|  |
The Impact of Slave Conspiracies on Colonial Societies
Contributing teacher:
Reiko Hillyer
Time period: 1700–50
Point
Eric Foner describes several slave conspiracies during the colonial era: two in New York City, in 1712 and 1741, and one in South Carolina in 1739. He provides these vivid examples of slave resistance in order to make the point that slaves had a fiercely held notion of liberty and that they did not accept their enslavement passively. Presumably Foner is also suggesting that slave rebellions in the colonial era were more frequent than they would later become, in part because slaves who were born free in Africa—as many would have been before the closing of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808—were more likely to rebel than those who had been born into slavery in America. But Foner does not discuss the effect of these rebellions on the colonial societies in which they occurred and on the nature of the slave system itself. Although Foner does explain the gradual shift from indentured servitude to slavery in the seventeenth century, he does not examine in detail the ways in which slavery continued to change during the first part of the eighteenth century, even after its establishment.
Counterpoint
For some historians who choose to focus on slavery in one particular state or colony, local events (such as slave insurrections) are important turning points in the evolution of the local slave system. Peter Wood, in Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina (New York: Knopf, 1974), writes in great depth about the 1739 Stono Rebellion, near Charleston, and its consequences. Wood delineates what he considers to be the local conditions and developments that led to the slave rebellion. He suggests that such rebellions were historically and geographically contingent rather than random or part of a trans-colonial trend. The local white response to the Stono Rebellion altered the slave system in South Carolina and therefore, Wood asserts, signified "the end of an era for the Negro in the colony." The South Carolina government wanted to reduce provocations for rebellion, so it laid down penalties for excessive work or brutality. Further, a Negro school was started in the hopes that teaching slaves the Christian doctrine of obedience would render them more docile.
In addition, the government passed a Negro Act, which would serve as the core of South Carolina's slave code for the next century. This act curtailed relative liberties of slaves, such as freedom of movement and assembly, the freedom to earn money, and the freedom to learn to read. (Of course, this suggests the significant fact that before the Negro Act, slaves in South Carolina did have these freedoms, at least by custom.) The right of individual owners to manumit their slaves was curtailed as well. Having concluded that African slaves were more likely to rebel than those born in the American colonies, the state legislature passed a duty on the importation of African slaves and even sought to encourage immigration from Europe instead. Thus, the effects of the rebellion were deeply felt by South Carolinians, both free and unfree. Wood's close examination of this one rebellion reminds students of slavery about a point Foner makes as well, that the nature of the institution is neither predetermined nor static. For more on the ways in which American slavery varied over time and place, see Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), and Berlin, "Time, Space, and the Evolution of African American Society," in The American Historical Review 85 (February 1980): 44–78.
|
| |
