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[[File:Maroon.jpg|thumbnail|left|300px|"Le Negre Marron" Statue In Haiti, photo by Jerome Handler]]
Slavery represented the opposite of freedom. In the period of human history variously known as the modern era or the Age of Discovery, this form of unfree labor would mark the landscape in critical ways. It is believed that slavery not only provided the economic foundations of the modern world, it helped establish the limits of freedom. In other words, slavery was required to remind citizens what freedom actually meant. __NOTOC__
====The Practice of Marronage====
In order to fully appreciate the idea of revolt among enslaved Africans in the United States, we must first understand the practice of marronage. Marronage encompassed the idea of creating levels of separation from the slave society and the creation of alternative modes of living. In order to accomplish the creation of these societies, enslaved Africans had to run away—hence the term, “marronage,” an English derivation of the Spanish term for runaway cattle, cimarrones. In creating alternative communities in the mountains and in the swamps of the New World, enslaved Africans practiced freedom on their own terms, liquidating the relationships of master-slave that defined their existence in the world of the enslavers. Historian Robin D.G. Kelley calls this “the first principle of African resistance.”<ref>Robin D.G. Kelley, "Do Black Lives Matter?," https://vimeo.com/116111740</ref> It represented the most immediate and available form of recreating the life interrupted by the experience of the Middle Passage and chattel slavery. Flight was not easy, but it perfectly captured the intent behind Black resistance to slavery: to live on one’s own terms.
====The Colonial Period====
During the Revolutionary War, enslaved Africans “revolted” by siding with the British against their masters. Many of them were induced to “betray” the Patriots by promises of freedom that were fulfilled by their removal to regions like Nova Scotia, Sierra Leone, and, Trinidad and Tobago.
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==== The Gabriel Prosser Conspiracy ====
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.
==== The Denmark Vesey Conspiracy ====
[[File:Vesey.jpg|thumbnail|200px|left|Denmark Vesey Statue in South Carolina]]
By 1822, the international dimensions of slave revolt were coming into the view. The United States was joined by another new country, built on revolutionary principles: Haiti. Itself a product of a slave revolt, Haiti, recognized the primacy of Black people as free citizens. It was a country premised on the principles of marronage. In Charleston, many of the enslaved Africans had heard of these events, and one who had self-emancipated himself with lottery winnings, Denmark Vesey, led a revolt that had as its aims the destruction of the city and the relocation of Black people to Haiti.
Eleven years prior, the largest revolt, known as the German Coast Uprising, involving perhaps five hundred enslaved Africans took place in Louisiana. Though this revolt is becoming more and more known, it long suffered from historical silence. It is important, however, because it demonstrated an international consciousness as well.
==== Nat Turner's Rebellion ====
[[File:Natturner.jpg|thumbnail|left|300px|Nat Turner]]
The most well-known of all the antebellum revolts is Nat Turner’s Rebellion in Southhampton, County, Virginia. Because of the severity of the revolt as well as the taking down of Turner’s Confessions, this event often stands in as if it were the only revolt that occurred. Nevertheless, Turner and his band were responsible for approximately sixty deaths of whites in the region—a larger number when we consider the casualties of all other revolts. The roving band was subdued after two days and Turner was subsequently captured, jailed and hanged. Beyond that, Turner’s revolt reveals a number of critical historical insights. Firstly, the figure of Turner himself is quite interesting as he was saw his work as divinely inspired. It was a clear embrace of the spiritual implications of slavery and freedom. Secondly, the fact that slavery had so intensified that a revolt of this scale was saw as necessary by large segments of the Black community. Thirdly, it calls into question the nature of revolutionary violence. Whites remembered the revolt because of its brutal nature, while Blacks saw this sort of violence as necessary to undermine and undo an inherently violent system.
The questions raised by Nat Turner’s revolt energized the conversations that were being held about resistance in the abolitionist community. Free Blacks participated in these conventions where the questions was raised and debated with the likes of David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, and Frederick Douglass. As these debates occurred, resistance continued on the ground in the South in big and small ways, leading to the repressive measures that outlawed reading and gathering for unsupervised meetings. Ultimately, as the nation debated the future of slavery, white abolitionists like John Brown came to decide that slavery had to be destroyed by force. In 1859, he led his infamous raid on Harper’s Ferry with the plan to arm and organize enslaved Africans and create a new country. Though it was destroyed by the U.S. Army, Brown’s raid and its connections to enslaved Africans, indicated that this question was likely not going to be resolved by debate and compromise. Two years later, the United States was at war with itself over that very issue.
====Bibliography====
Aptheker, Herbert. ''[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0717806057/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0717806057&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=4897487de0288081715e63265996a90f American Negro Slave Revolts]'' New York: International Publishers, 1983. Diouf, Sylviane. ''[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0814760287/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0814760287&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=5e24bdc099d8834eb404e8d9c3ed6e0b Slavery's Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons]'' New York: New York University Press, 2014.