True Left

Records about antebellum slave insurrections are scarce. Whites generally suppressed reports of servile insurrection because they didn’t want to encourage other slaves, so many of the rebellions we know about were the ones too large to censor. Slaves tried to revolt hundreds of times in the antebellum period. The first settlement within the present-day United States had a slave revolt. San Miguel de Gualdape — established by Spaniards in what is now Georgia in 1526 — failed in just a few months, due to shipwreck, hunger, cold, disease, hostile Indians, and a slave rebellion.[ii]
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Blacks often tried to kill their masters,[v] and the preferred methods were arson and poison. Arson was so common that it raised insurance premiums. Entire towns could be lost to the torch.[vi] In the 1790s, prominent citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, organized a committee to ensure that brick or stone be used in building new buildings instead of wood, making them harder to burn. Servile arson also encouraged construction of fire-escapes, which became common in 19th-century Virginia.[vii]

Newspaper reports from the time show poisoning was also common. In 1751, South Carolina ordered the death penalty for slaves who tried to poison whites, and the guilty would not receive benefit of clergy. The preamble to this legislation explained that it was necessary because the crime was attempted so often.
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Fugitives slaves, or maroons, also harassed whites. They formed loose bands and communities, and preyed on whites, plundering plantations and robbing travelers. Maroons “plagued every slave society in which mountains, swamps, or other terrain provided a hinterland into which slaves could flee.”

Occasionally, maroons made alliances with American Indians; the Florida Seminole Wars are the best example.[xi] In 1823, maroons in Norfolk County, Virginia, killed several whites
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Insurrections could involve any number from a dozen to several thousand slaves. On most occasions, authorities discovered conspiracies and smashed them. When this failed, insurrections had one main purpose: to slaughter as many whites as possible. The most murderous insurrection killed nearly 60 whites.[xiv] Here are some of the most significant revolts.

In 1712, a band of around two dozen slaves and Indians in New York City got hold of guns, swords, knives, and axes. Early one Sunday morning, one of the insurrectionists set fire to his master’s plantation while others hid in the dark as local whites arrived to douse the blaze. Blacks ambushed and killed at least nine.[xv]
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African-born slaves also led the 1739 insurrection near the Stono River in South Carolina.[xviii] The only eyewitness account of that event, the bloodiest insurrection in South Carolina, was that of Lieutenant-Governor Lawrence Bull. Returning to Charles Town from Granville County on horseback, Bull happened upon a band of 80 or so blacks, carrying guns and flags and chanting, “Liberty!” Bull rode off and notified the militia.

The black leader was an illiterate slave named Jemmy (also known as Cato). The rebels decapitated their first two white victims, and displayed the heads on a staircase. The blacks then sacked several plantations, plundered liquor stores, and killed whites.[xix] By the time the insurrection was put down, slaves had razed a dozen plantations and killed and at least 25 white men, women, and children.[xx]
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In 1738, two different bands of slaves in the region escaped their plantations to head for what they hoped would be freedom in Spanish Florida. One of them, passing through Georgia, murdered several whites.[xxi]
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Gabriel Prosser marked the turn of the nineteenth century with a vast plot in Henrico County, Virginia. He was literate, willful, stood six feet two or three inches tall, and was considered by both blacks and whites as “a fellow of great courage and intellect above his rank in life.”[xxiii] In the spring of 1800, slaves in Virginia quietly made crude swords and bayonets, and hundreds of bullets. About one thousand — some mounted — armed with clubs, scythes, homemade swords and bayonets and a few guns, gathered six miles outside of Richmond. However, a downpour delayed their invasion of the city. Word got out about the insurrection, and Governor James Monroe of Virginia posted artillery and called up 650 militiamen. Before the slaves could attack, authorities arrested any they could identify.

Governor Monroe interviewed Prosser, noting that “from what he said to me, he seemed to have made up his mind to die, and to have resolved to say but little on the subject of the conspiracy.” John Randolph, who saw several of the blacks in custody, wrote: “[The slaves] have exhibited a spirit, which, if it becomes general, must deluge the Southern country in blood. They manifested a sense of their rights, and contempt of danger, and a thirst for revenge which portend the most unhappy consequences.”

Mississippi Territorial Governor W.C.C. Claiborne suggested that 50,000 slaves may have been in on the plot; others estimated their numbers at between two and 10 thousand. Governor Monroe believed that the plot had reached Virginia’s entire slave population.[xxiv] The blacks had decided to spare all Frenchmen, Methodists, and Quakers whom they considered sympathetic to emancipation. They would kill all others, but show mercy to whites who agreed to emancipation — by only cutting off an arm.[xxv]

In 1811, there was a large insurrection in Louisiana. It began when the ringleader, together with two dozen subordinates, hacked his master’s son to death as he slept.
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As many as 500 slaves, led by a free mulatto from Saint-Domingue and armed with axes, clubs, knives, and a few firearms, marched on New Orleans. They sacked plantations, intent on “killing every white they could get their hands on.” Local planters and militiamen took action, but the slaves were not fully subdued until Governor Claiborne called out the full militia.
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In 1822, in Charleston, South Carolina, Denmark Vesey led what Thomas Higginson, Unitarian minister and member of the Secret Six (the group of wealthy Northern abolitionists who financed John Brown’s attack at Harper’s Ferry), called “the most elaborate insurrectionary plot ever formed by American slaves.” Vesey’s conspiracy involved thousands of slaves who planned to exterminate every white in Charleston, seize bank reserves, and sail to Haiti.[xxix] One of the black leaders reportedly remarked that the men “would know what to do with the white women.”[xxx] Their plan was ambitious, with simultaneous attacks from five directions and a sixth force on horseback to patrol the streets.[xxxi]

Slaves within the city were set to start fires and set explosions with stolen black powder. When whites ran out of their homes to put the fires out, the blacks were to slaughter them. In the chaos, columns of slaves would fall upon the city from every direction, seizing the state and federal arsenals.
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The plot failed and the authorities sentenced Vesey to death. On the day of his execution, federal soldiers were called to help the militia suppress another insurrection.[xxxiii] The fact that Vesey was a free black, rather than a slave, “sent shockwaves throughout Charleston’s white community, the members of which had always considered the free blacks living in their midst to be a nonthreatening, although unwelcome, presence.”[xxxiv] Though Vesey and his subordinates had maintained lists of their co-conspirators, only one list and part of another were recovered. One witness testified that nearly 7,000 slaves had been involved, while another implicated 9,000.

In 1831, Nat Turner led the deadliest slave revolt in American history, in Southampton County, Virginia. Thomas Gray, the lawyer for several of the slaves involved in the revolt and the man who published Turner’s confession, wrote that the insurrection “was not instigated by motives of revenge or sudden anger, but the results of long deliberation, and a settled purpose of mind.” Gray continued: “It will thus appear, that whilst everything upon the surface of society wore a calm and peaceful aspect; whilst not one note of preparation was heard to warn . . . of woe and death, a gloomy fanatic was revolving in the recesses of his own dark, bewildered, and overwrought mind, schemes of indiscriminate massacre to the whites.”[xxxv] Virginia had a white majority, so any rebellion was sure to be suicide.[xxxvi]
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The slaves fanned out across the countryside and marched house to house, killing every white they found. The slaughter continued well into the next day; as the death toll mounted, so too did Nat Turner’s band. By the end, he had about 60 slaves, “all mounted and armed with guns, axes, swords and clubs.” At one home, the family tried to barricade the door. Turner later explained:

    Vain hope! Will, with one stroke of his axe, opened it, and we entered and found Mrs. Turner and Mrs. Newsome in the middle of a room, almost frightened to death. Will immediately killed Mrs. Turner, with one blow of his axe. I took Mrs. Newsome by the hand, and . . . struck her several blows over the head, but not being able to kill her, as the sword was dull. Will, turning around . . . dispatched her also.[xxxix]

When Turner arrived at the Whitehead family’s home, he said he was:

    [Ready] to commence the work of death, but they whom I left, had not been idle; all the family were already murdered, but Mrs. Whitehead and her daughter Margaret. As I came ‘round to the door, I saw Will pulling Mrs. Whitehead out of the house, and at the step he nearly severed her head from her body, with his broad axe. Miss Margaret. . . had concealed herself. . . on my approach, she fled, but was soon overtaken, and after repeated blows with a sword, I killed her by a blow on the head, with a fence rail.
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One slave insurrection succeeded: a mutiny aboard the slave transport Creole in 1841. One black and one white were killed in the mutiny, after which the blacks forced the white navigator to sail to the British Bahamas. Most of the blacks escaped to freedom.[xliv]
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As for weapons, large numbers of slaves had access to axes. Slaves who worked in the sugar fields carried knives large enough to decapitate a man with one blow, and every slave who worked in the tobacco fields carried a blade. Many slaves knew how to use firearms despite legal restrictions.
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Fears of servile revolt were so serious that they affected Confederate troop movements.[lxiv] Throughout the war, there were steady reports of conspiracies and individual acts of sabotage, arson, and murder. Maroons dramatically increased their depredations. In several cases, white deserters and escaped Yankee prisoners formed biracial groups of bandits who preyed on lightly-defended Southerners while the Confederate Army was away fighting.[lxv]
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“[H]orrified as Southern whites were by the uprising, some Northerners . . . could hardly suppress their satisfaction at what they took to be a justified rebellion against the horrendous institution of slavery.”[lxxi]
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