore those problems in depth; here, we shall have to settle for a delineation of contours.

Many revolts began as more or less spontaneous acts of desperation against extreme severity, hunger, sudden withdrawal of privileges, or other local or immediate conditions. These sometimes but not often passed into warfare against particular injustices even as defined by the customary arrangements of slavery. Other revolts, as well as guerrilla wars waged by maroons (i.e., groups of runaway slaves) aimed at withdrawing from slave society in an attempt to resurrect an archaic social order often perceived as traditionally African but invariably a distinct Afro-American creation. There appeared, especially during the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, revolts aimed at overthrowing slavery as a social system—a magnificent object unknown to the slaves of the ancient world—and at winning for black peoples a place in the modern system of nation-states. The nineteenth-century revolts in the Old South formed part of this epoch-making transformation in the relations of class and race in the Western Hemisphere.

The most important slave revolts in the English-speaking North American states occurred in New York City in 1712; at Stono, South Carolina in 1739; in southern Louisiana in 1811; and in Southampton County, Virginia under Nat Turner in 1831. To them might be added the conspiracy at Point Coupee, Louisiana, in 1795, before the cession of the colony to the United States, and the conspiracies of Gabriel Prosser in Richmond, Virginia, in 1800 and of Denmark Vesey in Charleston, South Carolina in 1822. The brutally suppressed conspiracy of 1741 in New York City, however, seems largely to have been a figment of white hysteria, although some room for doubt remains. Other actions, realized and aborted, took place within narrow limits and engaged small numbers. Most states smashed plots, real and imagined, and periodically quaked with fear without suffering substantial revolts. The authorities may have suppressed evidence of some revolts, but they could hardly have done so successfully if they had had to contend with significant numbers or a large area.

The slaves of the Old South had a history radically different in certain essential respects from that of the slaves of the Caribbean islands and South America. The slave regime in the United States entered its great period of territorial, economic, and demographic expansion after the slave trade had closed; the prospect of windfall profits emerged at the very moment it became necessary to improve the material conditions of slave life in order to guarantee an adequate rate of reproduction. This conjuncture proved decisive to the flowering of paternalism and for the process within which the slaves increasingly were led to an accommodation with the regime, albeit a contradictory and violent accommodation.

Paternalism had taken root in Maryland and Virginia even before the closing of the slave trade had driven up slave prices and compelled the owners to concern themselves with the minimal welfare of their slaves. The eighteenth-century depression in the tobacco market squeezed the slaveholders, who increasingly found slave prices driven up by the more favorable conditions in the sugar market. Hence, economic conditions during the eighteenth century produced, prematurely as it were, an effect in the tobacco areas of a kind that would become general in the South once the international slave trade closed. The tobacco planters could make the psychological and political adjustment much more easily than the sugar planters of the islands could ever do, for they lived on their plantations in intimate contact with their slaves. As the proportion of Creole slaves to African-born increased and the cultural distance between masters and slaves narrowed, the foundations of a regional paternalism grew progressively stronger. Yet, as the experience of the Brazilian Northeast shows, the ameliorative tendency in the paternalism of a resident slaveholding class, even one that inherited a seigneurial ethos from the Old World, could be offset by the economic pressures for increased exploitation generated by an open slave trade and the attendant low cost of labor.

The development of an organic master-slave relationship within the web of paternalism does not alone or even primarily account for the low incidence of slave revolts during the nineteenth century. Much less does it prove the slaves infantilized or docile. Without recourse to any such speculative psychologizing, it can be explained by a consideration of the specific conditions that encouraged slave revolt in the Caribbean islands and Brazil but were largely lacking in the United States. The development of paternalism in the Old South— that is, the development of a sense of reciprocal rights and duties between masters and slaves—implied considerable living space within which the slaves could create stable families, develop a rich spiritual community, and attain a measure of physical comfort. As they came to view revolt, under the specific conditions of life in the Old South, as suicidal, they centered their efforts on forms of resistance appropriate to their survival as a people even as slaves.

In no sense did that decision imply acceptance of slavery. The Spirituals and much other evidence attest to the slaves’ deep longing for freedom. Nor did it guarantee peaceful relations with their masters and with whites generally. Both violent and nonviolent resistance to injustice marked every day of the slave regime. And when, as in some noteworthy cases, slaves aboard ships in the domestic slave trade rebelled and steered for Haiti or for the protection of the British, they demonstrated that the appearance of favorable conditions and a genuine chance of success could trigger bold action. But, resistance and violence in daily affairs usually represented the settling of personal or local scores rather than a collective attempt to overthrow an overwhelming white power.

The religion the slaves fashioned for themselves fully revealed these contradictions. Led by their own black preachers and exhorters, the slaves did not simply imbibe white Christianity. They blended it with their own folk religion, partly African in origin, and thus created a message of love and mutual support, of their own worth as black people, and of their ultimate deliverance from bondage. Their Christianity served as a bulwark against the dehumanization inherent in slavery. But increasingly, black preachers understood, especially after the failure of Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner, that revolt would be suicidal, and, therefore, with a few important exceptions, they counseled a defensive strategy of survival. Thus, the social content of black religion became circumscribed by wider political realities, which it then reinforced. As the moral content of the religion emerged to justify accommodation and compromise as a properly Christian response, it simultaneously drew the teeth of political messianism and revolutionary millenialism. The development of black Christianity did not arise mechanically from the failure of slave revolts; nor can the failure of slave revolts be attributed to black Christianity.* Each arose within the totality of social relations and steadily reinforced the other.

Were the slaves in the United States unwilling or simply unable to rise in large numbers? The question ultimately collapses into absurdity. If a people, over a protracted period, finds the odds against insurrection not merely long but virtually certain, then it will choose not to try. To some extent this reaction represents decreasing self-confidence and increasing fear, but it also represents a conscious effort to develop an alternative strategy for survival.

The slaves of the Old South never gave up their expectation of deliverance and did not expect it to be handed to them without effort of their own. But the strategy for survival as a people, implicit in their magnificent religion and day-today resistance-in-submission to what could not be avoided, claimed its own price. The religiously grounded ideology of accommodation, understood as itself a vital form of resistance to dehumanization and to enslavement, acted as a powerful brake on the revolutionary impulse, to which it posed a realistic alternative.

The slaves’ religion muted but by no means wholly repudiated the revolutionary message in the prophetic tradition. The strategy of accommodation counseled patience and realism but did not destroy the possibilities for revolutionary daring. The slaves’ ideology steadily reduced the probability of revolt; it did not guarantee that a sudden main chance could not be seized. Thus, the slaveholders’ constant fear of a people who rose rarely and in small numbers stemmed from a hard-headed ruling-class realism of their own.

General risings of thousands, such as those in Jamaica, Demerara, and Saint-Domingue, or even of hundreds such as those in many countries, remained a possibility, which, however slim, rendered the hopes of a Gabriel Prosser, a Denmark Vesey, or a Nat Turner rational. Turner did not succeed in raising the countryside en masse, but he might have, had he sustained his pilot effort even for a few weeks or escaped to forge a guerrilla base in the interior. Gabriel Prosser’s supposed thousand followers probably never existed, but the legend itself may well have grown out of a plausible expectation.

The leaders of the conspiracy of 1822 in Charleston—“the most elaborate insurrectionary plot ever formed by American slaves,” in the sober judgment of Thomas Wentworth Higginson—claimed to have enlisted thousands of slaves in city and country, and some historians have devoutly wished to believe them. But what should these tough rebels have said? “Well, chaps, all we have is a cadre of a few dozen, if that many, but we know in our hearts that the masses will follow us.” That message would hardly have sounded a certain trumpet to people who properly assessed the strength of the white apparatus. Vesey, an uncommonly able and sophisticated man, understood that the more people he had to confide in, the greater the danger of betrayal; and Gabriel Prosser before him and Nat Turner afterwards understood too. Initially, Vesey needed captains more than soldiers, for circumstances did not permit his training a large army. Charleston, a beautiful, charming—and well disciplined—city, did not present an ideal place to drill rebel troops. The captains would have to raise the army as they marched.

Vesey estimated, in effect, that the slaves, despite everything, would rise once confronted with evidence of success in a war in which they would have to choose sides. Nothing in the history of the Old South proves that estimate unsound —only painfully difficult to realize. Good sense, then, called for working with a few people who would be capable of quick large-scale recruiting once the war had begun. Their chances depended on their prestige among the slaves, on their prior effort to stir up support without saying too much or being too specific, and on the soundness of their evaluation of the popular temper.

And it depended on revolutionary terror.* The recruitment of large numbers could not proceed in the abstract. Slaves, long conditioned to submission and fearful of being slaughtered, had to be made to confront a new reality. Vesey appealed to the words of Jesus: “He that is not with me is against me” (Luke, 11:23). He expected to force his people to choose not between revolution and safety but between revlutionary and counter-revolutionary violence. He reasonably concluded that the slaves, notwithstanding their fears, desired freedom and identified with each other rather than with the whites, and he expected to lead an army of thousands. But, first, he had to seize and secure Charleston with a Gideons army, much as three hundred or so blacks came close to seizing Bahia in 1835, when they too reasonably expected to raise the countryside once they had secured their base.

Vesey’s problem foreshadowed that of national-liberation armies during the twentieth century. How often did we hear during the Algerian War that the Front de Liberation Nation-ale was killing more “innocent” Algerians than it was killing Frenchmen? How often today do we hear the same accusation leveled against the rebels in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia)? And probably it is true. But the accusation comes with ill grace from those whose proudest boast has been that they have succeeded in “pacifying” subject peoples—in breaking their spirit and convincing them that “the smart move” is to “work within the system.” Indeed, this very evidence of pacification then appears in the work of apologists as evidence of contentment and imperialist beneficence: The people know how much better off they are and would live peacefully under our rule if only they were not tormented by outside agitators.

Since the system in question happens to be one of national humiliation and social oppression, it is pointless to berate some people for regarding those who accept such shameful conditions as traitors. Who does not know that the French could not have held Algeria long without the passive assent of thousands of “innocent” Algerians? Or that Smiths regime in Rhodesia would long ago have collapsed were it not for his black troops and politicians?

Those who do not readily blame the collaborators argue that accommodation follows from a realistic appraisal of the relationship of forces, not from moral degeneracy. Very well. But this defense reduces to the proposition that opposition to the oppressor ends in death. If so, revolutionaries who have not lost their senses must conclude that they will have no prospects until the cost of collaboration rises to the level of the cost of rebellion. For only then will people be free to choose sides on grounds of duty. And it serves no purpose to pretend that “innocent”—personally inoffensive and politically neutral—people should be spared. The oppressor needs nothing so much as political neutrality to do business as usual: It is his sine qua non. He who wills liberation in a context that does not permit peaceful change wills revolutionary terror. No slave revolt that hesitated to invoke terror had a chance.

Even a brief review of the general conditions that favored massive revolts and guerrilla warfare suggests the special difficulties which faced the slaves of the Old South. Were a list of those conditions presented without regard for the presumed importance of one relative to the other, it would suggest a higher probability of slave revolt where: (1) the master-slave relationship had developed in the context of absenteeism and depersonalization as well as greater cultural estrangement of whites and blacks; (2) economic distress and famine occurred; (3) slaveholding units approached the average size of one hundred to two hundred slaves, as in the sugar colonies, rather than twenty or so, as in the Old South; (4) the ruling class frequently split either in warfare between slaveholding countries or in bitter struggles within a particular slaveholding country; (5) blacks heavily outnumbered whites; (6) African-born slaves outnumbered those born into American slavery (creoles); (7) the social structure of the slaveholding regime permitted the emergence of an autonomous black leadership; and (8) the geographical, social, and political environment provided terrain and opportunity for the formation of colonies of runaway slaves strong enough to threaten the plantation regime. The list may be extended, refined, and subdivided, but taken together, these conditions spelled one: the military and political balance of power. Slave revolts might anywhere, anytime flare up in response to the central fact of enslavement; no particular provocation or condition was indispensable. But the probabilities for large-scale revolt rested heavily on some combination of these conditions.

Having glanced at the social context here and discussed it at length in Roll, Jordan, Roll, I shall, at the risk of too schematic a presentation, comment on some of the other conditions. Economic distress provoked many big slave revolts in the hemisphere, especially in the Caribbean, where war and inadequate local provisioning often resulted in desperate food shortages and outright starvation. Pronounced hunger, occasioned by years of drought and depression, triggered, for example, the massive rising on St. John in 1733; and in Cuba, writes H. H. S. Aimes, “There has always been a striking coincidence of servile revolts and unrest and the periods of economical depression and political crisis.”

Countless agrarian and urban uprisings throughout the world have grown out of acute hunger and deprivation. Slaves, like other lower classes, normally stirred themselves to revolt slowly and with difficulty. The whip of hunger often rendered them desperate. Some of the greatest revolts, however, came during periods of material improvement, which stimulated expectations. And, although the governor of the Cape Verde Islands once estimated that almost four thousand slaves had died from the effects of drought and famine, no revolt ensued. Even starvation might not be enough.

A general depression in the United States did not have the same effect on slaves that it did in the Caribbean Islands, for a much higher level of self sufficiency provided some insurance against acute food shortages. Depression led weaker slaveholders to try to sell and lease slaves, whose resultant discontent must be taken into account, but even selling and leasing slackened during general economic depression as the demand for labor fell. The food supply remained the critical question. There is no evidence of large-scale or frequent diminution during 1820–1860, the period for which the firmest documentation exists, and little evidence for the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

With or without economic depression, a large concentration of slaves facilitated the organization of revolt. Slaves in the Caribbean and in Brazil lived for the most part on great estates that averaged between one hundred and two hundred slaves. In Venezuela and Colombia the slave revolts occurred in areas of similar concentration or in the mining centers and cities. For example, the gold mining districts along the Cauca River suffered revolts as late as 1842–1843. In the United States half the slaves lived on farms, not plantations, and another quarter lived on plantations of fifty or less. Large units provided a favorable setting within which insurrectionary movements could mature. Cities and mining centers offered some of the same advantages to rebel slaves as did large plantations: Leadership could more easily develop; centers of autonomous culture could more easily emerge; and conditions favorable to personal movement existed. Richard C. Wade, in his attempt to make Denmark Vesey disappear, has argued that the conditions of urban life militated against insurrection. But in the Caribbean, Venezuela, and Brazil, not to mention New York City, urban revolts did occur despite social conditions very much like th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• For Eric Hobsbawm Our Main Man
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• ONE: Slave Revolts In Hemispheric Perspective
• TWO: Black Maroons in War and Peace
• THREE: The Turning Point
• AFTERWORD: “The Flag of Our Country”
• Bibliographical Essay
• Index