Slave Rebellion Research Articles

Communities in Revolt: A Comment

This essay comments on three articles appearing in the same issue of the Journal of the Early Republic: Randolph Ferguson Scully, "'I come here before you did and I shall not go away': Race, Gender, and Evangelical Community on the Eve of the Nat Turner Insurrection"; Patrick H. Breen, "Contested Communion: The Limits of White Solidarity in Nat Turner's Virginia"; and Anthony E. Kaye, "Neighborhoods and Nat Turner: The Making of a Slave Rebel and the Unmaking of a Slave Rebellion." Both the comment and the papers originated in a panel session at the 2005 annual convention of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. The comment suggests that the three articles fit together exceptionally well and demonstrate how local history can provide an ideal setting for raising questions of far more than local interest. Scully and Breen provide book-ends to the Nat Turner insurrection, examining religious tensions in southeastern Virginia on the eve of and immediately following the rebellion. Together, their articles reveal a basic continuity in the dominant pattern of black-white interaction within the Baptist churches of Southampton County, Virginia, a pattern in which segregation and subordination coexisted with a significant degree of black religious autonomy. Kaye focuses on Nat Turner and the revolt that he led, arguing that its most salient characteristic was its local orientation; the revolt "arose from the solidarity of neighborhoods, and it broke apart on the shoals between them." Although these articles have a local focus, they raise big questions, touching on black-white religious interaction, disagreements among whites over the place of blacks in Protestant churches, the sources and limitations of slave rebellion, and the overall impact of the Turner insurrection. Together, they give readers a lot to think about.

Manzano's Zafira and the Performance of Cuban Nationhood

Domingo del Monte's tertulia, which sought to define Cuban nationalism through literary imaginings, exemplifies Benedict Anderson's belief that the formation of nations is an act of collective will disseminated largely though the medium of writing (73). But the group's white Creole invention of nation was a truncated one that entertained in limited and generally figurative terms the direct participation of Cuba's majority population of color, even within the antislavery narratives it so vigorously cultivated. Despite his periodic mimicry of European models and efforts to placate the tertulia's white readership, Juan Francisco Manzano was engaging in an aesthetic-and political-dialogue with Enlightenment values and ideas of nation that were rather autonomous of white Creole designs. In his last major published work, and his only drama, Zafira: tragedia en cinco actos (Havana, 1842), Manzano responds to Creole literary fantasies of miscegenation as well as Hispanic literary traditions of colonization and delivers his own formula for sovereignty in Cuba, which I suggest holds obscured reference to the 1791 slave revolt of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) and the subsequent establishment of a black republic there in 1804.Late eighteenth-century enlightened, liberal philosophy transformed the political landscape of Europe and sparked successful independence movements in much of Latin America. But nineteenth-century Cuba was characterized by fear and repression, tight censorship, and overt persecution. A series of factors on the island contributed to this continued squelching of autonomy, including what even Simon Bolivar had recognized as a tendency of the white population to remain loyal to the Spanish crown: Although a handful of progressive individuals favoured independence from Spain, Cuba's economic elite was conservative, fearful of the economic and social consequences of a break with the colonial motherland (Gott 52). Meanwhile, in Cuba and elsewhere in the Americas, slavery continued to exist in stark contradiction to the values of freedom and equality championed in new and restructured societies. The British impulse towards abolition resulted in its own legal termination of the slave trade, but Spain refused to discontinue its involvement in the practice, despite signing a treaty with Britain in 1817 to do so by 1820 (Gott 59). Moreover, although Spain passed a reformist constitution in 1836 for its own population, it denied the right of Cuba to participate in those reforms, expelled Cuban representatives from the Cortes in 1837, and determined instead that the island would be governed by special rules (Fischer 102).While colonies and new nations in the Americas scrambled to find ways to justify the persistence of slavery in an age that made claims to human equality by birth, Haiti stood as a singular example of black freedom and political self-determination. Its existence in the midst of myriad slaveholding territories was unsettling at best. The slave revolt in Saint Domingue had pushed thousands of wealthy land and slave owners first into Spanish-held Santo Domingo and then into Cuba, bringing with them not only bloody stories of black rebellion that terrified Cuban owners, but also some of their own slaves. Cuba had tried repeatedly to prevent French slaves from entering the island in an attempt to prevent the events of Haiti from repeating themselves there. Cuba had suffered its own slave rebellions, which became increasingly frequent in the early nineteenth century. It is difficult to say how many of those were directly influenced by the events in Haiti (Gaspar and Geggus 4-5, 13-18).1 But in white minds, the connection was presumed, and this perpetual fear of slave agency, along with concerns about Creoles seeking independence determined the repressive character of a series of Cuban governorships like that of Francisco Dionisio Vives (1823-1832) and General Miguel Tacon Rosique (1834-38): Este, que habia apurado la hiel de la derrota en Sur America, trajo con sus amargos rencores la firme determinacion de estirpar con mano dura todo germen de liberalismo para evitar posibles sediciones. …

Constituting Antebellum African American Identity: Resistance, Violence, and Masculinity in Henry Highland Garnet's (1843) “Address to the Slaves”

In August 1843 Presbyterian minister Henry Highland Garnet delivered his “Address to the Slaves of the United States of America” to the National Convention of Colored Citizens in Buffalo, NY. While often read (and almost as often dismissed) as either an unqualified call for a violent slave rebellion or, at the least, a celebration of prior acts of militant resistance which suggested that such methods deserved further consideration than they were currently receiving, the “Address” might profitably be approached within the context of an identity–action dialectic. Garnet's discussion of resistance and violence is more complicated than many scholars have recognized; one way in which we might recuperate these contested ideas and recognize their implications for African American identity and agency is to examine the way Garnet engaged and negotiated some of the antebellum African American community's dominant discursive traditions. The image and the accompanying idiom of a frequently submissive, emasculated “suffering servant” as well as the image/idiom of a violent, potentially brutish “avenging messiah” have long occupied prominent positions in the African American cultural imagination. Garnet's “Address” negotiated the disjunctive logics of submission/resistance, emasculation/brutish violence, and “suffering servant”/“avenging messiah” by drawing on and exploiting the resources of these and other performative traditions in order to fashion a tertium quid, a middle course of action capable of constituting a new mode of African American agency and an alternative form of civic identity.

The Slave's Rebellion: Fiction, History, Orature

Book Review| January 01 2007 The Slave's Rebellion: Fiction, History, Orature The Slave's Rebellion: Fiction, History, OratureAdéèkó, Adélékè Khadidiatou Gueye Khadidiatou Gueye Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature Studies (2007) 44 (3): 324–326. https://doi.org/10.2307/25659585 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Khadidiatou Gueye; The Slave's Rebellion: Fiction, History, Orature. Comparative Literature Studies 1 January 2007; 44 (3): 324–326. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25659585 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressComparative Literature Studies Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2007 The Pennsylvania State University2007The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Slave's Rebellion: Fiction, History, Orature

The Slave's Rebellion: Fiction, History, Orature

The Slave's Rebellion: Fiction, History, Orature (review)

The Slave's Rebellion: Fiction, History, Orature (review)

“To establish a community of property”: Marriage and race before and during the Haitian Revolution

The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) was the greatest social upheaval in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. The paper presents results from the first systematic study of marriage during this event, which included slave rebellion (1791), general emancipation (1793) and political independence from France (1803). The article focuses on a single colonial parish, leveraging a sample of roughly 1000 contracts by comparing them with similar documents from same region in the 1760s and 1780s. Ironically, amid a revolution that was ostensibly eliminating slavery and racism, the interracial marriages that had once been common in this parish virtually disappeared. The wealthy “mulatto” families who had been free long before 1791 intensified their pre-Revolutionary pattern of endogamy and cousin-marriage. In the meantime, French male immigrants of the sort who, before the Revolution, had allied with these established clans, now shunned these marriages.

Writ In Blood: John Brown’s Charter of Humanity, The Tribunal of History, and the Thick Link of American Political Protest

Writ In Blood:John Brown’s Charter of Humanity, The Tribunal of History, and the Thick Link of American Political Protest Zoe Trodd All the great charters of humanity have been writ in blood. I once hoped that American democracy would be engrossed in less costly ink. —Theodore Parker, 1859 I leave it to an impartial tribunal to decide whether the world has been the worse or the better of my living and dying in it. —John Brown, 1859 If General Tubman is the Mother of Our Country and Frederick Douglass the Father . . . then bloody old Shenandoah Brown . . . is some kind of Godfather. Blood may be thicker than water, but politics is thicker than either. —Terry Bisson, 1988 Sketching the Charter of Blood [Brown] has struck the bottom line of the philosophy which underlies the abolition movement . . . Slavery is a system of brute force . . . It must be met with its own weapons. —Frederick Douglass, 1859 If you commence, make sure work," advised David Walker in his protest pamphlet, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829). Addressing all blacks who might rebel, he continued: "Do not trifle, for they will not trifle with [End Page 1] you—they want us for their slaves, and think nothing of murdering us in order to subject us to that wretched condition—therefore, if there is an attempt made by us, kill or be killed." The pamphlet prophesied millennial violence if slavery was not abolished: "The Americans may be as vigilant as they please," warned Walker, "but they cannot be vigilant enough for the Lord, neither can they hide themselves, where he will not find and bring them out." He called blacks to action, to "go to work and prepare the way of the Lord," explaining: "There is a great work for you to do."1 In 1848, John Brown helped republish Walker's pamphlet (alongside an oration by the militant black abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet). Two years after this republication, the Fugitive Slave Law passed. Black abolitionists advocated responses to the law ranging from nonviolent civil disobedience to violent resistance. One, Joshua B. Smith, circulated weapons at an abolitionist meeting, and another, William P. Newman, wrote to Frederick Douglass: "I am frank to declare that it is my fixed and changeless purpose to kill any so-called man who attempts to enslave me or mine, if possible . . . To do this . . . would be an act of the highest virtue, and white Americans must be real hypocrites if they say not to it—amen!" At a meeting in Philadelphia, on October 14, 1850, several hundred free blacks passed a resolution that concluded: "In full view of the unheard of atrociousness of the provisions of this infernal fugitive slave bill, we solemnly declare before the Most High God, and the world, to resist to the death any attempt to enforce it upon our persons." The following year, when fugitives fought slave catchers trying to re-enslave them in Pennsylvania, the black radical James McCune Smith proclaimed: "Our white brethren cannot understand us unless we speak to them in their own language; they recognize only force. They will never recognize our manhood until we knock them down a time or two; they will then hug us as men and brethren." Echoing Smith, Mr. Culver in Martin Delaney's Blake: or, the Hut of America (1859) tells the black rebel Blake: "If you want white man to love you, you must fight im!" Blake sets out to incite a slave rebellion, Culver's words ringing in his ears: "Go on young man, go on!" John Brown's soon-to-be infamous strategies of violent resistance had a bloodline, traceable through the history of black abolitionism from Walker to Blake.2 Brown himself responded to the Fugitive Slave Law by forming the League of Gileadites, a black self-defense unit named after the Biblical army tested by God before battle. He wrote a document entitled "Words of Advice," and 44 black residents of Springfield, Massachusetts, signed an "Agreement" on January 15, 1851. Brown's advice included a range of guerilla tactics: "A lasso might possibly be applied to a slave-catcher," he suggested, or recommended...

Slaves to the Marketplace: Economic Liberty and Black Rebelliousness in the Atlantic World

Slaves to the Marketplace:Economic Liberty and Black Rebelliousness in the Atlantic World Douglas R. Egerton (bio) Late one night in 1822, a small band of men plotted revolution in a narrow house on Charleston's Bull Street. "[A]s soon as [we] can get the money from the Banks, and the goods from the stores," advised Rolla Bennett, the enslaved servant of South Carolina's governor, we "should hoist sail for Saint Doming[ue]" and live in freedom in the Caribbean republic. That came as welcome news to Frank Ferguson, a black artisan, who had grown weary of passing a large portion of his cash earnings on to his owner, Ann Ferguson. He "would pay [her] no more wages," he insisted, for "what would the Whites want with wages, [as] they would soon be no more." Twenty-two years before, and three hundred miles north, an enslaved blacksmith named Gabriel had told his brother Solomon of his dream of pulling down "the merchants" and "possess[ing] ourselves of their property." Any rebels who fought with him might "take the treasury, and divide the money amongst" themselves.1 [End Page 617] There are numerous ways to interpret these statements. Perhaps the slaves who banded together with Denmark Vesey regarded the specie in Charleston's banks as back pay for decades of uncompensated labor. Perhaps these bondmen recognized how much white men, particularly merchants, coveted cash, and so taking what whites valued was simply sweet revenge. Perhaps it was pragmatic. Vesey understood that Haiti's embattled president, Jean-Pierre Boyer, would be less than pleased to see a small armada of wanted men sail into his harbors, and so the money and goods might persuade him to risk the wrath of white Americans and European statesmen. Or perhaps the most obvious reading is also the correct one: That by the early nineteenth century, many slaves around the Atlantic world were attuned to the claims of money and property, and that regions of rebelliousness correlated to areas where the market economy was most advanced.2 This essay suggests that enslaved rebels throughout the Americas, and particularly those in the early national and antebellum United States, rose in revolt not merely because their urban milieu presented those who lived and labored in close proximity to one another with singular opportunities to organize, or even that city geographies diminished legal controls over them, but also because it gave them a better understanding of cash power. The cumulative experiences of these slaves provided them with a vision of a different class system—one, incidentally, that was emerging in Saint Domingue—in which class position was based upon initiative and economic advancement rather than on the more sluggish, agrarian plantation-based society in the countryside, where prosperity and race were conflated within a static and less dynamic system.3 [End Page 618] More than half a century ago, Herbert Aptheker put it best: The "cause" of slave revolts was slavery. At bottom, that was certainly true and well understood by all but the master class. Determined to avoid conceding the obvious, southern whites invariably pointed to foreign causes and outside agitators. In 1822, for example, Carolina authorities blamed their recent troubles on New York Senator Rufus King and "the Missouri poison"; just as, parenthetically, Charleston's mayor insisted in 1963 that "outsiders rather than city Negroes" were responsible for a protest march organized out of Vesey's old African Methodist Episcopal Church. Yet Aptheker's blunt assessment does little to explain why large-scale slave conspiracies were more prevalent in some parts of the Americas than in others, or why slave rebellions were virtually absent from the English mainland colonies in the seventeenth century, but almost endemic to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Most of all, it says little about the type of person who instigated slave revolts.4 There are numerous possibilities when it comes to explaining the patterns of slave rebelliousness in the Americas, and there are almost as many interpretations as there are historians who have investigated this question. Religion was often a factor, as revolts and conspiracies from Stono River to Saint Domingue and from Vesey to Nat Turner attest. So...

Clerks All! Or, Slaves with Cash

Clerks All! Or, Slaves with Cash Walter Johnson (bio) Douglas Egerton's fascinating article begins with an image of slave rebels in Charleston in 1822 planning to rob a bank. And, indeed, it speaks volumes that such an image should be interesting in and of itself, as it surely is. We have focused intensively in the literature on slavery and slave revolts to discern underlying tendencies and long-term transformations, but there is much about the everyday life of slavery (and especially of enslaved resistance) about which we know next to nothing. And apparently when slave rebels thought about revolt one of the practical steps they considered was to take over banks and steal the money inside (if, of course, taking that money from those banks could be called stealing given that it represented, in congealed form, labor that had been wrung from their bodies). Egerton asks why they began with the banks. Ranging widely and comparatively in time and space, Egerton proposes a big answer composed of several smaller arguments. To wit: Urban environments that hosted banks were shaped by structures and practices that both suggested and supported collective revolt as a solution to the problem of slavery. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cities, Egerton points out, were geographically complex: They provided a lot of places to hide and a lot of places to encounter subversive ideas and discontented people. And they provided enslaved people with a lot of ways to make money. The urban economy was sufficiently complex that it required flexible terms of employment even for slave labor. The skilled labor of a cabinet-maker would never be needed all the time by one [End Page 641] owner, but through hiring out, it might be useful to any number of clients and transformed into an income stream. Likewise, a man trying to set up a tavern in his front room might not have had the money to invest in buying a slave, but hiring a slave for a year at a time might have been a way to begin to make that money. And, finally, there were all the petty bribes and small cash incentives through which notionally unpropertied slaves were daily and regularly coaxed into labor everywhere in the Americas.1 And this money, Egerton argues, was meaningful. It was the lubricant that offered slaves an entrée to the treating and drinking of the multiracial tavern life of the docks, a world that Egerton's wonderful books on the revolts in Richmond in 1800 and Charleston in 1822 demonstrates was full of the subversive ideas and rough characters that made the idea of revolution believable. But there was more to money than that, for money, Egerton suggests, shaped the aspirational structure of revolt. The experience of having had money in their hands, Egerton argues, was, for slaves an experience of freedom: of possibilities that were otherwise foreclosed, of crossing boundaries that were in principle defined by race, but in practice, it turned out, defined by the cash nexus. Of buying fine clothes, or standing for a round of drinks, of experiencing the tonic power of [End Page 642] being able to choose, to evaluate, consider, compare, linger. Of behaving like a clerk. For Egerton, this experience was one of "psychological independence" of the very sort that made it possible to imagine revolution and freedom. I must admit that it took me a while to get used to this idea, but after my initial skepticism, I did so, and it is, of course, a really bright and interesting idea. Enslaved people lived in a society where power and beauty and sanctity and all sorts of other virtues were experienced and expressed as control over commodities. And the only irony in the fact that some of them—many of them?—might have joined their owners in imagining that the achievement of human freedom could be indexed by the possession of things is the most obvious one. It seems utterly sensible to try to imagine a world in which enslaved people could care for themselves and express their love for one another by pursuing money and purchasing goods. And, indeed, it seems utterly sensible to try to imagine a...

William A. Link, Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsWilliam A. Link, Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum VirginiaKeith A. WinsellKeith A. Winsell Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 91, Number 4Fall 2006P. Sterling Stuckey: In Praise of an Intellectual Legacy A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/JAAHv91n4p473 Views: 8Total views on this site Copyright ASALHPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. By Laurent Dubois. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Pp. xiv, 357. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $29.95 cloth; $17.95 paper. - A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804. By Laurent Dubois. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. xiii, 452. Maps. Illustrations.

Reviewed by: Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution, and: A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 Ada Ferrer Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. By Laurent Dubois. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Pp. xiv, 357. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $29.95 cloth; $17.95 paper. A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804. By Laurent Dubois. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. xiii, 452. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Chronology. Glossary. Index. $55.00 cloth; $22.50 paper. In these two books, published almost simultaneously in 2004, Laurent Dubois tells the story of the French Atlantic world in the Age of Revolution. Moving adroitly between metropolitan France and the colonies of Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe, Dubois recounts with exceptional power the story of the encounter between republican ideals and the institutions of slavery and colonialism. This is an inherently fascinating tale, and one rich in significance for our understanding of the history and legacies of slavery and racism, revolution and enlightenment, and democracy and human rights. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution is a masterful retelling of upheavals that transformed Saint-Domingue, the most prosperous colony of its time, into Haiti, an independent nation ruled by men of color, many of them formerly enslaved. Though this is a story that has been told before, Dubois's new synthesis has unusual depth and originality. He leads the reader into Saint-Domingue with fresh eyes, walking us through local cemeteries or helping us see the world's first large balloon fly over the densest and richest sugar cane in the world. In the process, he paints a vivid picture of the fissures in colonial society that would deepen and ultimately erupt after the start of revolution in France in 1789. When he moves to his discussion of the revolution itself, he lightly and expertly engages important historiographical questions, such as the place of voudou, maronnage, and transculturation in the slave revolution. But these interventions, while thoughtful and persuasive, are brief; throughout, the emphasis is clearly on the gripping narrative of revolution. [End Page 287] Dubois recounts the manner in which enslaved men and women of the colony rose up in August of 1791, and over the next three years did effective battle against their masters and the French colonial state. By October 1793, their successes, and the context of imperial war, led local French officials to abolish slavery throughout the colony, a move that was ratified by the French National Convention in February 1794. It was after French recognition of emancipation that the emerging leader of the slave revolution, Toussaint Louverture, embraced the French Republic, defeated the Spanish and British, and ultimately governed Saint-Domingue as an integral and equal territory of France. As Dubois shows, one of the greatest challenges confronting Louverture in this period was one that would haunt leaders of almost every major post-emancipation society over much of the nineteenth century: how to reconcile the freedom of laborers with the exigencies of plantation agriculture. In this, Louverture failed, instituting increasingly draconian measures to stem the rebellion of free cultivators. In 1802, after Napoleon's disastrous attempt to re-impose slavery and after Louverture's arrest and deportation to France, rebellion again became widespread, as the army and people of Saint-Domingue rose up to expel the French and declare independence. A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, beautifully written and exhaustively researched, focuses on the eastern Caribbean colony of Guadeloupe in this same period and tells a story that is much less known than that of Saint-Domingue. Dubois begins with an exploration of a 1793 slave insurrection in Trois-Rivières, where slaves took for themselves the banner and language of the French Republic to rise up, destroy a handful of plantations and kill 22 whites, whom they accused of a massive royalist conspiracy. Confronted by a group of anxious white colonists, the slave rebels greeted them openly, identifying themselves as "citizens and friends." With an alliance between slaves and the French Republic...

The forgotten fifth: African Americans in the age of revolution

As the United States gained independence, a full fifth of the country's population was African American. experiences of these men and women have been largely ignored in the accounts of the colonies' glorious quest for freedom. In this compact volume, Gary B. Nash reorients our understanding of early America, and reveals the perilous choices of the founding fathers that shaped the nation's future. Nash tells of revolutionary fervour arousing a struggle for freedom that spiralled into the largest slave rebellion in American history, as blacks fled servitude to fight for the British, who promised freedom in exchange for military service. Revolutionary Army never matched the British offer, and most histories of the period have ignored this remarkable story. conventional wisdom says that abolition was impossible in the fragile new republic. Nash, however, argues that an unusual convergence of factors immediately after the war created a unique opportunity to dismantle slavery. founding fathers' failure to commit to freedom led to the waning of abolitionism just as it had reached its peak. In the opening decades of the 19th Century, as Nash demonstrates, their decision enabled the ideology of white supremacy to take root, and with it the beginnings of an irreparable national fissure. moral failure of the Revolution was paid for in the 1860s with the lives of the 600,000 Americans killed in the Civil War. The Forgotten Fifth is a powerful story of the nation's multiple, and painful, paths to freedom.

Breve historia de la esclavitud en el Perú: Una herida que no deja de sangrar

In Breve historia de la esclavitud en el Perú, Carlos Aguirre surveys three hundred years of African slavery, from the Spanish Conquest to abolition in 1854. The volume is an important addition to the literature on slavery in Peru and the Americas, as well as the social history of colonial Peru. Aguirre tackles an important subject with ease and produces a very accessible analysis.The author focuses on the social and human aspects of slavery, rather than its economic and political effects. Aguirre aims at illuminating Peru’s present-day culture, influenced in innumerable ways by the traditions brought from Africa and the emergence of autochthonous Peruvian-African traditions. He shows how slavery shaped the cultural traditions of Afro-Peruvians and their descendents; some of these traditions have lasted until the present day.Breve historia highlights how the colonial state and its laws and courts, in conjunction with the church (as a legitimizing force), worked together to keep slavery a socially accepted form of domination. The first chapter discusses these forms of domination, including the ideological, legal, and political barriers that shaped Peruvian slavery. The chapter highlights the social stigma engendered by the caste system and colonial laws. The remainder of the book shows how Africans in Peru challenged domination. Chapter 2 concentrates on rural slavery and the important role it played in coastal agriculture, while chapter 3 focuses on slavery in urban Peru. In these chapters, Aguirre stresses the variations of slave labor, including as field workers, water sellers (aguateros), or domestics. The milieus in which slaves worked and the conditions of their enslavement were complex and diverse: in the fields, slaves labored alongside free blacks, peons, and wage laborers; in the city, slaves oftentimes worked as artisans, paying their owners a daily fee, while contributing immeasurably to the development of urban culture. This diversity created two important, if contradictory, situations: first, slaves were confronted with a reality that should have provoked questioning about their condition; second, as one among a multitude of forms of labor, slavery was in some way naturalized and made acceptable for many people, including slaves themselves (p. 70). This is not to say that slaves did not desire, or obtain, their freedom.Chapter 4 studies the influence of African slavery on religion and culture, including the processes of syncretism, especially on the coastal haciendas of the Jesuits, the largest slaveholders during the colonial era. Aguirre focuses on two of Peru’s most important religious devotions, the Señor de los Milagros and San Martín de Porres, and their roots in African society in Peru. He also looks at the development of Afro-Peruvian music and one of its most important contributions, the cajón. Chapter 5 looks at the long road to abolition, including forms of rebellion and resistance such as escape (cimarronaje) and banditry, and forms of repression, like panaderías and palenques. The scarcity of slave rebellions, Aguirre argues, does not indicate a lack of combativeness among slaves; rather, it proves there were other nonviolent ways to challenge the oppression of slavery. The final chapter looks at the political, social, and economic processes leading up to abolition. Abolition did not create an economic disaster for coastal agriculture; rather, it led to the consolidation of a new economic force that quickly began to dominate the nation’s economy and politics. African slaves and their descendants now had a rhetorical freedom and equality, but they remained marginalized within Peruvian society.A snapshot of the institution’s three-hundred-year history, Aguirre crafts his narrative from a wide variety of secondary sources, from the early phase of African slavery in Peru to studies of abolition and manumission. However, it is hard to see how the institution of slavery developed and changed over time: slavery seems to be the same in 1780 as it was in 1580. This minor critique in no way should detract from the important contribution that this book makes to the study of colonial Peru. An accessibly written and beautifully illustrated volume, it would make an excellent addition to courses on the history of slavery, Africans in the diaspora, the history of race, Peruvian history, or the history of colonial Latin America. The book’s 14 appendixes of primary sources (laws, decrees, and essays) will be valuable teaching aids to engage students into the realities and legalities of slavery and colonial Latin America. Hopefully, a translation to English is forthcoming.

In Search of Callie House and the Origins of the Modern Reparations MovementMary Frances Berry, My Face Is Black Is True

I appreciate the comments from these prominent scholars who participated in the ASALH plenary session and this book forum on My Face Is Black Is True. I hope their reactions encourage the widespread acceptance of Callie House and the Ex-Slave Movement in the historiography of the American experience. Darlene Clark Hine aptly places the narrative in the distinct field of Liberation Historiography. She also finds it a worthy addition to the field of black women's history. If scholars are moved to reassessment based on this study, it would, as she notes, be a clear example of how the marginalized, the overlooked, and rejected are at the center of our history. Daryl Scott's very perceptive analysis reinforces my hope that the narrative adds to our understanding of the many ways in which government harassment of social change movements occurred. The Ex-Slave Movement may have promoted a radical idea, but its actions were not really radical--it relied on exercising every person's First Amendment right to petition the government. Scott is also struck by how much the fate of the movement reflected the class divisions among Americans then and now. He believes my analysis raises the question of whether black elites, largely drawn from the middle and upper classes, can ever be adequate leaders of the masses of blacks. But I also recognize, as Callie House did, that the elite's goals of an education and voting rights bill were quite appropriate, but they were too exclusive in rejecting the pension claim. Perhaps dissembling, as Clark Hine describes how black women did not speak of being raped, well-off Americans who published newspapers and founded acceptable self-help organizations or denounced Jim Crow, remained silent about the Ex-Slave Association because of the lower class origins of its leaders and membership. I wonder if the fear that these middle-class leaders might become government targets affected their decisions to reject the pension cause. Scott wonders about the attitude of black intellectuals whom I do mention in the book. In examining correspondence and secondary works on this group, I found no discussion of the pension cause. In many cases, the civil rights activists were also intellectual elites. James Turner is attracted by what the study shows about Americans and social movements. Like slave rebellions, and the antebellum black convention movement before, and other movements since, he believes it is a clear example of how African American people created an indigenous, integrated political culture. He believes the Association's story should cause a shift in American historiography. I did not really consider the place of this work in the historiography of the American experience until after I was well along and began to think about the possible audience for the study. Thereafter, I tried to keep in mind the various theoretical and methodological issues posed as my research revealed findings that differed from the conventional wisdom. The best way for me to underscore these points, I believe, is to describe the research methodology I pursued, which led in and out of many blind alleys along the way. I first learned of Callie House and the Ex-Slave Pension Movement from a Detroit labor movement activist, Christopher Alston, some years ago. I gained the distinct impression that knowledge of the Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association and of Callie House traveled North by word of mouth with those who joined the great American migration to work in the automobile factories of the Motor City in the early 20th century. Perhaps black migrants to Chicago carried the message there. Alston, inspired by the comments of a retired black auto worker who recalled that there had been a movement to gain pensions as reparations, found records, and believed that additional sources could be found in the National Archives. …

The slave's rebellion: literature, history, orature

Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Hegel's Burden: The Slave's Counter Violence in Philosophy, Critical Theory, and Literature 2. Nat Turner and Plot Making in Early African American Fiction 3. Reverse Abolitionism and Black Popular Resistance: The Marrow of Tradition 4. Slave Rebellion, the Great Depression, and the Turbulence to Come for Capitalism: Black Thunder 5. Distilling Proverbs of History from the Haitian War of Independence: The Black Jacobins 6. Slave Rebellion and Magical Realism: The Kingdom of This World 7. Slavery in African Literary Discourse: Orality contra Realism in Yoruba Oriki and Omo Olokun Esin 8. Prying Subaltern Rebellious Consciousness Out of the Clenched Jaws of Oral Traditions: Efunsetan Aniwura 9. Reiterating the Black Experience: Rebellious Material Bodies and Their Textual Fates in Dessa Rose Conclusion: What Is the Meaning of Slave Rebellion Notes Bibliography Index

From Slave Rebels to Strikebreakers: The Quilombo of Jabaquara and the Problem of Citizenship in Late-Nineteenth-Century Brazil

From Slave Rebels to Strikebreakers: The Quilombo of Jabaquara and the Problem of Citizenship in Late-Nineteenth-Century Brazil

The Slave's Rebellion: Fiction, History, Orature (review)

Reviewed by: The Slave's Rebellion: Fiction, History, Orature Oyekan Owomoyela The Slave's Rebellion: Fiction, History, Orature By Adélékè AdéèkóBloomington: Indiana UP, 2005. ix + 203 pp. ISBN 0-253-34596-0 paper. Narratives of slave revolts, Adélékè Adéèkó's discussion demonstrates, express their authors' dissatisfaction with inhumane reality and their preferred strategies for amelioration. Focusing primarily on the Americas, it analyzes works spanning [End Page 238] the spectrum from antebellum North America (Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave) to the Cuban revolution (Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World). The modes they adopt (or inaugurate) are equally varied, ranging from the realist fictional of the antebellum writers to Carpentier's magical realism. In addition to "refashioning the present" they also aim at "preserving the past and sketching the trajectory [. . .] that the future developments should follow" (174). Ex-slave Madison Washington's career vindicates the writers' strategy: the account of Singbe (alias Cinque) Pieh's rebellion on the Amistad later inspires Washington, when he finds himself again captive on a slave ship, to lead an insurrection that succeeds in steering the vessel to a free port. Although convinced that the particularizing operations of "nationalist and ethnocentric will" (12) preclude any uniformity of historical and social processes across the black world, Adéèkó nonetheless seeks African examples to fit into his scheme. Finding none, he attributes the silence on the subject in "African creative cultures" to "a general anxiety of African intellectuals about the possible culpability of Africans in the Atlantic trade" (123). In practically the same breath, though, he cites the absence of records to bolster his skepticism about suggestions that Africans did resist the slavers: "something is amiss," he quips, "in the fact that popular African oratures do not preserve discursive records of these struggles against slavery [. . .] on the continent" (123). More problematic, however, is his use of his chosen texts, the lineage oríkì (praise poetry) of Olúfè and Oníkòyí, two renowned warriors, and Akínwùmí Ìsòlá's fiction Efúnsetán Aníwúrà. The title of the chapter on the latter is revealing: "Prying Rebellious Subaltern Consciousness Out of the Clenched Jaws of Oral Tradition." In the discussion of the texts, "prying" means subordinating fact to speculation and invention: "The African section of the book proceeds on the premise that domestic African slaves would have resisted their captivity" (4); "the poetics and politics of exclusion [. . .] might be responsible for the effacement of slavery in what have become African classical traditions" (4); Ifè and Ìkòyí are "two groups that would have played significant roles in slavery" (4); and Olúfè and Oníkòyí "were in all likelihood deeply involved in domestic slavery" (127; emphases added in all cases). The author's antinativist distaste for the Yoruba societies he discusses is evident—every day, in Olúfè's realm, "priests show up in pristine white outfits [. . .] and clean-shaven heads [. . .] to kill slaves [. . .] and offer their innards to the Gods"; and "the slave and the chicken [. . .] are of the same order" as sacrificial objects (128); Oníkòyí's career, for its part, is one of "brigandage," "war-mongering," "looting, slave raiding, [and] stealing"(129). The smear on what we see of the Yoruba past, however, also devalues the quite interesting exegesis of narratives of American slave rebellions. Oyekan Owomoyela University of Nebraska-Lincoln Copyright © 2006 The Indiana University Press

Symbolic legacies of slavery in Guyana

Focusses on the commemoration and symbolic functions of the slavery past in the Americas, with a particular focus on Guyana. Author explains that while symbolic representations of the legacies of slavery increased in the Americas since the 1960s, the nationalist government under Forbes Burnham since 1970 went further in using the slavery past as its ideological foundation. He discusses how this relates to Guyana's history and ethnic development of 2 main, often opposed groups of African- and Indian-descended groups, calling on their respective slavery or indenture past in emphasizing their national significance. He further describes slavery-related symbolic representations promoted under Burnham, specifically the 1763 slave revolt led by Cuffy, presented as first anticolonial rebellion aimed at liberation, and as a precursor to the PNC government, and other slave rebellions and rebels, such as led by Damon in 1834. He points out how some Indian-Guyanese found that Indian heroes were sidelined in relation to these. Author then describes how the annual commemoration of Emancipation Day continues to refer to the martyrdom of these slave rebels, along with other discursive connections, such as regarding reparations. He also pays attention to the activities of nongovernmental organizations in Guyana up to the present in commemorating the slavery past, often with broader African diaspora connections.

“To Plead Our Own Cause”: The St. Domingue Legacy and the Rise of the Black Press

From the 1820s to the 1850s, the black press, with early support from white abolitionists, published historical essays on the St. Domingue slave rebellion for new generations of readers. The purpose was to exhort free black readers to emulate the vigor of the St. Dominguan rebels in taking control of their communities and personal lives. In this essay, I address how antebellum black activist writers formulated a St. Domingue legacy to unite free black communities, to promote literacy education, and to build firm moral character.