All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849 by Jeff Strickland

Abstract

Reviewed by: All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849 by Jeff Strickland Sarah Whitwell (bio) All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849. By Jeff Strickland. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. 256. Cloth, $89.99; paper, $29.99.) When historians write about Black resistance to slavery, they often write about rebellions: moments of confrontation in which enslaved people lashed out directly and often violently against the exploitative conditions of slavery. Prominent in the historical record, such moments have received significant attention from historians. Three famous men typically dominate the narrative: Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner. Historian Jeff Strickland adds a new player to the slave rebellion narrative by telling the story of Nicholas Kelly, the bonded craftsman who led the Charleston workhouse rebellion. Although Strickland covers familiar ground by framing resistance primarily in terms of bloody rebellion, he deserves praise for drawing attention to a Black individual whose actions have been obscured within the historical record. In 1849, Nicholas Kelly, along with two accomplices, led a violent revolt that allowed thirty-seven enslaved people to escape the workhouse where they had been imprisoned in Charleston, South Carolina. In the immediate aftermath of the rebellion, terrified white South Carolinians launched two investigations. The first explored mismanagement of the workhouse, concluding that the rebellion had resulted from a laxity of discipline. The second focused on religious instruction of enslaved people. Despite these two investigations and the policy changes that resulted, the Charleston workhouse rebellion has been missed by historians. Strickland reveals that it took twenty years to amass the documentation needed for his book because the evidence is so scattered. Why the rebellion has been ignored and downplayed in the historical record, then, is a central theme of his study. Strickland frames the recording of the Charleston workhouse rebellion as an act of silencing the past. He succinctly explains how white South Carolinians seized control of the narrative by restricting references to the rebellion in mainstream publications. Even in personal papers, Strickland reveals, few white South Carolinians referred to the rebellion explicitly, instead using euphemisms that minimized the resistance of enslaved people. Because of these limitations to the record, the significance of the revolt has long been missed by historians. Strickland might have pushed [End Page 239] his analysis further by explicitly framing this manipulation of the historical record as epistemic violence against marginalized groups. Strickland positions the rebellion as a pivotal moment leading to the secession of South Carolina from the United States in 1861. Slave insurrections were a clear indicator of opposition to chattel slavery, and many white southerners lived in fear of rebellion. In chapter 1, Strickland traces the history of insurrections in the Atlantic world, revealing how each rebellion contributed to a climate of fear within South Carolina. In chapter 2, Strickland positions the workhouse as a response to South Carolinian concerns about potential insurrection. The workhouse, he argues, represented the establishment and maintenance of both social control and racial domination. Strickland builds on this theme in chapter 3, in which he challenges the notion that urban slavery was less harsh than rural slavery. Nearly a hundred pages into the book there is little discussion of the Charleston workhouse rebellion. What Strickland does instead is create a sense of continuity between the Charleston workhouse rebellion and other slave revolts. The downside to this approach is that Strickland seldom references the myriad other ways in which enslaved people resisted. Even when discussing political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott’s Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985), a book that famously drew attention to methods of informal resistance, Strickland largely ignores Scott’s argument that subordinate classes are rarely able to engage in formal resistance because of high risk and lack of resources. Instead, he reinforces a long-standing misconception that rebellions were the main way that enslaved people voiced their discontent. Strickland gets to the heart of his narrative in chapter 4. Here we finally learn how Kelly ended up imprisoned in the workhouse, and in chapter 5 we reach the Charleston workhouse rebellion at last. It is in these chapters that readers learn more about...