Slave Rebellions

6 Key excerpts on "Slave Rebellions"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  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 The result is that historical documents often throw around words such as ‘rebellion’ or ‘revolution’ in casual ways that can be deceptive.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.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Caribbean

  A History of the Region and Its Peoples

  • Stephan Palmié, Francisco A. Scarano, Stephan Palmié, Francisco A. Scarano(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  Other periods saw few or no revolts. Some events seem connected to spikes in the arrivals of Africans, times of warfare, and troop movements, but mechanistic explanations will not wholly account for incidents driven by group psychology and interactions among many individuals. Shifts in composition and goals tended to occur: from events inspired primarily by Africans to events dominated by creoles, from attempts to secure freedom from slavery and restore a lost social order to attempts to overthrow slavery itself, from acts of rage to forms of industrial strife. Such neat descriptions of the transformations are too schematic, but still the revolutionary era marked an important transition. The circulation of revolutionary ideas broadened horizons: some slaves drew inspiration from Haiti while others saw the possibility of sympathy from the emerging antislavery movement. The three great slave revolts in the early 19th-century British Caribbean—Barbados in 1816, Demerara in 1823, and Jamaica in 1831–32—are most notable for their self-restraint and awareness of metropolitan debates. Rebelling against the system from within, the argument goes, caused abolition to be hastened from without. Slave resistance was always more than collective violence. It encompassed flight, sabotage, and individual murders. Most plantations experienced a few desertions each year; arson occurred occasionally; tool-breaking, cruelty to animals, and crop destruction were everyday problems; and every now and again enraged slaves killed overseers or masters. But none of these actions threatened the economic viability of the institution. Furthermore, the cook who poisoned the master’s food had first to get the job. Slaves who plotted in the marketplace had first to produce for the market. The slave who ran away was often the one who possessed a skill, had some mobility, and could perhaps pass as free in town

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  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

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  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

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  A Short History of Transatlantic Slavery

  • Kenneth Morgan(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • I.B. Tauris

    (Publisher)

  4 SLAVE RESISTANCE

  Slaves resisted bondage frequently, as one might expect in a situation where unequal power relationships defined the position of masters and unfree labourers. The harshness and brutality of the slave system on many plantations was bound to lead to slave resistance of one sort or another. Collective revolts were the most dramatic form of resistance, but slaves also challenged their masters through individual acts of defiance. For slaves, unwillingness to perform work adequately, either because their condition stimulated opposition or because they were badly treated, was common. This could be done by working below levels of expected productivity, arriving at work late, failing to complete tasks, breaking tools or sabotaging work routines. Slaves could feign ignorance about learning to use new implements. They could pretend to be careless and sometimes simulated illness. When disenchanted or alienated from their lot, slaves downed tools and stopped work. All these forms of non-violent resistance to slavery interrupted the smooth functioning of the plantation.1

  Opportunities existed to damage a master’s property, to steal food and to interrupt seasonal work routines. Thus sometimes slaves picked tobacco leaves too early, flooded rice fields or stole sugar cane. Disruptions to crop production were a nuisance to planters, but they were to be expected in the circumstances and could usually be contained without serious damage to work regimes. Attacks on the customary rights of slaves could lead to concerted resistance. This happened in Antigua in 1831, when thousands of slaves marched to Government House in St John’s, the island’s capital, and protested against the British government’s attempt to abolish the slaves’ Sunday markets.2 Conversely, slaves could resist passively by refusing to eat rations after they had been punished.

  Sabotage and arson were further tactics that lay at slaves’ disposal to disrupt plantations and attack owners’ properties. They were major weapons used by slaves against oppressive masters.3 Setting fire to houses, torching sugar cane or burning storehouses could often be carried out anonymously and under cover of nightfall. In 1740 over 300 houses were burned in Charleston, South Carolina just a year after the Stono Rebellion alarmed white planters. This outbreak of arson was attributed to slaves. South Carolina’s lawmakers responded with alacrity to the attack by including in the colony’s Negro Act of 1740 execution as the punishment for slaves, free blacks, mulattoes or Indians found guilty of wilfully burning property and crops.4 In New York in 1741 slaves were accused of starting several fires.5 Rumours and incidents of arson played a part in the last major slave revolt before slave emancipation, in Jamaica in the early months of 1832.6 Sabotage by arson frequently occurred in the first half of the nineteenth century in Cuba.7 Arson was a component in nearly all slave revolts even though it was a felony punishable by death.8

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Freedom

  • James Walvin(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Pegasus Books

    (Publisher)

  The massive slave upheavals we find in Brazil and the Caribbean were not repeated in North America, but revolts (and, more common, widespread fear of slave revolts) dotted North American slave history. Slave owners could not shake off the fear that unrest might get out of control. There was Bacon’s rebellion of 1676 in Virginia (when slaves joined forces with indentured white workers), the Stono rebellion in South Carolina in 1739 (with Angolan slaves trying to reach the freedom of Spanish Florida), later the Gabriel rebellion in Virginia in 1800, a rising of some 200 slaves in Louisiana in 1811, and Denmark Vesey’s revolt (1822) in Charleston. Most famous of all perhaps was Nat Turner’s rebellion (in which about eighty rebels were involved and sixty whites killed) in Virginia in 1831. All these revolts led to ferocious retribution on the spot and, after subsequent onesided trials, this was followed by a tightening of local slave laws. Turner’s rebellion was to prove the last major slave revolt in US history, despite the fact that, at the time, slavery was expanding rapidly throughout the cotton belt.

  However we look at North American slave revolts (the numbers of slaves involved, the levels of violence and the scale and intensity of retribution), they are markedly different from events in the Caribbean. In Antigua, the conspiracy of 173 5–6, Tacky’s revolt in Jamaica in 1760, Fédon’s revolt in Grenada in 1795: all involved large numbers of slaves, and desperate and sometimes protracted fighting by colonial forces to suppress the upheavals. All were defeated and all were followed by bloody reprisals – in the field or after legal hearings (where accused slaves stood no realistic chance of receiving a fair hearing). Time and again, dozens of slaves were executed, often after protracted torture (being broken on the wheel, for example). And, again, severed heads and body parts were liberally distributed for other enslaved people to witness. The lucky slaves caught up in failed revolts were those transported to remote colonies and regions. The conclusion seemed clear: revolt could lead only to prolonged suffering and death. Planters and colonial officials seemed to relish the barbaric rituals played out in the aftermath of a slave revolt, but, in fact, their reprisals were a reflection of their deep-seated fears about the slaves. They also suggest a paucity of ideas about how to cope with slave unrest.

  Slaves’ violent reactions were, then, the extreme element of slave defiance – and that defiance was an integral aspect of slave life in the Americas. Conceived in the violence done to millions of Africans during their enslavement and transportation, it was nurtured and shaped in the hardships of daily life across the Americas. The determination to cope with the injustices of bondage spawned a multitude of slave responses, from the simplest of personal insolence and truculence through to the extremes of collective violence. But it had to be tempered by the stark understanding of what happened to the slave who crossed the line; who reared up in anger – and failed.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book