DIVERSITY | Offering a place for everyone
29 December 2008
By the Sword
Some African-American slaves took up arms against slavery
This article is excerpted from the book Free At Last: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 3.6 MB).
As early as 1663, when several Gloucester County, Virginia, blacks were beheaded for plotting rebellion, African-American slaves launched a number of rebellions against their slave masters. They could look for inspiration to Haiti, where native resistance expelled the French colonizers, ended their slave-plantation labor system, and established an independent republic. In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a successful black entrepreneur named James Forten concluded that African Americans similarly “could not always be detained in their present bondage.” In the American South, white plantation owners feared he might be right, and they reacted brutally to even the slightest tremor of possible rebellion.
Even so, some brave African Americans were determined to take up arms against impossible odds. Perhaps the best-known struggle occurred in Virginia in 1831. Nat Turner (1800-1831) was a slave in Southampton County, Virginia. His first master allowed Turner to be schooled in reading, writing, and religion. Turner began to preach, attracted followers, and, by some accounts, came to believe himself divinely appointed to lead his people to freedom. On August 22, 1831, Turner and a group of between 50 and 75 slaves armed themselves with knives, hatchets, and axes. Over two days, they moved from house to house, freeing the slaves they met and killing more than 50 white Virginians, many of them women and children.
The response was as swift as it was crushing. Local militia hunted down the rebels, 48 of whom would be tried and 18 of whom were hanged. Turner escaped, but on October 30 he was cornered in a cave. After trial and conviction, Turner was hanged and his body flayed, beheaded, and quartered. Meanwhile, mobs of vengeful whites attacked any blacks they could find, regardless of their involvement in the Turner revolt. About 200 blacks were beaten, lynched, or murdered.
The political consequences of the Nat Turner rebellion extended far beyond Southampton County. The antislavery movement was suppressed throughout the South, with harsh new laws curtailing black liberties more tightly than ever before. Meanwhile in Boston, William Lloyd Garrison tarred as hypocrites those who blamed the antislavery movement for Turner’s revolt. The slaves, Garrison argued, had fought for the very liberties that white Americans proudly celebrated at every turn:
Ye accuse the pacific friends of emancipation of instigating the slaves to revolt. Take back the charge as a foul slander. The slaves need no incentives at our hands. They will find them in their stripes — in their emaciated bodies — in their ceaseless toil — in their ignorant minds — in every field, in every valley, on every hill-top and mountain, wherever you and your fathers have fought for liberty — in your speeches, your conversations, your celebrations, your pamphlets, your newspapers — voices in the air, sounds from across the ocean, invitations to resistance above, below, around them! What more do they need? Surrounded by such influences, and smarting under their newly made wounds, is it wonderful [surprising] that they should rise to contend — as other “heroes” have contended — for their lost rights? It is not wonderful.
