2.13 - Resistance and Revolts in the United States
Everyday Resistance
Resistance to slavery didn't only show up in large, organized uprisings, it happened constantly, in small, everyday acts. Enslaved people resisted continually by slowing down their work, breaking tools, stealing food, or attempting to run away. These weren't isolated acts of defiance either, they added up over time and helped sustain the larger, longer-term movement toward abolition.
Religious life became a key engine for this kind of ongoing resistance. Churches and religious services weren't just about worship, they functioned as genuinely multipurpose spaces: places for community gathering, celebration, mourning, sharing information, and, especially in the North, organizing politically. In other words, the church became an infrastructure for resistance as much as it was a place of faith.
Major Revolts and Abolitionist Movements
In some regions of the Americas, the transatlantic slave trade concentrated large numbers of formerly trained African soldiers together, which actually gave enslaved communities in those areas a real advantage when it came to organizing revolts.
One of the earliest known examples happened in 1526, when Africans enslaved in Santo Domingo, in what's now the Dominican Republic, were brought along to support Spanish exploration efforts near the South Carolina and Georgia coastline. These enslaved people led the earliest known slave revolt on what would become United States territory, and afterward escaped into nearby Indigenous communities, finding refuge outside the reach of their enslavers.
Nearly three centuries later, the Haitian Revolution directly inspired one of the largest uprisings on U.S. soil. In 1811, Charles Deslondes led up to 500 enslaved people in what's known as the German Coast Uprising, or the Louisiana Revolt of 1811. Deslondes organized support across multiple local plantations and maroon communities, including people who had self-emancipated from Haiti, and led them on a march toward New Orleans. The uprising was ultimately crushed with brutal force, but its scale alone marks it as a defining moment of American resistance history.
The revolt began in January 1811 on plantations along the Mississippi River about 30 miles upriver from New Orleans, in an area called the German Coast after its early German settlers. Militia and U.S. troops crushed it within days. Dozens of rebels were killed in battle or executed afterward, and authorities displayed the heads of some of them along the river road as a warning.
Thirty years later, resistance took a different shape entirely. In 1841, Madison Washington, an enslaved cook, led a mutiny aboard the slave brig Creole, which was transporting enslaved people from Virginia to New Orleans. Washington seized control of the ship and sailed it to the Bahamas, deliberately choosing that destination because he knew Britain had already abolished slavery in its West Indian colonies back in 1833. As a direct result, nearly 130 African Americans won their freedom in the Bahamas, a rare case of a slave ship mutiny ending in mass emancipation rather than recapture or death.
Religious conviction fueled resistance in other forms too, both through armed rebellion and through public activism. Rebellions led by figures like Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey were rooted in religious belief, and abolitionists like Maria W. Stewart and Henry Highland Garnet drew on that same religious framework to publicly organize and advocate against slavery.
Denmark Vesey was a free Black carpenter in Charleston, South Carolina, who had bought his own freedom. A leader in the city's African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, he used Bible stories of the Israelites' escape from bondage to recruit followers for a planned uprising in 1822. The plot was betrayed before it began, and Vesey and 34 others were executed. Authorities also tore down the AME church.
Nat Turner was an enslaved preacher in Southampton County, Virginia, who believed God had called him to lead his people out of slavery. In August 1831 he led a revolt that killed about 55 to 60 white people. White militias and mobs then killed many Black people, including some who had nothing to do with the revolt, and Turner was captured and executed. Afterward, Virginia and other Southern states passed even stricter laws limiting enslaved and free Black people's ability to gather, preach, and learn to read.
Religion drove peaceful activism too. Maria W. Stewart framed her speeches as Christian calls to action (see 2.14), and Henry Highland Garnet, a Presbyterian minister, urged enslaved people to resist in his 1843 address (see 2.19).
One more plot matters for this topic's required source. In 1800, an enslaved blacksmith named Gabriel organized a plan to seize Richmond, Virginia, drawing on the revolutionary ideas of the era. A violent storm delayed the uprising, and two enslaved men revealed the plan to authorities. Gabriel and more than two dozen others were executed. The scare led Virginia's leaders to look for a place outside the United States to send enslaved people convicted of rebellion, which is the background to Thomas Jefferson's 1802 letter to Rufus King below.
Required Sources
Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Rufus King, 1802
Thomas Jefferson wrote this letter as president in July 1802 to Rufus King, the U.S. minister (ambassador) to Great Britain. After Gabriel's planned revolt, Virginia's legislature had asked for a place outside the United States where enslaved people involved in insurrections could be sent. In the letter, Jefferson asks King to find out whether the British Sierra Leone Company would accept them in its West African colony. Jefferson writes of "a great disposition to insurgency" among enslaved people, and he admits that the rebels were not "common malefactors" but people whose own feelings would see their act "in a far different shape." The letter shows how seriously American leaders took the threat of organized Black resistance, and how removing Black people from the country was already seen as a solution, an idea that grew into the colonization movement (see 2.10 and 2.18). The Sierra Leone Company refused.
The course of things in the neighboring islands of the West Indies, appear to have given a considerable impulse to the minds of the slaves in different parts of the United States. A great disposition to insurgency has manifested itself among them, which, in one instance, in the State of Virginia, broke out into actual insurrection. [...] The Legislature of the State [...] have communicated to me [...] their wish that some place could be provided, out of the limits of the United States, to which slaves guilty of insurgency might be transported [...]
[...] It is material to observe that they are not felons, or common malefactors, but persons guilty of what the safety of society, under actual circumstances, obliges us to treat as a crime, but which their feelings may represent in a far different shape.
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Rufus King, July 13, 1802, printed in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, vol. 10 (1903), pp. 326 to 328. Source: Internet Archive