African Linkages
Enslaved people resisted slavery in many ways, but in exceptional contexts they were able to organize revolts that brought together dozens and even hundreds of bondspeople. The motivations that led slaves to take the risky route to form a collective rebellion depended on several elements such as local and international revolutions and religion.
Concrete problems such as working conditions also certainly prompted revolts to erupt in a specific moment, and larger uprisings often occurred in places where Black people and enslaved people outnumbered the white population. Several revolts also occurred in regions where the number of African-born enslaved persons was more significant. Most of these Africans were born free in their homelands. Several were religious leaders. Many others who were captured during wars had previous knowledge of warfare. These skills and experiences drove them to join other countrymen and to resist the violence of the legal slave status imposed on them.
Some revolts were either led by or involved freedpeople born either in Africa or the Americas. Existing records associated with most insurrections identify male leaders and participants and rarely reveal the participation of women in these rebellions. But despite this invisibility, bondswomen and freedwomen played all sorts of roles in the preparation of these insurgencies by providing information, shelter, food, and tools to rebels. On the eve of these rebellions, bondswomen individually killed slave owners through various means, including poison.2 Several slave rebellions were repressed at their inception, but others lasted for several days or weeks until slaveholders eventually successfully defeated the rebels. Not all these revolts clearly sought to end slavery, but all these insurrections destabilized the power of slaveholders. Ultimately, the Saint-Domingue slave revolt succeeded in ending slavery on the western portion of Hispaniola, creating the new Black nation of Haiti in 1804.
Ironically, the very same island had been also the site of the first slave rebellion in the Americas nearly three centuries earlier.Just a few years after disembarking on the island Hispaniola (in what is the present-day Dominican Republic and Haiti), enslaved Africans led the first rebellion in the Americas. As noted in chapter 14, enslaved people took advantage of the end-of-year holiday season to plan escapes, since their owners and overseers were distracted by the festivities. During the first three decades of their presence on Hispaniola, enslaved Africans resisted bondage in various ways, running away individually and in groups. But in 1521, they organized the first slave rebellion. On December 21, they took over the sugar estate owned by Diego Colón (the son of Christopher Columbus), the island’s governor and viceroy of the Indies. From the banks of the Nigua River, where the plantation was located, the rebels armed themselves with all the “weapons they could find and made others out of sharpened poles,” then walked westward for more than sixty miles, reaching the Nigua village.3 The insurgents reportedly stole gold from travelers they met along the roads, as well as jewelry and clothes from the properties they attacked.
We can assume most of these rebels were born on the African continent and had been forced to convert to Roman Catholicism. Therefore, their goal was to “kill all the Christians they could and to free themselves and take over the land.”4 Spanish colonists put down the insurrection using their weapons and cavalry to repress the rebels. A few months after the rebellion, they imposed a set of new laws to control the enslaved population, including physical punishments, to prevent new insurrections.5 Although there were previous regulations to repress slave fugitives, this legislation became the oldest legal code mandating restrictions precisely against enslaved persons in the Americas.
Slave rebellions were not circumscribed to zones where plantation slavery predominated; they also occurred in urban areas.
In 1712, the colony of New York witnessed its first slave revolt on the night of April 6, made up of twenty-four slaves, among whom were several West African-born enslaved men and at least two bondswomen, one of whom was pregnant.6 Armed with axes, knives, firearms, and other weapons, they started an insurrection in New York City by setting fire to the outhouse of Peter Vantilborough, a baker who owned two of the enslaved rebels. As white residents tried to extinguish the fire, the insurgents ambushed them, killing nine white individuals and wounding at least seven others. When the colonial militia and soldiers intervened to stop the insurrection, six enslaved people killed themselves before being captured, including one bondswoman. Colonizers arrested seventy Black persons in the rebellion. Twenty-six enslaved persons were convicted and tried, among whom four were women—Amba and Lilly were acquitted, whereas Sarah and Abigail were convicted. It remains unclear which of the convicted bondswomen was pregnant.7 In total, twenty-one slaves were sentenced to death.8Beyond the obvious brutality of being held in bondage, what could have led these men and women to organize this uprising? Walter Rucker has noted that nearly half of the convicted rebels in New York City were West African–born, Akan-speaking men identified in the primary documents as Coromantee, a term referring “to two Fante-speaking towns, Upper and Lower Kormantse and a nearby trading factory” on the Gold Coast, in present-day Ghana. Moreover, their names corresponded to days of the week, following the existing tradition among Akan speakers.9 Hence, a male child born on Monday would be called Kwado on the Gold Coast, but in the Americas this name became Cudjo, whereas a female child born the same day would be called Adwowa on the Gold Coast, which in the Americas became Juba. Likewise, a baby born on Friday on the Gold Coast would be called Kwefi, Cuffy, Cuffee, or Kofi in the Americas.10
Among the insurgents was an Akan-speaking conjurer known as “Peter the Doctor.” According to his testimony collected by the British colonial authorities, he “administered a powder, which being rubbed on their bodies, was to make them invulnerable.”11 Similarly to the slave rebellion in Hispaniola, contemporaneous accounts reported that New York City’s rebels “conspired to murder all the Christians” and “destroy all the White [people] in order to obtain their freedom.”12 As in further revolts, not all rebels were necessarily African-born enslaved people, but Akan speakers had a leading role in the movement. As in the Black Catholic brotherhoods examined in chapter 14, ethnic links certainly played an important role in bringing bondspeople together to organize an insurrection and collectively attempt to free themselves.
The aftermath of the 1712 rebellion was marked by increasingly repressive measures imposed on the enslaved, freed, and free Black population, and also on white people who allegedly helped Black people. The colony’s governor, fearing further uprisings, proposed that the colonial legislature pass laws regulating the activity of slaves and recommended increasing the number of white indentured servants in the colony. Knowing that bondspeople plotted and started uprisings during the night, the newly enacted legislation imposed a curfew that limited their movement. But the new laws also affected freeborn and freed Black individuals by preventing the growth of the free Black community and limiting the social mobility of existing free Black people. The new law made it much more difficult for slave owners to emancipate their human property, as to do so they had to pay a security amount between four and six times the price of an adult enslaved person. Furthermore, enslaved people manumitted after 1712 were prohibited from owning real estate.13
Almost three decades later, enslaved Africans organized a plot in New York City. On March 18, 1741, a bondsman named Quaco (or Kweku, meaning Wednesday in Akan) burned down Fort George, the headquarters of the British royal government and the governor’s residence in New York City. Also, an enslaved man called Cuffee (suggesting he was an Akan speaker) was arrested when fleeing his owner’s burning storehouse. In the weeks that followed, other fires broke out around the city. The investigation that followed showed that the fires were part of a plot. Participants comprised enslaved men and women, including Akan speakers, and also slaves seized from a Spanish ship who had been transported to New York City, where they were sold and became locally identified as “Spanish negroes.” But English and Irish workers also joined the conspiracy, which led to the series of fires that became known as the New York Conspiracy of 1741 (also called the Negro Plot or Slave Insurrection).14
Despite the involvement of African-born individuals in the plot, in contrast with the New York City slave revolt of 1712 and the Hispaniola slave rebellion of 1521, the goal of the plotters of 1741 was not to kill Christians or white people but rather, as historian Leslie M.
Harris put it, to “achieve greater economic and political equality.”15 Still, colonial authorities largely targeted enslaved conspirators. Most of the two hundred alleged plotters arrested during the investigation were bondspeople. Thirty enslaved men were sentenced to execution, whereas seventy other bondsmen and bondswomen were deported from the colony. As in the aftermath of other slave insurrections, the control over the enslaved population in New York City increased in the years that followed the conspiracy. But resistance against slavery continued. In the next decades of the eighteenth century, at least three other major rebellions erupted in the Americas.On September 9, 1739, just two years before the New York Conspiracy of 1741, enslaved people started a major revolt in the Southern colony of South Carolina, where rice cultivation predominated.16 The insurrection that became known as the Stono Rebellion emerged in a context in which Black and enslaved people had outnumbered the colony’s white population for nearly three decades. In 1740, one year after the rebellion, there were 39,200 enslaved Black people for 25,000 white people.17 Gathered along the banks of the Stono River approximately twenty miles southwest of Charleston, a group of enslaved men armed with stolen firearms and other weapons, flying flags and playing drums, started marching with the goal of reaching St. Augustine in Spanish Florida. The insurrection was likely a response to a call from Spanish colonizers who promised freedom to South Carolina’s rebels willing to join Spanish forces. As they passed through other plantations, the rebels attracted nearly one hundred enslaved persons. Eventually the militia stopped the insurgents by killing some men, but a few rebels continued to resist in the following days.
The fact that, in this context, Black people largely outnumbered the white population allowed enslaved people to feel sufficiently empowered to take the risky path of rebellion.
The invitation to join the Spanish colony may have been particularly attractive to a number of insurgents who were likely born in the Kingdom of Kongo, in West Central Africa. As previously explained, Kongo rulers and their subjects had embraced Christianity since the late fifteenth century. Moreover, the presence of enslaved rebels born in Kongo could also explain the rebels’ familiarity with firearms, as the kingdom was involved in a series of wars that led to the capture of prisoners trained as soldiers who were sold into slavery to North America during the eighteenth century.18 As the rebellion was suppressed, twenty white persons and approximately forty enslaved rebels were killed. Fear of new rebellions remained, haunting British colonists and slave owners. To prevent new revolts, legislation that stopped, at least temporarily, the introduction of new Africans into the colony passed in April 1740, and one month later, a new act established several other measures to limit the mobility of the enslaved population.19