[On September
9, 1739, enslaved African Americans began a brief but bloody rebellion in
South Carolina. So this week on the 280th anniversary I’ll
AmericanStudy Stono and other rebellions and contexts, leading up to a weekend
post on cultural representations of such revolts.]
On how a
thwarted 1800 revolt both echoes and diverges from familiar tropes.
Although it was
discovered and more than 25
of its intended participants executed before it began, in many other ways
the Virginia slave revolt planned in August 1800 by a twenty-something enslaved
man named Gabriel (often known as Gabriel Prosser, after the last name of
the Richmond-area
family that owned him and his two brothers) closely parallels the Stono
Rebellion and many other such histories. It was led by a striking individual, a
talented and literate young man who was described by contemporaries as “a
fellow of great courage and intellect above his rank in life.” It pulled
together enslaved people from a number of neighboring plantations, with a plan
to march together toward a future of freedom and opportunity far different from
the world of chattel slavery. And in its aftermath, the fears it inspired
contributed to a number of repressive legal and social responses, including an
1806 law passed by the Virginia Assembly that required free African Americans
to leave Virginia within a year or face potential re-enslavement.
Yet as historian
Douglas Egerton has uncovered and discussed at length in his magisterial
book Gabriel’s
Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 & 1802 (1993), there
are many specific aspects of Gabriel’s rebellion that diverge from those
broadly familiar tropes and reveal significant cultural and historical contexts
for turn of the 19th century Virginia and America. Many of those
have to do with Gabriel himself, and particularly with his (by the summer of
1800) longstanding and well-established status as a skilled
blacksmith for hire. That category of enslaved person will be familiar to
anyone who has read Frederick Douglass’s
Narrative, as Douglass was similarly
hired out by his owner during his time in Baltimore. And it’s important to be
clear that this was still very much a form of slavery, as it was the
owners/plantations that chiefly benefitted from the work and wages, not the
enslaved laborers. Yet nonetheless, this side of Gabriel’s life and identity
reminds us of a fundamental truth captured by works like Mechal
Sobel’s The World They Made Together:
that 18th and 19th century Virginia, and America, were
literally and figuratively constructed by both individuals like Gabriel and the
intersections of all the cultures and communities present in this evolving
society.
Gabriel’s
experiences in that role no doubt contributed to his evolving visions of both
his own life and his society, and thus to his plans for rebellion and social
change (according to Egerton, after his rebellion succeeded he planned to “drink
and dine with the merchants of” Richmond). Another factor, and an even more
complex and (at least in this context) under-remembered one, is the fraught relationship
between France and the era’s political systems. Egerton discovered evidence
of white co-conspirators (whom Gabriel had likely met during his work as a
blacksmith), at least one of whom was a French national. Not coincidentally,
part of Gabriel’s plan involved kidnapping Virginia
Governor James Monroe, a friend and ally of Vice President Thomas Jefferson
in his Democratic-Republican Party. By late August 1800 the highly contested
presidential campaign between Jefferson and Adams was in full swing, and
much of Jefferson’s support came from Southern planters and farmers. Fears of
both slave revolts and of French radicals could well have undermined or
splintered Jefferson’s coalition, which would help explain why (again,
according to Egerton) evidence of the French co-conspirator’s activities was
never produced in court proceedings. Far too complex contexts to address
adequately in a few sentences, but a reminder that every slave rebellion,
including Gabriel’s, is far more multi-layered than overarching tropes or
tropes might suggest.
Next rebellion
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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