Source: Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1981): 1-50.

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 world's 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 slaveholder 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, ¹ 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By the end of the eighteenth century, the historical content of the slave revolts shifted decisively from attempts to secure freedom from slavery to attempts to overthrow slavery as a social system.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 I790s 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; 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, real 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.² 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 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.³ 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, II: 23). He expected to force his people to choose not between revolution and safety but between revolutionary 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 Gideon's 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 Nationale 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 Smith's 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 slave-holding 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 senile 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 the 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 of-fered 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 those of the cities of the Old South. Revolts occurred in both town and country; on the whole, urban centers, like great plantation districts, offered especially favorable conditions as well as special dangers.

The countries of the New World in which slave revolts occurred most frequently and with greatest intensity had a high ratio of blacks to whites and slave to free. In British Guiana slaves constituted 80 percent of the population and outnumbered whites by between twenty and thirty to one. Jamaica, Saint-Domingue, and much of the Caribbean had huge black majorities, often more than 80 percent, and even in Brazil which had a large mestiço population, blacks heavily outnumbered whites from the early days of the slave regime. As Captain Stedman wrote after his experience in Surinam, "Every part of the world where domestic slavery is established, may be occasionally liable to insurrection and disquiet, more especially where the slaves constitute the majority of the inhabitants."

In the most important of slaveholding countries, the southern United States, blacks remained a minority except in restricted areas. They constituted a majority only in South Carolina and Mississippi, where their proportion ranged from 55 to 57 percent. The proportion of slaves in principal states in 1860 was: Louisiana, 47 percent; Alabama, 45 percent; Georgia, 44 percent; Virginia, 31 percent; Tennessee, 25 percent; Kentucky, 20 percent. The southern slaveholders read the history of the Caribbean correctly and moved to end the African slave trade. State governments periodically debated the significance of white-black ratios in order to reassure themselves against a new imbalance. In the 1830s, Dr. J. W. Monette of Mississippi offered the conventional wisdom of his class, which for once had some merit, when he noted that since blacks outnumbered whites only in two states the regime need not fear a general rising.

The slaves required a heavy numerical preponderance to offset the enormous military advantages concentrated in white hands. The slaves in Jamaica, Saint-Domingue, the Guianas, and Cuba, at decisive moments, could feel their strength; the slaves in the United States could not help feel their weakness. As Bennett Wall has emphasized, the constant westward movement inhibited, although it certainly did not prevent, the consolidation of those intimate ties which conspiracies thrive on. Suspect trouble-makers could be sold out of the area with little difficulty, and, in any case, a reshuffling of local personnel was constantly taking place. Wall has also emphasized another geographic influence: Southern slaves were not concentrated in large numbers except in the sugar and rice districts, and even there the plantations were sufficiently spread out and the police apparatus sufficiently strong to discourage attempts at collective resistance.

The slaves faced this white majority virtually unarmed. They did have access to axes and other crude weapons; Those who worked in the sugar fields, for example, carried knives large enough to decapitate a man with one strong blow. During the eighteenth century Landon Carter of Virginia noted in passing that every slave in the tobacco fields carried a knife of some kind for his work. More slaves knew how to use firearms than the law allowed, for planters often gave trusted slaves permission to hunt with guns; and being trusted did not assure loyalty during a rising. Some slaves carried rifles while standing plantation guard, and others surreptitiously obtained access to guns and learned their use. A former slave interviewed for the Fisk University Slave Narrative Collection claimed: "Culled folks been had guns all their life. They kept them hid." In apparent agreement, Colonel Higginson thought that most of the former slaves who joined his regiment had had some experience with firearms. And recent archeological excavations of slave quarters provide new evidence.

The slaveholders had nevertheless not deceived themselves when they minimized the danger of revolt on grounds of insufficient arms. In any given area only a few slaves would have experience with firearms and even fewer with their tactical uses. Thus, John Brown wisely planned to distribute pikes rather than rifles to those slaves who might join him. As a leading Mississippian remarked during the 1830s, European peasants had much greater experience with firearms than southern slaves did, and yet they could usually be over-awed by disciplined military units.

Even with some guns, the slaves faced overwhelming odds The whites who filled the interstices of the plantation districts, the up country, and the back country raised their sons to shoot. Sharpshooting and extraordinary feats with arms became elementary marks of manhood. The white population constituted one great militia-fully and even extravagantly armed, tough and resourceful, and capable of all the savagery that racism can instill. In South America, in contrast, mercenaries filled the militias and often did little more than they had to.

The southern militia and armed settlers had, moreover, a powerful reserve in the federal army, rarely summoned to put down slave revolts but psychologically invaluable to the bolstering of slaveholder spirits and the dampening of slave hopes. Masters and slaves both knew that formidable military garrisons stood ready to reinforce wavering slaveholder militias. Although the troops under Wade Hampton entered the slave rebellion of 1811 in Louisiana only after the militia had restored order, the firmness and promptness of their movement reassured the slaveholders for the future and could not have escaped the notice of the slaves. After the Vesey crisis, Charlestonians pointedly congratulated themselves on the assurances of federal support if needed. The federal response to Nat Turner and John Brown in Virginia underscored the point. With a white majority surrounding even the areas of black concentration, the slaveholders had a strong hand to begin with, but, in addition, they knew, and their slaves knew, that the armed might of the United States stood in ready reserve.

The Gabriel Prossers and Nat Turners of the South, like rebel leaders in countries with more favorable conditions, confronted other problems almost as formidable. However much solidarity and mutual support the slaves demonstrated, their circumstances left much room for informers, spies, and traitors. In any delicate situation one might be enough. Thus, Colonel Higginson explained the infrequency of slave revolts in the South by noting that the blacks saw all the power in white hands. He added, "They had no knowledge, no money, no arms, no drill, no organization-above all no mutual confidence. It was the tradition among them that all insurrections were always betrayed by somebody." During the Nat Turner revolt some slaves even sided with their masters, as some slaves did during many of the revolts throughout the hemisphere. But every popular movement swarms with traitors, spies, cowards, and agents-provocateurs, so that dealing with them becomes the first test of resourcefulness for a rebel leadership. The context remains at issue. Inadequacy of preparation and execution--of organization--accounted for the failure of some of the most serious slave revolts in the Americas.

The enormous advantage of maroon leaders over slave revolt leaders rested here: Whereas with a little luck maroon leaders could maneuver, break off combat, survive defeats and learn from mistakes, slave revolt leaders normally had to stake everything on a single stroke, prepared without prior experience among people who knew they would be risking their lives on a plunge into the unknown. Thus when Charles L. Redmond advocated encouragement to slave revolt in 1858, Josiah Henson heatedly countered that he would do everything in his power to keep three or four thousand of his people from getting killed in a hopeless cause.

Cultural influences also shaped the military relationships Throughout the hemisphere newly arrived Africans mounted the most dramatic insurrectionary thrusts. Creole slaves sometimes found themselves forced to side with their masters against rebellious Africans in Brazil and the Caribbean. The great revolution in Saint-Domingue was carried out by a slave population most of which, in the words of the rebel leaders, "do not know two words of French"; the Bahia risings of 1807-1835 had an unmistakable African base; and the overwhelming majority of the revolts in the Caribbean before 1800--perhaps all the important ones--were carried out by Africans who were, or claimed to be, Akan. The creoles made a vital contribution to the history of slave revolts, the content of which they transformed decisively; but, with minor qualifications, their moment did not come until the end of the eighteenth century.

The Africans who entered the Atlantic trade as slaves may have included some common "criminals" in their own countries, for the African chiefs used the trade to get rid of antisocial and disorderly elements. But they included many ordinary people labeled "criminals" in order to justify their sale and some political rebels who had participated in revolts and maroon activity while still in Africa. The Atlantic trade did sweep up common thugs and trouble-makers, but also heroic rebels against oppression with prior experience in the organization of militant resistance to despotic authority.

In the United States the slave trade closed on the eve of the great expansion of the slave regime, so that a creole slave force of unparalleled proportions arose during the nineteenth century. The trade to the British Caribbean closed about the same time, but emancipation itself followed after a quarter century of political struggle in England and declining economic prospects in the colonies. Reflecting upon the greater incidence of slave revolt during the eighteenth century than during the nineteenth and on the part played by Africans, W. E. B. DuBois wrote in The Suppression of the African Slave Trade:

The rough and brutal character of the time and place was partly responsible for this, but a more decisive reason lay in the fierce and turbulent character of the imported Negroes. The docility to which long years of bondage and strict discipline gave rise was absent, and insurrections and aces of violence were a frequent occurrence.

As the number and proportion of creole slaves increased in the United States, so did the regime's military power. By the turn of the century, slave revolts, difficult to mount under the best of conditions, attracted only an occasional zealot, for the oppressors stood united and in full command of growing military power. Slaveholders throughout the hemisphere, being neither politically inexperienced nor stupid, did not readily court disaster by dividing their ranks. Like Metternich, they calculated that if the great and well-born would vigilantly man their posts, the people would not dare rise or would be speedily crushed if they did. The aptitude of hardened reactionaries for logic has, however, usually outrun their aptitude for self-criticism and for empirical verification of their self-serving theories. As if that discrepancy were not sufficiently dangerous, they have also exhibited an irresistible tendency to underestimate the ability of their lower-class enemies to do anything except manifest a presumed penchant for mindless violence. The slaveholders understood perfectly well that their strength resided in their unity. But unity did not come easily when they resided in colonies presided over by warring European powers. The white Jamaican slaveholders might control their property-holding mulattoes, although that division along racial rather than class lines would eventually cost them dearly, but how were they to control the Spanish or the French?

The Caribbean region, almost from the first arrival of the Europeans, constituted one grand theater of recurring warfare, declared and undeclared. When the region enjoyed peace the slaveholders and their military forces happily helped each other to keep the slaves down. Without the arrival of French troops from Martinique, for example, the Danes probably would have lost St. John to their slaves in 1733. Yet, the landing of unwelcome French troops in Jamaica sixty years later provoked several slave risings. During the Maroon War of 1795 the British could rely on help from Spanish Cuba but had to lament the drain on their forces occasioned by war with France. In earlier days when Drake attacked Nombre de Dios in 1571 and humiliated Spain by sacking Santo Domingo in 1586, he had carefully prepared the way by forging alliances with local maroons. The Spanish also knew how to play the game. British officials in Jamaica sent messages to London in 1730-1731, warning that an expected Spanish invasion would have substantial and carefully prepared black help. The Spanish made Puerto Rico a sometime haven for escaped British slaves during the eighteenth century. During the 1730s the enmity between Spain and Britain provided favorable opportunities for the slaves in South Carolina, whom the Spanish invited to cross into Florida under assurances of freedom. The Spanish correctly assumed that self-emancipated black warriors would provide a formidable border army. The major slave revolt at Stono occurred in this context.

Repeatedly, the French incited the slaves of the British, who incited the slaves of the Spanish, who incited the slaves of the French The slaves needed little incitement but welcomed evidence that they had powerful allies with whatever motives. In the early days of the revolution in Saint Domingue, Toussaint deftly used the Spanish, French, and English to torment each other while he built his own army, ostensibly loyal to whichever European power had most to offer at the moment. At that, the slaveholders of Saint Domingue invited disaster by creating a racial chasm between white and mulatto property holders and thereby weakening their alliance with the Girondist bourgeoisie at the moment the montagnard threat was rising against both. Toussaint learned quickly to maneuver for advantage and provided an almost too-good illustration of Marx's dictum that ruling classes unwittingly forge the weapons for their enemies below. Once made victims of divide and rule, the people can learn its uses. Toussaint made a brilliant pupil, but we should not shower him with too many compliments on this particular count: He had such good teachers.

Brazil offers another major example of the importance of ruling-class divisions in the history of slave revolt and maroon war. Palmares, the greatest of autonomous black communities, arose during the seventeenth-century struggle between the Dutch and Portuguese for control of the Northeast; it grew strong during the long period in which the Portuguese army had more important things to do. Brazil remained internally turbulent through the eighteenth century, and the slaves took advantage of white divisions. Most notably, the Portuguese had great difficulty in suppressing quilombos in Minas Gerais during the eighteenth century, when the blacks repeatedly took advantage of the struggle between the government and the settlers. The Portuguese attempts to sell monopoly rights and to levy confiscatory taxes provoked a harsh reaction and resulted in the Emboaba War of 1711 and subsequent armed clashes that played into the hands of rebellious blacks.

The series of revolts in Bahia during 1807-1835 took place against a background of bitter factional struggle within the ruling class, acute inflation and the disruption of foreign trade, considerable violence especially in the cities, and the frequent risings of disaffected army garrisons. The Napoleonic wars had brought the seat of the Portuguese empire to Brazil, and subsequent events produced political separation. Provincial separatists, supporters of one or another court party, not to mention those who rose against taxes and the metric system, provided a constant uproar in a country with less than the best of armies and with a large frontier to attract fugitive slaves. During the second half of the century the new abolitionist movement, the crisis generated by the humiliating war in Paraguay, and the struggle between rising and declining groups of bourgeois and landowners created a tumult favorable to slave desertions, resistance, and organized violence.

In contrast, the slaveholders of the United States confronted their slaves from a position of unusual strength. They had no metropolitan capital in Europe to answer to and shared power effectively in Washington. When faced with the threat of slave revolt during the early part of the nineteenth century they suppressed internal divisions and established a political consensus by eliminating the slavery issue and settling all other issues, many of which evoked strong passions, without violence or visible rupture of ruling-class solidarity. Southern slaves had much less reason than Carib bean or Brazilian slaves did to believe that they could take advantage of their enemy's internal divisions, although they too responded not merely to accurate political reports but to unfounded rumors as well.

False reports of political dissension among the whites spurred slave revolts as readily as true reports did. The slaves had their own means of getting news of distant developments. In 1733, William Matthew wrote to London that reports of the rising on St. John had reached Nevis via the French islands. In 1816, a resident of Kingston, Jamaica, warned Earl Bathurst that the reading of the Registry Bill in Commons would have dangerous repercussions. "My Lord," he pleaded, "the mere allusion to the question [of abolition] has gone far toward effecting our destruction and renewing the horrors of St. Domingo. Intelligence has reached us of an insurrection in Barbados." Were these gentlemen referring only to news that reached the whites? Hardly. As testimony on the Jamaican rising of 1831 made clear, the whites talked too much, and the slaves heard everything. On Tortola in 1790, Barbados in 1816, Jamaica in 1831, and elsewhere in other years, the slaves rose in the belief that London had abolished slavery and that their masters, with the connivance of local officials, were suppressing the decree. Similarly, in the sit-down strike in Buenos Aires in 1805, slaves took militant action in the belief that the government had freed them.

The slaves were displaying an attitude common among peoples, even the most rebellious, who had grown up in a world of class dependencies. The Russian serfs presented only the most famous example. As Michael Chernievsky has written in Tsar and People:

Thousands of peasants literally risked (and lost) their lives in order to appeal directly to the emperor against their oppressors, despite the law that forbade the serf to complain against his master. Hundreds of peasant uprisings took place during the thirty years of Nicholas I, for which the justification was the utter conviction of the peasants that their tsar had decreed their liberation and that his order was being disobeyed and suppressed by the gentry and the bureaucracy, that is, by the State.

This spur to insurrection appeared in the United States as well but not nearly so often during the nineteenth as during the eighteenth century. Even as the secession crisis burned hotter, especially after Lincoln's election, it had the radically different effect of raising the expectations of emancipation to come rather than of proclaiming an emancipation established and suppressed. Lewis Clark, an ex-slave who escaped to write his own narrative, even suggested that when the slaves in Kentucky had heard of the emancipation in the British West Indies, they became less militant because they considered their own emancipation a matter of time. In pare the southern slaves simply may have had more accurate information, but the slaveholders' power over their region, so clearly manifest in every phase of political and military life, muse have set firm limits to anything the slaves could believe about a superior power in a far-off place called Washington. The slaves of the Caribbean knew that London had the power to abolish slavery, especially after it abolished the slave trade, but the slaves of the Old South experienced little or no exterior power except that of their masters, whose consent was necessary even to abolish the African slave trade.

During the colonial period the slaves could seize upon evidence of internal and external division among the whites more readily than they could after the Revolution. In addition to trying to take advantage of British-Spanish antagonisms, they responded to political excitement within the colonies. The revolt in New York in 1712 occurred while the wounds from Leisler's Rebellion were still open and the whites deeply divided; and the cloudy conspiracy of 1741 occurred during the War of Jenkins' Ear. After Independence, political conditions became less favorable, but Gabriel Prosser took heart from the American conflict with France; Denmark Vesey effectively seized upon the implications of the Missouri debate and even spread the false story that Congress had declared emancipation but that the slaveholders were balking; and Nat Turner moved in an atmosphere charged at once with rumors among white and black alike of renewed war with Britain and with hard evidence of antislavery disaffection among the whites of western Virginia. The slaves always saw and heard more than they were supposed to, even though the slaveholders determined that there would be as tattle as possible to see and hear.

The white South suffered from internal divisions, the most dangerous of which pitted slaveholders against nonslaveholders. Recent research into the politics of the 1850s suggests deepening class antagonisms, which spurred proslavery extremists to push for secession as a way of disciplining the white lower classes. But there remains no doubt of the slaveholders' hegemony-that is, of their success in confining all struggles to issues other than that of property. In other words, although the struggles between slaveholders and nonslaveholders, not to mention those within each class, were growing sharper, they were not over slavery in any way that directly threatened slave property. To the contrary, the nonslaveholders of the Lower South and of most of the Upper South reiterated their support of the social system.

The whites of all classes effectively closed ranks against the slaves after, if not before, the Nat Turner revolt. Had the South not seceded in 1861, the class antagonisms beneath the regional consensus might have exploded and created new opportunities for slave revolt. Indeed, fear of such developments played a discernible part in the decision to secede and try to secure the slave states against internal and external threat. But, whatever the might-have-beens, the slaves confronted a solid and overwhelming white majority until the end of the regime.

The magnitude of the task facing slaves who chose insurrection suggests the importance of leaders with considerable knowledge of political events in general; of the divisions among whites; of military prospects and exigencies; of terrain; of the psychology of their people; of ways to get arms and train fighters; of everything. Mechanics, craftsmen, preachers, drivers, even house slaves played a big role in the great slave revolts. Both rebel leaders and supreme accommodationists came from the same ranks, for they were men of wider experience than ordinary field hands and had talents they could turn in either direction.

Slave society in the Old South provided less room for the development of advanced strata than in the Caribbean islands and Brazil. Those strata did emerge and achieve noteworthy results in the South, but they did so within conditions that minimized the prospects for revolutionary success and thus maximized the pressures for nonrevolutionary forms of resistance and self-assertion. Craftsmen, drivers, and preachers provided the indispensable leadership in the southern revolts, but on fewer occasions than their counterparts in other countries, not because of lack of will but because of fewer promising possibilities. The privileged strata of oppressed peoples, then as now, respond to opposing pressures, as Frantz Fanon especially has stressed. Being most exposed to assimilation by the dominant culture and its superior technology, they are the least likely to equivocate on the political issues. That is, either they identify with their oppressors and seek individual advancement or they identify with their people and place their sophistication at the disposal of rebellion. They thus produce a high percentage of leaders and traitors. Individually, they play a central role on both sides; collectively, however, they do equivocate and attach themselves to one or the other.

Until the nineteenth century, and even then albeit with altered content, religion provided the ideological rallying point for revolt. In the Caribbean and in South America religious leaders--Obeahmen, Myalmen, Vodûn priests, Ñáñigos, Muslim teachers--led, inspired, or provided vital sanction for one revolt after another. In addition to the Bahian drama, Muslims led at least two revolts--in Saint-Domingue and in Surinam--despite the numerical insignificance of Muslims in those countries. There is, however, no reason to regard Islam, Obeah, Myalism, or Vodûn as intrinsically more revolutionary than various forms of Christianity.

The influence of Islam in the wave of risings in Bahia may serve as an example. Throughout the Americas, Muslim slaves earned a reputation for being especially rebellious. The political-religious ideology they brought from West Africa ill-prepared them for enslavement to infidels, whose power they were expected to resist. West Africans could have absorbed Islamic doctrines only indirectly, for the masses continued to adhere to the older religions until well into the nineteenth century. The ruling strata, however, had both religious tradition and some knowledge of the specific teachings. In the New World they had the incitement and opportunity to forge an ideology of resistance. To do so effectively, however, they had to eschew Muslim purity and assimilate much of the religious thought and practice of the traditional African and emerging Afro-American religions. Thus, the literate Muslim leaders in Bahia accepted many practices considered fetishistic and pagan by strict Muslim reckoning. As their syncretism bound them closer to the urban blacks, free and slave, their ideological hegemony prepared them to assume the leadership of a firm and disciplined revolutionary effort.

The Hausa emerged as the decisive leaders of the early Bahian revolts. Muslim penetration of Hausa territory in Africa dated from the fourteenth century. Some towns embraced Islam during the fifteenth and by the seventeenth had established centers of Muslim learning. The great majority of the people, especially the rural cultivators, nevertheless, continued to adhere to their traditional religions until the Fulani conquest of the nineteenth century. The Hausa masses may not have been converted to Islam in Africa by 1807, when Zaria fell to the Fulani and the blacks rose in Bahia; but they had already been disciplined to follow a firm Muslim leadership, which in the New World successfully advanced Islam as a religion of resistance.

In Bahia an Afro-Brazilian Islam brought together African peoples. The Yoruba, who had resisted Hausa and Fulani encroachments in their motherland, turned up as Muslims in Brazil. Islam in Africa as in the Middle Ease arose fundamentally as an urban religion, and the Yoruba (Nagôs, as they were called in Brazil), preeminently an urban people in Africa, were concentrated in the city of Bahia (Salvador) in large numbers. Despite their rivalry with the Hausa in Africa, they cooperated with them in Brazil for reasons chat, while not completely clear, probably included the combined psychological conditioning of their urban past and present and the attractiveness of Islam as an organizing force. As Triming -writes, "Islam, being a universal religion, spreads the conception of the inhabitable world along with that of the universal God and establishes a link between peoples who formerly had little to prepare them to live harmoniously together." Indeed, the ability to unite peoples of different cultures and socioeconomic systems into a coherent civilization marked the political genius of Muhammed and of the classical Muslim state-builders.

Afro-Brazilian Muslims played a prominent part in the revolts that shook Bahia during the early nineteenth century: in 1807, 1809, 1813, and with special force in 1816, 1826, 1827, 1830, and most dangerously in 1835. Ewe (Gêges), Nupe (Tapes), and other slaves and free Negroes participated.

The exact contribution of Islam remains in dispute, although the thesis of a jihad, advanced by Raimondo Nina Rodrigues and others, appears questionable in the light of recent evidence. Some have seen the revolts as ethnic with a Muslim gloss; others as a class struggle in religious garb. A series of powerful revolts that brought together slaves and free Negroes, Muslims and non-Muslims, Hausa and Yoruba, resists simple categorization. Yet, Nina Rodrigues well argued that the Muslims had a firm political-military tradition and leadership; that they taught their followers to read the Koran in a city in which many slaveholders were illiterate; that they enforced impressive discipline; and that they forged alliances among previously estranged peoples. Thus, however much weight muse be given to more general ethnic considerations, the ideological and organizational power of the Muslims proved indispensable. And if the revolt transcended class lines, as R. K. Kent has argued in his attack on the jihad thesis and other schematic readings, it nonetheless promised a substantial measure of liberation to the slaves of Bahia and thereby demonstrated an essential class as well as ethnic content.

The great Bahian revolt of several hundred slaves and free Negroes in 1835 revealed general conditions that provided the context for the revolts of the whole period. Despite British pressure and treaty obligations, Brazil continued to import Africans, whose number in Bahia increased steadily. Although these new slaves came from various areas, certain groups, notably the Hausa and Yoruba, clung together in large numbers. Many went to the city as skilled workers 'end craftsmen and established ties with free Negroes of similar background and together formed a coherent community with literate and sophisticated leaders. The surrounding plantations had long suffered desertions that fed the quilombos and kept the entire region in disorder; and the arrival of substantial of West Africans with ethnic ties to the city created new possibilities for urban risings capable of setting the plantations ablaze.

The revolt of 1835 struck terror into the regime, as well it might, since it came close to success. Hundreds of blacks gave an excellent account of themselves and were defeated only with difficulty.. Had the rebels planned more carefully or just had better luck, they might have realized their hopes of taking the city by virtual coup d'état and then raising the countryside. Bahia had come close to becoming another Haiti.

Where religious movements could take such non-Christian forms the slaves were being called to arms by a deep commitment that, by its very nature, divided master from slaves and black from white. It had to be immeasurably more difficult to win slaves to a purely revolutionary cause, the idealogical I logical and emotional content of which actually linked them to their masters on some levels while separating them on others. In the hands of a skillful anti-Christian leader the religious cry could be made to separate the slaves totally from the white community and thus transform every rising into a holy war against the infidel. When master and slave appealed to the same God, the same book, the same teachings, the task of the Nat Turners became much more difficult. It did not, however, as Turner himself demonstrated, become impossible, for Christianity has had its own revolutionary history. The difference came not with the abstract character of the Christian tradition but with the reduction of revolutionary potential inherent in the deeper separation of religion from class and especially ethnicity.

A final observation on the relatively unfavorable condi-tions facing slaves of the Old South concerns the maroons. The most impressive slave revolts in the hemisphere proceeded in alliance with maroons or took place in periods in which maroon activity was directly undermining the slave regime or inspiring the slaves by example. In Venezuela, for example, the Andresote revolt of 1732 occurred in the context of a widespread maroon war. The Caribbean revolts often had maroon connections, the most dramatic case being that of Saint-Domingue. For reasons explored in Chapter Two, maroon activity in the United States, while by no means trivial, could not spark general revolt as readily as it could elsewhere.

The size and frequency of the slave revolts in the British Caribbean may help to put those in the United States in perspective. The greatest slave revolts in the Western Hemisphere, except for the making revolutionary in Saint Domingue, took place in Guiana (the territories of Essequibo, Berbice, and Demerara) provided a theater of war between Britain and the Netherlands, who alternated control, and it offered an extensive hinterland for maroon colonies and guerrilla warfare. Like Jamaica, Guiana boasted a slave-free ratio of more than ten-to-one. Taken together, the territories averaged about one significant revolt, not to mention serious conspiracies, during every two years from 1731 to 1823-that is, from the revolt in Berbice in 1731 to the massive revolt in Demerara in 1823. The record is the more striking in view of the relative quiet of the years 1752-1762 during which a firm Dutch-Indian alliance kept the slaves and maroons in check. Berbice exploded, however, during the 1760s, with revolts in 1762, 1763-1764, and 1767.

The Great Rebellion of I763-I764 under under Cuffy, an exit driver Burned cooper, engaged, according to some estimates, half the slaves in the colony and was by any standard massive. The rebels were predominantly Africans; creoles joined late, apparently under some duress, and quit early. Cuffy attributed the origins of the revolt to the severity of treatment and tried unsuccessfully to negotiate peace. Although his aims cannot be wholly deciphered, they seem to have foreshadowed Toussaint L'Ouverture's dream of an autonomous black state allied to a major European power. The defeat of the slaves led, as usual, to widespread executions conducted with all the cruelty Europeans invariably attribute to nonwhite "savages."

Essequibo remained stable after the unsuccessful revolts of 1731 and 1741 and the aborted revolt of 1744, and the center of resistance shifted to Demerara in the late 1760s. The principal revolts occurred there during the 1770s: two in 1772; another in 1773; and two others in 1774-1775, which amounted virtually to full-scale civil war between the black slaves and maroons on one side and the whites and Indians on the ocher. Another serious revolt broke out in 1803, and twenty years later the colony went up in flames. The revolts of 1794-1795, took place against the radical backdrop of the French Revolution, the fall of the Netherlands and proclamation of the Batavian Republic, and the division of the white colonists themselves along political lines, with one party's raising the Tricolor and proclaiming the Rights of Man. Apparently, the slaves were supposed to be too stupid or too cowed to make that message their own.

In 1823 the slaves rose on the ease coast of Demerara. Before the revolt ran its course thousands from at lease thirty seven plantations had taken part, two thousand in one major battle. The rebels demanded emancipation and, apparently with an eye on future labor conditions, a shorter work-week on the plantations. They believed that the "Good King" of England had freed them and thee the planters were holding them illegally. Under the leadership of Jack Gladstone, a Christian cooper, and a group of drivers, craftsmen, and even house slaves, they attempted to prevail by nonviolent tactics suggestive of a general strike. Rather than kill the whites, they imprisoned them, executing only two who refused to lay down arms. The white captives subsequently testified to having been created humanely. This moderation availed the blacks nothing: They were put down in blood. But the revolt stirred English opinion and strengthened the resolve of the emancipationist party to be done with the tyrannical regime in the colonies.

The revolts in Jamaica fall into two phases divided by the peace treaty of 1739 between the maroons and the British. The slaves had risen in 1669, I672, 1673, twice in 1678, I682, I685, I690, I733, and 1734, with 150 participating in the revolt of 1685 and 300 to 400 in that of 1690. Once the maroons had won autonomy, however, they entered into an alliance with the British. Thereafter, the slaves could no longer find refuge in the interior, for the maroons would hunt them down and return them to the plantations or, worse, execute them on the spot. Increasingly, the slaves had to bid for the abolition of slavery as a system-bid, that is, not as particular groups for their own freedom but for a social revolution and the freedom of all. This tendency, however, did not mature until the interrelated revolutions in France and Saint-Domingue created a new system of international power and a more coherent revolutionary ideology.

The pacification of the maroons made revolt during the eighteenth century more difficult and less frequent, but not less incense: In 1760, St. Mary's Parish exploded in a revolt of at least 400 slaves, which triggered other revolts, one of which engaged about a thousand. The maroons helped the British crush "Tacky's Rebellion," but not before Jamaica had been shaken to its foundations by Akan slaves-turned-warriors called to arms by obeahmen. This revolt, and chose of 1765 and 1766 marked the beginning of the transition from rebellions aimed at restoring an African past to the movements to establish a revolutionary future.

In 1807 the slaves heard of the abolition of the slave trade and assumed that it also meant emancipation. Convinced that the planters were thwarting the king's will as well as their own, they rose. In 1815 about 250 Africans, primarily Ibos, without any creole support prepared to rise. They were crushed. In 1824, 1,200 slaves on five plantations rose. They too were crushed. By the 1820s the full force of the new world-wide revolutionary era and of the emancipation struggle in Britain was being felt. The great "Christmas Rising" of 1831, with 20,000 participants, followed the tense debates in London; embraced the creoles; prefigured a modern black Jamaican nationalism; and despite its defeat helped seal the fate of the slaveholding party. The revolt represented the culmination of a new stage, in which the slaves could look forward to independence in a world of modern nation-states. And its rhetoric was not lost on those battling for the Great Reform Bill as a means of staving off deeper social convulsions at home. Mark the year 1831. The men of power in London, who found themselves pressed by the events in Jamaica to settle the slavery question once and for all had also to reflect on disturbing news from Virginia.

Guiana and Jamaica had many fierce revolts, but some colonies had none. Trinidad escaped, and Barbados, despite conspiracies and disorders, had only one major revolt and that not until 1816. The contrast holds no mysteries. The Spanish had used Trinidad as a commercial entrepot, not a plantation colony. When the British spread sugar cultivation during the nineteenth century, large plantations did emerge. But on the whole the system had more in common with that of the northern colonies of North America than with the plantation colonies. British power in the Caribbean had become overwhelming by the time of annexation, and the prospects for peaceful emancipation were steadily brightening. The slaves bided their time.

Barbados, however, presents a problem, for it had been the greatest of sugar islands during the seventeenth century and hardly enjoyed a reputation for humanity toward its slaves. Richard Dunn has probably offered the simplest and best explanation: The island was too small. The slaves had no interior into which to flee and sustain maroon colonies and guerrilla warfare, and they had no hopes of holding off the formidable British military and seapower. Any revolt, therefore, had to be an all-or-nothing act of desperation with every prospect for ending in disaster. And the proximity in which masters and slaves lived maximized the whites' chances of strangling conspiracies before they could mature. The revolt of 1816 broke out in the context of the movement to accelerate an emancipation believed imminent and, therefore, sustains the argument.

The revolts in Spanish and Portuguese America also help put chose of the United States in perspective. Plantation slavery in contradistinction to the use of slave labor in way tangential to the main economy, did not flourish in Spanish America as it did elsewhere. The Spanish, with an enormous pool of Indian labor to explode, imported Africans as a supplement. Nevertheless, even before the sugar boom of the nineteenth century transformed Cuba, plantation districts did exist within the Spanish colonies, notably on the coast of Venezuela, Colombia, and Central America, and important mining districts in Mexico and South America came to rely heavily on African slave labor. Not surprisingly, these plantation and mining districts, in which exploitation often reached extremes of brutality, became the centers of revolt and maroon warfare, although other areas suffered lesser shocks from time to time. As early as 1522 the slaves in Hispanola rose in what was probably the first black slave revoit in the New World.

Black slaves in Mexico mounted significant revolts in 1546, 1570, 1608, and 1670. In 1537 the regime smashed an elaborate slave plot to kill the whites, impose a regime on the Indians and mestizos, and re-create a traditional "African" society. During the seventeenth century the conflict between the English and Spanish for control of the Mosquito Coast of Central America opened the way to autonomy for an Afro-Indian people ("Sambo-Mosquito") that had arisen there. These racially mixed people of color allied with the English, whose own weak settlement they protected in return for recognition and independence. Thus, the Spanish, who periodically faced trouble from black maroons, not to mention from insurgent slaves like chose who shook the San Pedro mining district in 1548, found themselves unable to dislodge either their main European rival or their dangerous nonwhite local antagonists.

In Colombia the slaves destroyed the town of Santa Marta in 1530, and, after it was rebuilt, inflicted much damage again in 1550. The rebel bozales (African-born slaves) in the Colombian interior mining district rose in 1548 and killed twenty whites while taking 250 Indian hostages during their retreat to maroon bases. In addition to mounting small revolts, slaves, four thousand in number, paralyzed the Zara- area in the middle of the sixteenth century.

In Venezuela in 1552, King Miguel's force of about eight hundred rebels shut down important mines until the Spanish, with Indian support, crushed the revolt. The great revolt under Andresote in the Yuracuy Valley in the 1730s annihilated a Spanish force of three hundred before being defeated by one of fifteen hundred. The slaves at Coro, where there had been an earlier slave revolt in 1532, followed reports from revolutionary France and in 1789 rose with expectations of French help. This massive revolt also succumbed to Spanish power supplemented by Indian allies, but its scope may be inferred by the savage repression, which included 171 executions.

Among the suggestive features of the Venezuelan revolts were the concern expressed by Philip V of Spain in 1716 that renegade whites were joining the black maroon colonies and the widespread belief that by 1800 the total maroon strength in Venezuela had reached thirty thousand. Leslie Rout, in his analysis of the Spanish American slave revolts, notes that rebel slave leaders often were creoles, and he has plausibly suggested the importance of roots in the colonial experience to the formation of effective black military leadership In any case, rebel slaves periodically plagued the coloniaI regime throughout its history, although during the nineteenth century black action increasingly merged with the struggles for national liberation and assumed a different political character.

Afro-Brazilian slaves also created an impressive history of armed struggle. Small, local revolts occurred frequently, and the first four decades of the nineteenth century in Bahia witnessed, in effect, a protracted revolutionary war. Certainly, insurrection-prone slaves in Brazil as everywhere else faced enormous military, political, and psychological difficulties and could not often realize their ambitions.

The attempt to minimize the record of slave revolt in Brazil presented with special force in Carl Degler's Neither Black Nor White rests on some extraordinary reasoning. In Brazil as in some other countries armed resistance of slaves took the form of maroon warfare much more readily than of direct insurrection. This distinction draws attention to a different set of military and political problems but hardly justifies the conclusion that the record of quilombolo struggle deserves no place in the history of slave revolt. Degler writes: "Generally, the quilombo neither attempted to overthrow the slave system nor made war on it." That is, the quilombolos fought defensively to preserve their autonomous regions rather than to attack the slave regime. This reading represents, at best, a partial and misleading truth. Its core idea--that the quilombolos did not aim at the overthrow of slavery as a social term--applies with equal force to all the great slave revolts from that of Spartacus to chose of black Americans until the late eighteenth century. Thus, by logical extension all black risings before Toussaint L'Ouverture's and some after it, should not be classified as revolts.

The record shows impressive slave revolts, strictly defined, throughout Brazilian history, although that which strikes one as impressive may strike another as trivial. The question reduces to "impressive relative to what?" Relative to the slave revolts in the United States, the Brazilian record, which includes revolts by hundreds of slaves in Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro, not to mention the events in Bahia, stands up well enough, although it could of course be dismissed by anyone for whom anything less than Saint-Domingue or Demerara hardly deserves notice.

Taken as a continuum-as the insurgent record should be taken despite the necessity for analytical distinctions among different forms of armed struggle--the revolts, quilombo activity, and the participation of slaves in such wider regional and social revolutionary movements as the Balaiada justifies the conclusion, insisted upon especially by Marxist scholars, that Brazilian slaves wrote a heroic chapter in modern history, all numbers and relativity games notwithstanding. Black participation did not, by definition, constitute slave revolt, but, then, neither did the movement of American slaves into the Union Army. Here at issue, however, was the destruction of slavery as a social system by the absorption of the impulse to slave revolt, directly manifested much more often in Brazil than in the United States, into larger forms of struggle with better chances for success.

The principal revolts of the eighteenth century in New York and Stono engaged modest in comparison to chose in the Caribbean or even Brazil, but they were big enough to strike terror into colonial America: thirty or forty slaves in New York and perhaps a hundred at Stono, with the ever-present possibility of attracting more if they had sustained themselves awhile longer. They had an impact all the greater since the slaveholders knew of the formidable revolts in the Caribbean and took an international view of the matter, thereby displaying greater sophistication than most subsequent historians.

Both revolts broke out in the midst of noticeable divisions within white society. The aftermath of Leisler's Rebellion in New York had left the whites divided, although not necessarily as much as the slaves may have hoped. Possibly, the slaves had no great illusions on that score but expected that conflicts among the whites had weakened the political and military apparatus. At Stono conditions were even more favorable: The whites had their hands full with hostile Indians and with black maroons in Florida as well as South Carolina. The slaves knew--everyone knew--that Spain and England were preparing for war and that the Spanish were offering freedom to runaway slaves from the English colonies.

African-born slaves dominated both revolts and appealed to the religious sentiments of their brothers and sisters. The New York rebels espoused traditional African religion, as they understood it, and called for a war on the Christians in a manner suggestive of the early Caribbean Obeahmen and foreshadowing the call to arms of the Vodun priests of Saint Domingue. The religion of the rebels at Stono appears to have been more clearly syncretic: Angolan slaves with at lease a formal adherence to Catholicism could put ideological distance between themselves and their masters and enter more easily into alliance with the Spanish, notwithstanding the small irony that the Spanish were themselves slaveholders. Mechanics, craftsmen, and other skilled and privileged slaves certainly led the revolt in New York and probably led the revolt at Stono.

The revolt in southern Louisiana in 1811, although the biggest in American history, remains obscure. Between 180 and 500 slaves--the lower estimate probably closer to the actual number--armed with axes and ocher weapons but with few firearms, struck coward New Orleans. The slaveholders, supported by a free Negro militia and reinforced by federal troops under Wade Hampton, smashed the revolt quickly. But the slaves' inexperience and lack of suitable weapons had not prevented them from manifesting a noteworthy degree of military organization; and as if that were not enough to make the slaveholders fearful of the future, the free Negroes' loyalty to the regime, never fully trusted anyway, was partially offset by the news that at lease one of the rebel leaders, Charles Deslondes, was a free mulatto from Saint-Domingue.

As soon as the blacks' ranks had broken, the vengeful whites began an indiscriminate slaughter, although the rebels had killed only two or three whites and had largely restricted themselves to burning the plantations. The whites summarily killed sixty-six blacks and subsequently executed sixteen leaders. The executioners cue off their victims' heads, put them on spikes, and used them to decorate the road from New Orleans to Major Andre's plantation, where the revolt had begun. The "savages" had been beaten. Civilization had triumphed.

Because the Louisiana revolt had occurred on the frontier, it had less impact on the South than three others during the early part of the nineteenth century, although two of those never came to fruition. The aborted revolts of Gabriel Prosser in 1800 and Denmark Vesey in 1822, and the bloody revolt of Nat Turner in 1831, coming in the two great, long-evolving, supposedly stable slave states of Virginia and South Carolina, terrified the whole country. The Nat Turner revolt especially stood out as a "cataclysm" and a "fierce rebellion"--to invoke the language of Aptheker and Oates--for the primary reason that it drew a considerable amount of white blood, more in fact than the much bigger and harder fought revolt in Bahia in 1835.

The Nat Turner revolt had much in common with the Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vesey conspiracies. In each the leader had learned to read and write and had special talents and privileges. Gabriel Prosser was a blacksmith whose militant politico-religious temperament placed him in a long line of artisan and skilled-slave revolutionaries. Nat Turner, a jack-of-all-trades slave who basically worked as a field hand, was an exhorter. If Turner did not emerge as the skilled mechanic or foreman he has often been called, he had nonetheless had ample preparation for advanced work and could only have been embittered by the lack of opportunity. His parents and their friends had perceived him as a remarkable child with special religious powers and had predicted a great future for him as a free man. Vesey had bought his own freedom after winning a lottery: curiously, the year was 1800--the year of Gabriel's rebellion and of Nat Turner's birth. As a slave, born either in the Caribbean or in Africa, he had worked as a seaman and visited many countries. Including Haiti. He spoke several languages and read the political press. Vesey's first-rate group of lieutenants included the celebrated Peter Poyas, a ship's carpenter, as well as a slave foreman, house servants, and skilled craftsmen.

Each revolt took root amidst bitter antagonisms among the whites. The undeclared war with France led Gabriel Prosser to expect all-out war and French help. And, however much the Federalists and Republicans fought each ocher within a consensus, the inflammatory rhetoric and the appeals to and denunciations of French revolutionary ideology made a deep impression on the slaves, who may well have thought that they saw a white nation on the verge of civil war. Vesey and his followers eagerly followed the Missouri debate--that "firebell in the night," as Jefferson called it. Whatever interpretation the slaves put on the debate, they had firm evidence that antislavery sentiment was rising and that the slaveholders were being thrown on the defensive. Their reading was strategically sound, however much they may have misjudged the pace of events. And at chat, they may merely have assumed that the political split was weakening the slaveholders to some extent. Nat Turner made his move after a tense constitutional convention in Virginia which embittered the antislavery western counties, displayed public charges of slaveholder tyranny over the state, and generated demands for abolition, albeit with colonization.

Each of these outstanding rebel leaders blended religious appeals to the slaves with the accents of the Declaration of Independence and the Rights of Man. Each projected an interpretation of Christianity that stressed the God-given right to freedom as the fundamental doctrine of obligation underlying a political vision that itself reflected the new ideologies of the Age of Revolution. And each had to confront the African presence among their people. Gabriel Prosser, despite warnings from within his own camp, stressed Christian secular appeals and, to his cost, slighted the folk religion the country slaves, who retained stronger links to their African past. Nat Turner emerged as a messianic Christian prophet and skillfully spoke a language drawn from the radical books of the Bible and the revolutionary tradition of America. Yet, sober scholars have seen in his Christianity, notwithstanding his seated contempt for "conjuring," a strong African influence of which he may not have been aware.

Between the two revolts in Virginia Denmark Vesey had worked out the most subtle and sophisticated appeal. His movement boldly spoke both in radical Christian and traditional African--or what purported to be traditional African--terms. Vesey appealed to the Bible, much as Prosser had done and Turner would do, but he also relied on Jack Pritchard ("Gullah Jack"), an Angolan, to reach slaves who had not yet been converted to Christianity or whose conversion had been superficial. Pritchard, like many other leaders of the revolt, had been a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which the authorities in Charleston had closed down as subversive; indeed, he reportedly had wanted to strike immediately after the repression, which had enraged him and the black community generally. In combining Christian and African appeals Vesey and his followers did not play a double game: They varied the accents of a black folk religion that was combining many sources and working itself out as a distinct Afro-American religious experience.

The appeal to African elements in the slaves' religion served a special function in bolstering morale among chose who faced grim odds. The use of charms by the rebels in Charleston, as by slave rebels throughout the Americas, will illustrate. In many revolts slaves went into battle with charms that ostensibly protected them from the white man's bullets. The Reverend C. C. Jones of Georgia, in his Religious Instruction of the Negroes (p. 128), expressed particular uneasiness at the appearance of such notions among southern slaves. Well he might have, for they have appeared among insurrectionary peasants and the poor in Europe as well as in Africa, Melanesia, and the colonial world generally. This recurring use of charms has proven a powerful antidote to the normal fears among fresh recruits. However "superstitious," those who have gone into battle under this protection have usually had their reasons; they have been able to see their comrades fall, charms or no charms. The Reverend Mr. Jones wisely refused to take comfort in the taunts of the judge who sentenced Gullah Jack to death:

Jack Pritchard . . . you represented yourself as invulnerable; that you could neither be taken nor destroyed, and that all who fought under your banner would be invincible.... Your boasted charms have not preserved yourself and of course could not protect others.

Religiously inspired rebels could always attribute the inevitable casualties to the victims' bad faith or failure to observe proper ritual or even to the prospect of reincarnation in Africa. They needed something to stiffen their resolve in the face of overwhelming odds, and their religious leaders provided as good a spur as was available. As Eric Hobsbawm remarks, "And, alas, the poor and the weak know that their champions and defenders are not really invulnerable. They may always rise again-but they will also be defeated and killed." The promise of invulnerability, he adds in his book Bandits, "offers in mythological form what every such rebel knows he desperately needs--luck."

Slave revolt leaders in the South had much less to fall back upon during the nineteenth century than their forerunners during the eighteenth or their counterparts elsewhere in the Americas. They were influenced by conjuring but also normally skeptical of its extreme and politically dangerous forms. And they lived too close to their masters to deceive themselves. As one rebel slave recruit in Missouri explained "I've seen Marse Newton and Marse John Ramsey shoot too often to believe they can't kill a nigger."

The strategic aims of the revolts remain debatable, apart from the straightforward goal of securing the freedom of those in rebellion and of as many other slaves as possible. Gabriel Prosser sought to seize Richmond--a realistic objective in view of its indifferent defenses--and to inflict enough blows on the whites to bring them to unspecified terms. Possibly, the rebels would have tried to win recognition for an enclave state; possibly, they sought freedom within existing political arrangements; probably, they were waiting to seize any opportunities that emerged. Vesey apparently tried to keep several options open. Had he taken Charleston and secured its hinterland he might have set up an independent republic, although he undoubtedly knew the odds against holding out. He seems to have expected to sail to Haiti with as many blacks as survived the early engagements. Turner's objectives remain obscure. He may have thought along lines similar to those of Gabriel Prosser or may have expected to form a large maroon colony in the Dismal Swamp. Of all the major plots and revolts his displayed the least evidence of careful planning, preparation, and foresight. Yet, this very weakness may have given it a strength denied to Prosser and Vesey, for it was less exposed to betrayal.

Whatever the reliance on archaic ideological forms, the nineteenth-century revolts in the United States reflected the world as it was emerging in the era of the great revolution in Saint-Domingue and the revolutionary struggles in Europe and America. Their restorationist appearance--the possibility that each would have ended as a maroon enclave--represented primarily the impingement of military reality. Vesey looked to Haiti as a model and for inspiration as well as for material support. His speech to his followers combined the language of the Age of Revolution, as manifested in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, with the biblical language of the God of Wrath. Nat Turner, a messianic exhorter, also spoke in the accents of the Declaration of Independence and the Rights of Man. Nat Turner, whatever else he might have been, was a Virginian.

In general, then, the slaves of the United States faced a highly unfavorable relationship of forces, which shifted them away from revolt and toward other forms of resistance. The slaves had much better opportunities to revolt during the eighteenth than the nineteenth century; in general, their position steadily deteriorated over time until revolt became virtually suicidal. But even during the eighteenth century they never had opportunities as promising as the slaves of other countries had. By the time of Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner only the most heroic souls, eve as measured by the highest standards of revolutionary sell sacrifice, could contemplate such a course; and their prospects for raising the masses grew steadily dimmer despite the popular commitment to freedom. The wonder, then, is not that the United States had fewer and smaller slave revolts than some other countries did, but that they had any at all. That they did, in whatever proportions, demonstrated to the world the impossibility of crushing completely the slaves' rebellious spirit.

1.The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays In Interpretation (New York, 1969), Part One.

2.I am amazed that some critics have attributed such a view to my Roll, Jordan, Roll (New York, 1974). Nothing in the book supports so bizarre a reading.

3.Under no circumstances should my discussion of revolutionary terror be read as a defense of terrorism per se--for example, that of the Red Brigades and resurgent fascist squadristi in Italy. Terror and terrorism are emotionally charged words with many different meanings. Any evaluation must be historically specific. Accordingly, here I mean neither more nor less than what I say about given historical problems.