Resistance and Other Responses to Slavery

Abstract

The idea that the only form of resistance to slavery was bloody revolt did not long survive the publication in the late 1950s of Stanley Elkins’ Slavery. Indeed almost two decades before Elkins used the relative absence of revolt in the United States as evidence for ‘Sambo’, the infantilized slave victim, Herbert Aptheker had argued for many subtle forms of resistance, including work go-slows, feigned illness, poisoning of whites and sabotage as petty as the breaking of tools and as damaging as arson. The scholarly controversies provoked by Elkins gave new emphasis to Aptheker’s arguments and also led convincingly to the conclusion that the incidence of large-scale revolt in Latin America and the West Indies, including the formation of successful maroon communities of runaway slaves, owed much more to environment and demography than to avoidance of the psychological conditioning that had allegedly produced Sambo. And very quickly the absence of rebellion in the United States came to be seen, not as institutionalized passivity, but as realistic appraisal of the odds in a society where whites outnumbered blacks. The new emphasis on slave community also suggested that slaves had too much to lose to challenge such a power structure head on. This was especially the case in Eugene Genovese’s thesis of an implicit bargain between masters and slaves, with the latter providing labour in return for largely unsupervised leisure time.1KeywordsDisorderly ConductSlave PopulationPetty TheftFree ColouredSlave SocietyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.