On “American Negro Slave Revolts” by Herbert Aptheker ***

Consisting essentially of two undenoted parts, this book first provides an overall theory of revolt, showing how revolt was feared, how enslavers attempted to prevent it, and why it happened. The second half then goes into a summary of the various revolts that happened from colonial times through the Civil War. The first part is a very interesting discussion that elicits at times a good degree of pathos; the second part, alas, feels mostly like an impersonal listing of events with often little analysis.

Aptheker notes that he took up the work because little attention had been paid in the historical literature to such revolts, outside of Nat Turner’s, which was taken as an outlier. This lack of attention led, in turn, to a mistaken notion that people enslaved in North America had largely been docile; indeed, one might say it even contributed to such Lost Cause tropes mythologized in works like Gone with the Wind and Song of the South of the happy slave. Aptheker shows that enslaved people were by and large anything but happy.

One thing that contributed to the fear of revolt was the sheer number of enslaved people; indeed, in parts of the South, enslaved Black people outnumbered white people. This was one reason, beyond desire to maintain a healthy number of representatives in Congress, that southern states so sought to extend slavery into new territories. By spreading out the population, it was hoped, the ability of enslaved people to gather and thus bring about a change to their status would be diluted. Laws passed in some states limited the ability of African Americans to assemble in any manner, except by the authority of an enslaver. So, essentially, if you were a Black person, unless you were working, you weren’t allowed to hang out with other folk. Sometimes, such laws included free Black people in addition to those who were enslaved. It boggles my mind how any social life would be possible--and thus how one’s sanity could be maintained. But of course, such laws were to prevent even the ability to plan a revolt. Other laws aimed at keeping certain Black people away from those who were enslaved. Obviously free Black people were seen as a not good influence on those enslaved and were by law prevented from migrating to some states; similarly, those from areas in the Caribbean that had won independence from their enslavers were also bad influences and often were banned from entering a state (or even from being enslaved, since theirs would be a pernicious influence on enslaved Americans.)

A particular contributor to slave revolt was economic tough times. One can easily imagine how when financial times got difficult, those who were enslaved were the last in line to receive basic necessities such as food. The degree to which enslaved people hated their lot is made plain in various tales of men and women who deliberately mutilated themselves to avoid service; one particularly affecting tale involved a pregnant woman who killed herself rather than bringing forth children who would themselves be slaves. Stories such as these, in addition to reports about rebellions, were often suppressed in the media, lest it encourage others to rebel.

From there, Aptheker turns to the individual accounts of revolts. These read, mostly, like those of another book I once browsed that attempted to tell the tale of southern hurricanes. Alas, rather than providing much in the way of a plot, it simply noted, and then this hurricane happened. Two years later, this hurricane, with this much damage, and so on. The revolts, outside of Nat Turner’s, which receives its own well-conceived chapter, come in for a similarly unstructured account here, which makes for tedious reading. I understand the reason Aptheker needed to document each case, but the real heart of the book comes in the analytical first half.