New Winds of Freedom
The Saint-Domingue slave rebellion reverberated throughout the Americas, and other revolts soon followed. One insurrection broke out in the mountainous region of the Province of Coro, an area nearly thirty miles from the Caribbean coast, in what is today’s northern Venezuela, by then part of the Spanish Viceroyalty of New Granada.
By the end of the eighteenth century, Coro’s plantations produced mainly cacao and sugar. The region was also commercially connected to the Caribbean, especially the Dutch island of Curaçao. Enslaved people often fled from Curaçao to settle in Coro, where they were emancipated by the Spanish crown.32 The Coro Rebellion, as the revolt became known, was led by JosĂ© Leonardo Chirino, identified in sources from the period as a man of mixed Black and Native ancestry. Some accounts mention another leader named JosĂ© Caridad González, who was labeled as luango (a term used to refer to former slaves from Curaçao, who probably originated on the Loango coast in West Central Africa), but his participation in the rebellion remains uncertain.33 Regardless of his role, we know that González traveled to Saint-Domingue before the revolt broke out on the then French colony.34 There is also no doubt that both men and their followers heard stories about the slave rebellion in the French colony that circulated across the Caribbean basin.35On May 10, 1795, the Coro Rebellion started. Driven by local motivations and the news about the Saint-Domingue slave revolt, the rebels gathered more than two hundred enslaved, freed, and free Black individuals and to some extent Native peoples as well. The insurgents had several motivations. Enslaved people may have joined the rebels in response to a rumor about a royal decree emancipating the slaves. But they also gathered to oppose the imposition of new taxes on the goods they locally produced for sale and to protest the tributes imposed on the Native populations.
Moreover, some accounts suggest that the insurgents wanted the abolition of slavery and the creation of a republic based on the “Law of the French,” likely a reference to the 1794 abolition of slavery in the French colonies.36 As in other insurrections, rebels marched, killing planters and burning their estates. In a few days, Spanish forces harshly repressed the insurrection. Chirino managed to escape but was found three months later. He was hanged, his body was quartered and salted, and his head and hands publicly displayed. His enslaved wife and children were sold separately to other cities. Dozens of rebels were tortured and killed. Several others, including Indigenous people, were sentenced to perform forced labor and deported to other regions of Venezuela.Slave insurrections continued to erupt all over the Americas in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In the forty years that followed the end of slavery in Saint-Domingue, several revolts broke out in Cuba, where sugar production was fueling the rise of the second slavery. The birth of Haiti consolidated the Spanish colony as the larger sugar producer in the Americas. Whereas Cuba became a site of refuge for French planters who escaped Saint-Domingue, for the island’s slaveholders the new Black nation was a constant reminder of the danger of further insurrections.37 As in Venezuela, the Saint-Domingue Revolution encouraged enslaved people in Cuba to fight for freedom, and enslaved rebels were motivated by rumors that either an unnamed king or the kings of Britain, Spain, Haiti, or Kongo had issued a decree emancipating the slaves but that Cuban planters had not followed suit.38
As with many of the escapes and rebellions examined previously, the first battle of what became known as the Aponte Rebellion was planned and organized toward the end of the year, during Christmas Day 1811 and later on the Day of the Kings on January 6, 1812. José Antonio Aponte, one of the alleged leaders of the insurrection, was a free Black carpenter and appointed captain of Havana’s militia in 1812.39 It remains uncertain whether this series of revolts that erupted on several plantations to “fight against the rich whites” stemmed from a coordinated effort.40 Nevertheless, the militia gathered enslaved, freed, and free people of color who used cabildos de nación to attempt to overthrow slavery.
Whereas colonial forces stopped dozens of rebels, more than fifty insurgents were arrested and sent to trial. The alleged leaders of the rebellion, including Aponte, were ultimately sentenced to death.But slave rebellions inspired by the Haitian example persisted in Cuba. In 1825, another slave revolt started in Matanzas, in the western part of the island, where the quick growth of sugar production led planters to import many new West African–born enslaved men, particularly Yoruba speakers, known as Lucumà in Cuba. Carrying with them significant warfare experience acquired in their homelands, a group of enslaved West Africans started a “war” that gathered nearly two hundred enslaved insurgents, who over twelve hours spread out through twenty-five plantations, killing fifteen white people. As the rebellion was repressed, Cuban authorities imposed a new code of rules in Matanzas. The code included measures to prevent rebellions by limiting enslaved people’s mobility and creating barracones (barracoons) to accommodate bondspeople on the plantations. Planters knew that in order to avoid future revolts they had to make concessions, which is why the code also instructed slave owners to possibly improve the treatment of the enslaved population.41
Similar revolts erupted in the United States. Nat Turner’s Rebellion, one of the bloodiest slave insurrections in the history of country, took place in Southampton in 1831. A county relatively isolated, Southampton is located nearly seventy miles south of Richmond in Virginia. The state had had the largest enslaved population in the United States since the late eighteenth century and maintained this position until 1860.42 Southampton relied on varied agricultural production, including corn, cotton, potatoes, and peas, and locals raised cattle, hogs, and chickens, mostly intended for the local market. Although two-thirds of the county’s residents owned human property, most slave owners held fewer than ten enslaved persons, only 13 percent possessed more than twenty bondspeople, and few people owned more than one hundred.43
Despite the small size of slaveholdings, Southampton’s enslaved population was proportionally large.
By 1800, enslaved and free Black people outnumbered the white population in the county, making it one of the places with the largest Black majority in Virginia. In 1830, one year before the rebellion, there were 6,573 white persons, 7,756 enslaved persons, and 1,745 free Black persons, former bondspersons, and their descendants manumitted by Quaker, Methodist, and Baptist slave owners.44 For bondspeople, this context was not less brutal than in regions with larger slaveholdings.The rebellion in Southampton was led by Nat Turner, an enslaved man and self-taught preacher, so the revolt is said to have resulted from his possible mystic visions. Unlike many enslaved people, Turner knew how to read and write. But these abilities did not exempt him from the cruelties of bondage. When the rebellion started, he was thirty-one years old and had already changed owners several times. After his first owner Benjamin Turner died, Nat was bequeathed to Benjamin’s brother Samuel Turner. When Samuel died, Nat was sold to Thomas Moore. But following Moore’s death, Nat Turner was passed down to Thomas’s son Putnam Moore. In 1830, Thomas Moore’s widow and Putnam’s mother married a carriage maker named Joseph Travis, who at the time of the insurrection was Turner’s actual master, even though Putnam Moore was his legal owner.45
Nat Turner’s Rebellion started in the early hours of August 22, 1831, when six enslaved men entered Travis’s farmhouse and killed all members of the family while they were still sleeping. Promising to murder all white people, the rebels gathered as many as fifty participants, including adult men as well as male youths and children.46 Although all insurgents were described as male, as historian Vanessa M. Holden argues, enslaved women of the local community supported their actions by either preparing food or attempting to murder their owners.47 As the rebels moved, they attacked fifteen houses and killed fifty-five white men, women, and children.
The next day, the local militia managed to stop the rebellion.As the repression of the insurrection evolved, Turner disappeared for nearly six weeks. Meanwhile, his wife was publicly beaten.48 All the captured coconspirators were tried and sentenced to death. Lucy, an enslaved woman owned by John T. Barrow, was the only woman tried for participating in the rebellion.49 Sentenced to death, she was hanged on September 26. In late October, Nat Turner was captured. After a trial on November 5, he was sentenced to death and hanged in Jerusalem (today Courtland), Virginia, on November 11, 1831. As in the aftermath of other rebellions, the months that followed the uprising once again set the stage for brutal repressive measures against the enslaved and free Black populations not only in Southampton and Virginia but also across the US South. For example, on March 5, 1832, Virginia’s General Assembly passed legislation prohibiting enslaved and free Black people from preaching, attending religious meetings without white supervision, carrying weapons, purchasing slaves except their own children, and several other restrictions.50
Samuel Sharpe, another religious enslaved man, led a rebellion in Jamaica also in 1831. Like Turner, Sharpe learned how to read and write when he was young. An enslaved domestic worker, he became a Baptist lay deacon in his early adulthood. Hence, he used religious meetings to preach his values to enslaved people. Unlike other bondspeople, he could read British newspapers and pamphlets that by that time had been spreading abolitionist ideas for several years. As noted earlier, the Christmas holiday was the only long holiday during which enslaved people could rest as well as gather to eat, drink, dance, and celebrate with their loved ones, but the holiday season also offered an opportunity to resist slavery. Sharpe called a general strike for Christmas Day 1831. The strike aimed to demand wages and better working conditions for the enslaved population.
Although the movement was intended to be peaceful, the insurgents knew there was no peace under the brutality of bondage. On the night of December 27, a group of slaves set fire to a trash house in the Kensington estate in Montego Bay. The wooden structure used to store the leaves of old sugarcanes that served as fuel for sugar boilers burned down. As the fire expanded, what was intended to be a strike became a powerful insurrection. In the following days, thousands of enslaved individuals armed with guns and knives marched from plantation to plantation setting fire to sugar fields and factories.51Gathering thousands of enslaved individuals who resisted British forces for nearly two months, the Christmas Rebellion or Baptist War, as it became known, was the largest slave revolt in Jamaica’s history.52 As in previous revolts, the insurgents were violently repressed. At least 540 participants either died in battle or were executed by the British forces.53 On April 19, 1832, Sharpe was tried and sentenced to death, and on May 23, 1832, he was hanged in Charles Square across from the courthouse in Montego Bay. The carnage of hundreds of enslaved men and women that followed the slave rebellion had great repercussions in Britain. Ultimately, the rebellion added more pressure for the passage of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833.54