Danver Steven L. (Edited). Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History: An Encyclopedia (ENG)
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and adapted in ingenious ways to the indignity and pain wrought by the slavehold-
ing system. For instance, slave families were often disrupted by auctions that split
family units apart, separating parents from their children and from one another.
Slaves in many places adapted to this cruelty by establishing a form of communal
family life wherein children became the responsibility of all the adult slaves on a
plantation, not just the responsibility of their own parents (if, indeed, those parents
even still lived on the plantation). This, in turn, strengthened the bonds between
and among slaves across the South and provided a sense of solidarity that would
become an integral part of slave resistance, whether it was organized or not.
Slaves also found comfort in religion and took advantage of their owners’
attempts to “Christianize” them by forming churches of their own and carefully
securing time and space for worship beyond the watchful eyes of overseers and
plantation owners. Religion could also be used as a powerful antidote to the cru-
elty of slave owners and overseers. Slave preachers walked a fine line between
inspiring their flocks with uplifting language about freedom and liberation, while
at the same time encouraging passive resistance to slavery tha t would undermi ne
the system but not place too many slaves in danger. Often, slaves themselves
were their own worst enemies once insurrection plots were revealed. In Gabriel’s
case, his own brother Solomon testified against h im in a vain effort to have his
own life spared. In the case of George Boxley’s alleged attempt to incite a revolt
in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, around 1815, a slave named Lucy notified her
master that something was afoot and thus helped t hwart the plot before it could
gather steam. Sometimes, such slaves were motivated by specio us offers of cash
reward to anyone who would inform authorities about potential armed rebellions,
but other times, they were motivated simply by fear. Thus, even as preachers
stirred the passions of some slaves, they may have stirred the fears of others.
Above all, many preachers counseled patience in the face of the inhumanity of
slavery and encouraged the men and women to whom they prea ched to l ook
forward to an afterlife of freedom and justice.
Attempts to carve a sense of community out of life in slavery demonstrated the
remarkable resilience of the human spirit in the face of despair. Yet, nearly every
form of resistance employed by slaves was made in response to an equally strong
effort to control slaves on the part of their owners. When slave owners attempted
to control their slaves th rough religion, slaves took advantage of the opportunity
provided to gather together and provide inspirational visions of life outside of
the shackles of bondage. Some, like Nat Turner in Virginia, took advantage of
their masters’ a ttempts to teach them the Bible to become literate themselves—
an idea that frightened some slave owners to the core. When owners attempted to
control their slaves throug h violence, some slaves bravely accepted that violence
and permitted it to s teel their determination to seek freedom for themselves and
254 Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s)
their families. Slaves took advantage of their proximity to one another on planta-
tions to develop an entire culture than expressed itself in music, art, religion, and
storytelling. In this way, they managed to pass stories of their plight from one gen-
eration to another, even despite being denied the opportunity to become literate
themselves.
Armed Rebellion and Its Suppression
Still, these efforts were sometimes not enough. Although historian James Oakes
observes that armed slave r ebellion was a relatively uncommon phenomenon,
occasionally such insurrections did o ccur. Certainly the hyper-militarization of
white societies around the South in the antebellum period, coupled with the clear
willingness of slave owners to use violence in extraordinarily vicious ways against
anyone accused of leading a rebellion, prevented many insurrections from happen-
ing. Oakes has argued that one rea son slave rebellions in the South were uncom-
mon was because slaves simply had nowhere to go—even if they secured their
freedom, slaves could hardly expect to be welcomed with open arms into a society
that had previously acce pted them, since American society in the 18th and 19th
centuries had never really accepted African slaves at all. Nevertheless, as slave
culture developed, som e slaves bega n to e nvision the possibility of constructing
a “society within society” consisting of those formerly held in bondage. Gabriel,
for instance (he is s ometimes known as “Gabriel Prosser” but was known in his
time simply as Gabriel, without his master’s surname added), envisioned installing
himself as “king” of Virginia after burning Richmond to the ground. George
Boxley, though a white former slave owne r himsel f, was the alleged mastermind
of a plot involving several slaves t hat would also entail destroying Richmond as
well as the city of Fredericksburg and, thus, creating space for former slaves to
live in. Denmark Vesey, on the other hand, planned in 1822 to seize the city of
Charleston, South Carolina, then escape to Haiti to avoid retaliation by whites.
In each case, the conspirators envisioned movement out of slavery into a more
sympath etic social and cultural environment where former slaves could live and
even prosper.
The slaves who led the most prominent rebellions of the ante bellum period—
Gabriel, Charles Deslondes, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner—were also inspired by
external events that galvanized them. Oakes describes the rebellion in Saint
Domingue (now known as Haiti) led by Toussaint L’Ouverture as the only success-
ful slave rebellion in all of human history, but it had a profound effect on Gabriel,
Deslondes, Vesey, and even Turner (though Turner attributed his inspiration t o
visions he saw encouraging him to lead a revolt). Deslondes was himself a native
of Saint Domingue, and Gabriel had extensive contact with people who hailed
Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s) 255
from various places by virtue of the fact that he was a skilled blacksmith and was
loaned by his owner, Thomas Prosser, to work in various industrial capacities in
Richmond. T hese contacts enabled Gabriel to hear of the events in Saint Dom-
ingue and almost certainly influenced his actions later. Thus, a web of interper-
sonal relationships enabled slaves to hear inspiring tales of rebellion occurring in
other places and provided an impetus for the insurrections led by these men.
Slave owners were also aware of another potential instigator of slave insurrec-
tion: the very libera l ideology upon which the Ame rican system had presuma bly
been founded. Although, as Oakes notes, slaves h ad no ability to exercise any
political influence through such sanctioned means as voting or petitioning the
governmen t for a redress of grievances, slaves did exercise an enorm ous amount
of influence on the political system by imposing themselves on it through their sta-
tus as runaways and as witnesses in courts of law. In the first place, runaway slaves
imposed a certain burden on the communities to which they fled—psychological,
moral, economic, and otherwise. As more slaves fled to areas in the North where
slavery was outlawed, their presence resulted in growing awareness of the inhu-
manity of slavery that would eventually contribute to its demise. Likewise, even
as slaves were systematically denied the right to fair trials in the antebellum period
(and beyond), the basic principles upon which such trials were based—the idea,
for instance, that a man could not be convicted of a crime if no witnesses came for-
ward to testify that he had actually committed it—became ingrained in the collec-
tive consciousness of slaves. Ironically, then, even as slave owners spread their
own culture to their slaves, they helped sow the seeds of the institution’s ultimate
demise. As O akes has put it, the political institutions of government did not
depend on slavery for their existence—but slavery itse lf did dep end on those
institutions to survive. Once slave owners lost control of those structures and
institutions—control they fought violently to maintain through the regular admis-
sion of additional slave states to the Union in the first half of the 19th century—the
existence of slavery as a legally sanctioned system would become significantly
more precarious.
So while the slave insurrections led by Gabriel, Denmark Vesey, Charles
Deslondes, and Nat Turner ma y have been suppressed with overwhelmi ng force
by slave owners, they still served an important purpose in helping to hasten the
demise of the system of slavery. By ratc heti ng up the level of force used to sup-
press slave reb ellions, slave owners unwittingly insisted on thrusting the “slave
problem” into the collective awareness of a wider range of American s—and into
the institutions t hat formed the legal fabric of American society in the 19th cen-
tury. Many in the political class were well aware of the contradictions implicit in
the slave system and the impending difficulty of extricating the country from it.
(These sentiments were expressed by Thomas Jefferson when he famously wrote,
256 Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s)
discussing the question of whether to admit Missouri into the Union a s a slave
state, that “we have a w olf by the ea r and we can ne ither hold him nor s afely let
him go.” He added, “Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”)
Nat Turner’s rebellion in Virginia occasioned an extraordinary discussion among
white elites in 1831–1832 about the system of sl avery in which multiple options
were considered for finding a way out of that system. In the end, Virginia’s politi-
cal leaders chose to endorse and justify the use of violence against slave insur-
gents, turning their backs on any possibility that slavery could be peaceably
dismantled there. Historian Susan Dunn asserts that 1832 marks the point at which
Virginia transitioned from a state where the slave system was widely viewed as a
“necessary evil” that should eventually be destroyed, to a radicalized state where
approximately 10 percent of its whole population—inc luding men, women,
children, and even slaves—was active in the state militia.
Such overwhelming shows of force were complemented by inhuman responses
to slave rebellion that included gibbeting, public hanging, and decapitation of con-
spirators so their heads could be displayed publicly to warn against future agita-
tion. If slave owning itself had not dehumanized slave masters, their collective
response to attempts by slaves to extricate themselves from the system almost cer-
tainly did. The Southampton Rebellion led by Nat Turner was by far the bloodiest
of the antebellum period, and Turner’s ruthlessness can almost certainly be traced
to his and his fellow insurgents’ awareness of earlier responses to similar insurrec-
tions. In the end, the increasing paranoia of slave owners—manifested in shocking
brutality against anyone accused of fomenting rebellion—did as much as anything
to hasten the demise of the slave system. Gabriel, Deslondes, Vesey, and Turner all
were executed for their opposition to slavery, but their efforts were not undertaken
in vain.
The Legacy of Slave Rebellion in the Antebellum Period
If a nything h ad become clear by the 1850s, it was that n eit her slave owners nor
abolitionists were willing to give ground to one another in the fight over slavery.
As security tightened across the South in the wake of Nat Turner’s So uthamp ton
Rebellion, slave-led uprisings became virtually nonexistent. In 1859, a final ante-
bellum revolt was suppressed when John Brown attempted to rally slaves to seize
a federal armory located at Harper’s Ferry in what is now West Virginia. Brown’s
plan was to encourage slaves in Virginia to join him and cause a ripple effect
throughout the South that would result in an end to the slave system. Brown was
hanged for his actions and the raid was a failure, but it represented an inexorable
step toward the Civil War: as a white abolitionist, Brown was the very personifica-
tion of the things the slave-owning class feared the most. Portrayed as a martyr by
Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s) 257
abolitionists in the North, Brown was reviled just as passionately in the South as a
religious fanatic and murderer. Frederick Douglass paid tribute to Brown after
Brown’s death, crediting him with beginning the war that ended American slavery.
“I could live for the slave,” Douglass f amously said of Brown; “but he could die
for him.”
In the final analysis, the constant friction s laves and abolitionist sympa thizers
brought to bear on the sl ave system in the South helped contribute immeasurably
to its collapse. Over the course of several generations, slaves built a culture that
wreaked havoc on their owners’ ability to keep them in line, occasionally lashing
out in violence against the oppression they endured. Though it took a civil war to
finally end legally sanctioned slavery in the United States, it seems unlike ly that
the war could even have taken place without the efforts of thousands of unnamed
slaves who rebelled against the system. Their e fforts laid the groundwork for the
bloodiest conflict in American history to that point, but also helped end the most
persistent, and philosophically inconsistent, system of slavery in the world.
—Dave Powell
See also all entries under Stono Rebellion (1739); New York Slave Insurrection (1741);
Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831); New Orleans Riot ( 1866); New Orleans Race Riot
(1900); Atlanta Race Riot (1906); S pringfield Race Riot (1908); Houston Riot (1917);
Red Summer (1919); Tulsa Race Riot (1921); Civil Rights Movement (1953–1968); Watts
Riot (1965); Detroit Riot s (1967); Los Angeles Uprising (1992).
Further Reading
Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. New York: Columbia University Press,
1943.
Dunn, Susan. Domin ion of Memories: Jefferson, Mad ison, and the Decline o f Virginia.
New York: Basic Books, 2007.
Egerton, Douglas R. Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and
1802. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.
Franklin, John Hope. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans. New York:
Vintage, 1947.
Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1974.
Genovese, Eugene D. The World the Slaveholders Made. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan Univer-
sity Press, 1969.
Higginson, Thomas W. Black Rebellion: A Selection from Travellers and Outlaws.New
York: Arno Press, 1969.
Jacobs, Harriet A. Incidents in t he Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself.Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
Lester, Julius. To Be a Slave. New York: Scholastic, 1968.
258 Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s)
Oakes, James. Sl avery and Freedom: An Inter pretation o f the Old So uth.NewYork:
Vintage Books, 1990.
Raboteau, Albert J. Slave Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
WGBH Educational Foundation and the Public Broadcasting System, “Africans in
America: America’s Journey through Slavery.” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/
home.html (accessed October 1, 2008).
Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present.NewYork:
HarperCollins, 2003.
Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s) 259
Boxley, George (c. 1779–1865)
George Boxley was born around 1779 or 1780 in Spotsylvania County, Virginia.
By the time of his death in 1865, Boxley had led a colorful life on the frontier—
and on the run. He was, at turns, a Methodist preacher, a social agitator, a fugitive
from the law, and a pioneer. Boxley is remembered for allegedly attempting to
incite a slave rebellion in Virginia in 1815–1816. He was accused of encouraging
slaves from Spotsylvania, Orange, and Louisa counties to collect ammunition and
proceed to seize the town of Fredericksburg before assaulting the state capital in
Richmond. Boxley was arrested, along with 27 slaves, and charged with con-
spiracy and insurrection. Five slaves were executed, and six more were transported
out of Virginia. Boxley escaped capture when his wife, Hannah, smuggled a saw
into his jail cell, and he freed himself and headed for Ohio and, later, Indiana.
Despite numerous attempts to return him to Virginia, Boxley lived the remainder
of his life on the Indiana frontier.
“Boxley’s Plot,” as it came to be known, is shrouded in mystery, and Boxley’s
own role in it is difficult to know. What is known is that Boxley was not popular
among the local elites in Spotsylvania County in the first decades of the 19th cen-
tury, nor were they popular with him. Boxley was described by local magistrates
as “a man of restless and aspiring mind; wild and visionary in his theories, and
ardent in the pursuit of his designs,” and seen as the very personification of the
slaveholding class’s greatest fear: a white man willing to subordinate his own
self-interest to the cause of freedom. Yet Boxley’s motives may have be en less
selfless than they appeared. His own history as the slave-owning s on of a slave-
owner and as a slave patroller himself suggests that Boxley saw his attempted
rebellion as much as a fight against local elites as one to be undertaken on behalf
of slaves. He was vilifie d in Virginia as a man desperate to raise his own profile,
as a religious fanatic, and as a dangerous rebel intent on upending the status quo.
But, ironically, Boxley ended his life as the head of a reasonably well-respected
pioneer family on the American frontier.
Boxley’s curious li fe raises a numb er of interes ting questions about the r ole
slavery played in the lives of lower-class whites in the 19th century. When he dis-
covered that he could not attain the status he sought in Virginia’s slave society,
Boxley took advantage of the frontier safety valve (an idea popularized by the his-
torian Frederick Jackson Turner) to find a place where he could be among the local
elite. Along the way, he became accused of stirring up social tension in various
places and appea rs to have actually befr iended many of the slaves and former
slaves he met in hi s travels. Boxley was, like many of his fellow citizens in t he
261
19th century, a complicated figure: equal parts firebrand and pragmatis t, appa-
rently driven most of all by a desire to improve his own lot in life.
—Dave Powell
Further Reading
Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. New York: Columbia University Press,
1943.
Sch warz, Philip J. Migrants against Slavery: Virginians an d the Nation. Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2001.
Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History.NewYork:Holtand
Company, 1962.
Deslondes, Charles (d. 1811)
Charles Deslondes was the leader of one of the largest slave revolts in U.S. history.
A native of Saint Domingue (known today as Haiti), Deslondes organized a group
of about fellow slaves in St. Charles Parish, south of New Orleans, on January 8,
1811. Deslondes and his fellow insurgents wounded his master, Manuel Andry,
and killed Andry’s son, then began marching toward New Orleans, gathering addi-
tional insurgents from plantations along the way. Deslondes may have recruited as
many as 500 slaves to join his march to New Orleans. Along the way, the army of
slaves burned and pillaged several plantations and killed two white people. As they
approached New Orleans, the slaves were met by General Wade Hampton and a
detachment of U.S. regular troops, along with two companies of the Louisiana
militia. The strong show of force stopped the insurgency abruptly; 66 slaves were
killed, and 17 were counted missing and presumed dead. Several others were cap-
tured. In the ensuing days, a local judge appointed a jury of plantation owners
(some of whom had been directly affected by the uprising) to determine the guilt
or innocence of approximately 30 slaves involved in the uprising. Twenty-one
slaves, including Deslondes, were convicted between January 12 and January 18
and sent to the plantations from whence they had come to be executed by their
masters; another was executed on February 20. The murdered slaves were decapi-
tated and had their heads placed on poles to discourage future uprisings.
Once the insurrection had been successfully halted, recriminatio ns began to fly
among the planter elite. Governor William C . C. Claiborne and many native New
Orleanians argued that the slaves who had led the uprising were “foreign s laves,”
not from Louisiana; as such, they said, the solution to the problem of preventing
future uprisings was to stop the importation of slaves from other places. Affronted
by the governor’s suggestion that the uprising was their fault, planters responded by
262 Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s)
blaming Claiborne himself and demanded that a full regiment of federal troops be
placed in New Orleans immediately. They also moved to reform existing laws that
had permitted some slaves to provide commercial services in N ew Orleans, and
even to re nt quarter s and earn incom e there, out of view of their masters. Others
believed that the revolt had been planned by Spanish or French agitators intent on
reclaiming Louisiana for themselves.
Overlooked by the white elite was another possibility: that Deslondes and his
fellow insurgents had been inspired by a recent battle in Saint Domingue won by
Henri Petion, a former black slave and heir to the political legacy of Toussaint
L’Ouverture. To acknowledge the inspiration of L’Ouverture or Christophe would
have been tantamount to acknowledging that the slaves had the sense and capabil-
ity to desire and demand their own freedom. This was an idea that whites in Loui-
siana simply were not capable of entertaining.
The immediate impact of the 1811 insurrection was that slave laws were
strengthened, and the paranoia of slave owners increased. The insurrection also
nearly derailed attempts t o bring Louisiana into the Union as many in Congress
worried about admitting a state with such a large slave population. In re sponse
to the rebellion, slave owners in Louisiana did what slave owners did elsewhere:
they doubled-down on their attempts to prevent revolts and made conditions even
more in humane for slaves. For his part, Deslondes lives on as one of the most
courageous—and, in some ways, successful—slave insurgents in American history.
—Dave Powell
Further Reading
Ingersoll, Thomas N. Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society
in the Deep South, 1718–1819. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999.
“The Louisiana Purchase: A Heritage Explored.” Online Educational Resource from the
LSU Libraries’ Special Collections. http://www.lib.lsu.edu/special/purchase/
history.html (accessed September 4, 2008).
Smith, Jessie Carney. Black Firsts: 2,000 Years of Extraordinary Achievement.Detroit,
MI: Visible Ink Press, 1994.
Thompson, Thomas Marshall. “National Newspaper and Legislative Reactions to Louisiana’s
Deslondes Slave Revolt of 1811.” Louisiana History 33 (1992): 5–29.
Gabriel (d. 1800)
The revolt planned and nearly consummated by a blacksmith named Gabriel, in
1800 in Virginia, was very different from the stereotypical image of slave
revolts. By the laws of Virginia, Gabriel was the property o f Thomas Prosser.
Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s) 263