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Examines the Louisiana-born Victor Séjour’s short story, ‘Le Mulâtre’ (1837), as a primary example of the ways in which debates over the effects of “racial mixing” were mediated simultaneously through the image of the tragic “mulatto/a” and the Haitian Revolution. Rather than celebrating the desire of the slaves to achieve freedom at any cost, Séjour’s narrative laments the psychosocial consequences of such a parricidal revolution, suggesting that slavery and “miscegenation” were ultimately responsible for the corruption, degradation, and eventual destruction of the family.

This chapter reveals the intense fear harbored by the Americans, especially those in the slaveholding South, of a massive slave rebellion originating from a concerted alliance of African and Indian in Florida. By focusing on literary accounts of the day, this chapter looks at the Second Seminole War as a war against blacks as much as against Indians. By connecting the slave insurrection on the island of St. Domingo to the Nat Turner rebellion in the United States, whites throughout the American South feared that the events in Florida could indeed incite a substantial slave rebellion. This chapter convincingly shows that the fate of the Seminole joined with that of the African in Florida, and that the topic of slavery and of fugitive and free blacks among the Florida Indians cannot be dissected from the story of U.S.-Seminole relations.

Chapter 6 links the Aponte slave rebellion in Cuba, which took place fifty years after the siege of Havana, with the wide-ranging impacts of the British invasion and occupation. After Spain regained Havana, Spain took unprecedented measures to promote transatlantic human trafficking, including the annexation in 1778 of what would become its only sub-Saharan African colony, Equatorial Guinea, as well as the tightening of ties to the Spanish Philippines, which was seen as an essential source of goods for exchange in the slave trade. Its Enlightenment-inspired reforms also included new efforts to promote the military service of Spain’s black subjects in both Cuba and greater Spanish America. In the decades that followed the Seven Years’ War, the men of African descent who had defended Cuba from British attack in 1762 sought the continuation and expansion of their many roles buttressing Spanish colonialism; however, white elites in Havana wanted new departures in Spanish imperial political economy and persuaded policymakers in Madrid to grant them. Their efforts remade the political economy of the island, more severely restricted the traditional privileges of free black soldiers and all people of African descent, and ultimately contributed to the outbreak of the Aponte Rebellion.

The chapter discusses how Florida′s experience with slavery from 1821 to 1865 evolved within an environment that was filled with the threat of race war, the actuality of race war, or the legacies of race war. Patterns of resistance that developed in the territory and state during that period also derived from that environment. It can be argued with credibility that the nation′s largest slave rebellion marked the midpoint of that era, an event so profound that no Floridian could have escaped its impact in one way or another. Known to history as the Second Seminole War, this significant but often neglected conflict came about through the leadership of maroons and was supported by hundreds of rebelling slaves. The major objective of Florida′s combatants involved not the complete overthrow of slavery but the safeguarding of individual and family freedom and of homes and homelands from white encroachment.

In 1763, a slave rebellion erupted in the Dutch colony of Berbice in northern South America. The great majority of the colony's enslaved people were caught up in the rebellion, as either rebels or fugitives. It took the Dutch almost two years to restore their authority. This was made possible by Dutch reinforcements who forced the rebels deeper into the jungle and the help of Amerindians who possessed the strength, local knowledge, and military skills for jungle fighting that the Dutch lacked. This chapter sketches the unfolding of the Berbice slave rebellion and describes the role of Amerindians in its suppression. What did the alliance of natives and colonists consist of? How was it organized? What held it together? How did Amerindian assistance help the Dutch project power and establish its coercive authority?

This chapter discusses the imperial turn of the English Revolution, when the English state, through legislation and force of arms, undertook the first systematic attempt to consolidate Ireland and the Atlantic colonies into a profitably organized and politically potent empire. The discussion here focuses on how saints returned from the colonies and from the ranks of the Coleman Street elite worked in concert as moving forces behind the Revolution’s imperial turn. From the top down, they designed and executed imperial initiatives and colonial projects that relied upon innovative legislation and sophisticated forms of financing as well as naval warfare, landed conquest, military conscription, slave trading, and a spectrum of unfree, mostly coerced plantation labor. But from the bottom-up, we see that hundreds of thousands of people from around the Atlantic world were swept unwillingly into the violent vortex that powered England’s expansion into the Americas. But these human beings did not go without a fight. Army and navy mutinies, republican insurgencies, crowd actions, slave and servant rebellions, and slave ship revolts arose around the English Atlantic, where commoners, servants, soldiers, sailors, and slaves strove to secure their lives and liberties, all of which England’s imperial expansion threatened to make forfeit.

This chapter examines the role of Elizabeth Heyrick, a British Quaker convert, in reinvigorating interest in the boycott of slave labor in Britain during the 1820s. The revival of boycott activity in Britain highlights the importance of political context in garnering support for consumer activism. Heyrick's efforts helped spark another popular boycott of slave-labor goods in the country. Taking a cue from the earlier movement, activists such as Heyrick linked the boycott to a broad agenda of social reform, including the abolition of slavery and the implementation of reforms for the working class. This chapter discusses two events that influenced British antislavery in general and Heyrick's activism in particular: the working-class radicalism of the early nineteenth century and massive slave rebellions in the British colonies of Barbados (1816) and Demerara (1823). It also considers the abstention movement and antislavery activism by Heyrick and other women, along with the intersection of abstention and gender in the British antislavery movement.

This chapter is all about ‘Theresa; a Haytien Tale’ (1828), a short story that was serialized and published anonymously in the first African American newspaper Freedom’s Journal, and is now considered to be the first African American short story. The author argues that this brief text provides an even more redemptive role for women of color. ‘Theresa’ imagines women as central to the liberation of the colony through their unfailing and unquestioning allegiance to the revolutionary cause. ‘Theresa’ is therefore not buttressed by pseudoscientific claims of the innate savagery or hyper-sexuality of “black” women, but instead unequivocally celebrates their ability to contribute to slave rebellions, imagining a hitherto denied active role for women of color in the events of the Haitian Revolution.

This chapter examines the role of Spanish Santo Domingo in the early years of the Haitian Revolution, focusing principally on the advent of emancipation in French Saint-Domingue in the summer and fall of 1793. The chapter argues that critical events of this period in Saint-Domingue, such as the disastrous “revolt” of the free-colored businessman-turned-activist Vincent Ogé, the August 1791 slave rebellion, and the piecemeal legal reforms of Léger-Félicité Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel leading to general emancipation, were all significantly influenced by a deep history of interactions with Spanish Santo Domingo. In presenting a political and intellectual history of the coming of emancipation to Hispaniola, this chapter makes a case for the centrality of the political discourses of certain key freed military leaders—preserved in extant governmental and personal correspondence—in enabling the first French Republican slave emancipation.

Nat Turner, as a leader of the 1831 Southampton slave rebellion, described a religious commitment that shaped his worldview and daily practices, and which ultimately manifested in his leading a slave rebellion. The task of interpreting the meaning of Nat Turner and the Southampton slave rebellion—highlighted by William Styron’s 1967 novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and the debate that ensued after its publication—discloses the persistence of Sylvia Wynter’s category of “Man” as a descriptive statement of the human within colonial modernity. This chapter opens up the need to re-visit Nat Turner, and to see how his life and worldview reveal possibilities beyond Man. It argues that religious practices and theological epistemologies can present an alternative to Man and that Nat Turner’s life and thought show one way such practices and epistemologies have been actualized beyond the doctrine of Man.

This chapter traces a conventional colonial history of rhythm and its suppression in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Trinidad. It studies the close relationship between music, dances, and slave rebellion, which was established early in a relatively short time. The British authorities in general systematically suppressed the drum and rhythmic popular music, as they were fearful of slave insurrection. As slavery continued, creolization took on a more complex, multidimensional shape, perpetuating the unpredictable play of cultures that characterizes the processes of creolization. During this period, at every point in the cultural history of Trinidad, rhythm was momentarily silenced, only to return via new, improvised instruments such as bottles and spoons, biscuit tins, pieces of bamboo, and finally the steel pan. Repression of rhythmic music only strengthened the bond between rhythm and the popular black culture of the island.

The Louisiana Purchase may have doubled the size of the US with a “stroke of the pen,” as goes the old cliché, but incorporating the vast new territory was not accomplished as easily. More than any other factor, Louisiana’s heterogeneous population fueled a crisis over the process of territorialization. The US reacted to the colony’s racial, ethnic, and religious diversity by rationalizing the indefinite deferral of political equality. This chapter examines how Creole whites in Louisiana, by cultivating and asserting a shared sense of racial solidarity with US citizens, attempted to seize equal rights in the nation-state. Two alarming events—the Aaron Burr conspiracy and the German Coast slave rebellion—hastened to cultivate the budding alliance between Creole whites and the US nation-state. By showing their loyalty to the US, Creole whites offered evidence of their fitness for self-government and successfully altered the politics of incorporation.

The black Britons Robert Wedderburn and William Davidson played a prominent role in London ultra-radicalism. Davidson was executed for his part in the Cato Street Conspiracy, and Wedderburn encouraged violent resistance to tyranny and slavery. This chapter unearths important new biographical information about these two men, and applies this to the development of their political ideas.

In 1840, Church Vaughan’s dying father Scipio advised his family to return to Africa, the continent of their ancestors. Although Scipio had spent most of his life as a slave, his ten children and their mother were life-long free people of color in Kershaw County, South Carolina. Through hard work and the careful cultivation of white patrons, they made an independent living and owned their own land. As this chapter shows through the experiences of this family and their neighbors, however, inland South Carolina became increasingly restrictive and dangerous for free people of color in the first half of the nineteenth century. By the time Church Vaughan’s free Anglo-Catawba mother and African American father married in the 1810s, so many slaves worked on Kershaw County cotton plantations that planters had good reason to fear rebellion, such as one that was brutally suppressed in 1816. Over the following decades, plantation slavery expanded over land previously controlled by Native Americans. Though Scipio Vaughan was gradually manumitted, even free people of color faced increasing legal restrictions, social exclusion, and violence. This chapter illustrates their limited pathways to freedom as well as the mounting pressures on free people of color that made emigration attractive.

This chapter situates William Earle’s 1800 novel Obi within a network of texts—including histories, natural histories, poems, and travel narratives—that surface the novel’s engagement with the profitable business of botanical transplantation which, at the turn into the nineteenth century, depended on connections between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Earle aligns human bodies with plants in order to represent the slave trade as a destructive form of transplantation and amputation. Drawing from Erasmus Darwin’s poem Botanic Garden, the novel Obi advances a “vegetable economy” in which revolution is a natural, botanical response to the violent transplantation project of the Atlantic slave trade. The surprisingly transoceanic and political life of plants during this period therefore forms the backdrop for the novel’s anti-slavery argument, which aligns human bodies with the bodies of plants and understands plantation slavery in terms of botanical transplantation.

This first part of the book contains the text of the Preamble to Walker's Appeal. In it, Walker justifies the reasons for his appeal and anticipates the reaction to it. This Preamble is followed by the four articles of the appeal which advocate immediate emancipation and slave rebellion.

The political thought of Thomas Spence encouraged rebellions in the colonies and on the political and economic ‘pheriphery’ against racism, and exconomic exploitation. This chapter shows how the Cato Street Conspirators were influenced by the views of Spence and his ‘Spencean’ followers concerning the righteousness and efficacy of resistance by Native Americans, slave rebellions in North America and the Caribbean, and the risings of the United Irishmen.

During the 1790s, Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. was a ship captain engaged in sugar and coffee trade in the West Indies. In 1793, his ship was seized by a French privateer and sold at an Admiralty Court auction at Charleston. With France and Britain at war and privateers capturing commercial vessels owned by citizens of an enemy nation, Kingsley decided to change his British nationality to that of a neutral nation. He pledged loyalty to the United States, and continued his maritime trade in the West Indies with an added degree of protection while sailing under a neutral flag. Between 1793 and 1797, while a massive slave rebellion against the French colonial government was underway in Saint-Domingue, the French colony on the Island of Hispaniola, Kingsley traded for coffee in the southern province then under military control of Britain. The United States then became involved in an undeclared naval war against France, however, endangering Kingsley’s neutral trading status. In 1798, he moved to the Danish Island of St. Thomas and pledged loyalty to neutral Denmark.