Changes

Slave revolts continued into the nineteenth century as the slave regime intensified after the establishment of the United States, founded on a constitution that protected that regime. Though gradual emancipation laws transformed the experience in the North, slavery actually expanded in the South and West. In 1800, a major conspiracy exemplified these changes. In Richmond, Virginia, a city that employed enslaved Africans as laborers, a conspiracy led by Gabriel Prosser sought to undermine slavery in that state.  Virginia had experienced the desiccation of the soil of the region and thus had a double problem: the declining profits of tobacco production and an unfree labor force with no work. The solution of employing them has hired hands almost proved fatal to the regime as this was the base from which Prosser recruited his fellow revolutionaries. Prosser had his compatriots were either hanged or imprisoned, once the plans for the revolt were foiled, but this event led to what would become the domestic slave trade as well as the attempt to curtail the movements of enslaved Africans in Virginia.