In what ways did slaves respond to their condition? What evidence is there for these? How did circumstances limit the range of responses?

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In what ways did slaves respond to their condition? What evidence is there for these? How did circumstances limit the range of responses?

In order to answer this question I will divide this essay into three main parts. The first part will analyse the ways in which slaves responded to, and resisted slavery, as well as providing a bit of historiography to help with this analysis. The second part of my essay will assess the credibility and reliability of much of the evidence I will have discussed in part one. Finally the third section will analyse how circumstances may have limited the range of slave responses to their servitude. In such a broad and wide topic as slavery it will be impossible to include everything in this essay so I will attempt to concentrate on a select number of the most important arguments, in order to form the best debate on each of these.

The original and accepted view among most historians and scholars deep into the first half of the twentieth century was that slaves had been generally happy with their condition and had rarely resisted, or even wished to resist slavery. Ulrich B. Phillips’ ‘American Negro Slavery’ in 1918 perhaps best exemplifies the early twentieth century view of slavery, dominating its interpretation for around the next thirty years. Phillips depicted a plantation system in which slaves were generally contented with their lot and unlikely to resist. Those rare occasions in which resistance did occur were more likely the result of slaves having lazy or criminal characters rather than any legitimate complaint about their condition. Twinned with these early views was the idea that slaves were in fact incapable of responding and resisting, thus showing their submission to slavery. Phillips described the Negro as suffering from inherited ineptitude, whereas James Schouler saw slaves as being “incapable of deep plots, sensuous, stupid, obedient to the whip, children in imagination.”

 

Other historians have presented a slightly different version of the slaves’ inability to respond to slavery. Stanley Elkins compared the system to the Nazi concentration camps of World War Two, infantilising the inmates with a “closed system” of slavery that was so cruel and all-encompassing that it rendered the slaves “sambo-like”, thus making it extremely difficult for slaves to put up resistance. William Styron backs up this interpretation somewhat, declaring that slavery had reduced its victims “to the status of children…tranquillised, totally defenceless, ciphers and ants”. So therefore one interpretation of slavery, and in particular the early school of thought, saw slaves as generally happy with their condition, submissive, and unlikely to resist either as a result of the inferiority and incapability of the Negro or because of the control the system boasted over the slaves. These points will be put into context in the third part of my essay.

However since the 1950’s, or perhaps slightly earlier this analysis began to be revised, with the view that slaves were not content with slavery and never ceased in their struggle against it, resisting in numerous ways. Herbert Aptheker was the first to really openly and effectively challenge the original understanding of slavery with his book ‘American Negro Slave Revolts’ in 1943 and since then numerous historians and scholars have produced works on slave resistance with Kenneth Stampp’s, ‘The Peculiar Institution’ in 1956 one of the most noteworthy. Stampp described the idea of the happy sambo as just a ruse and noted the rebelliousness of slaves in responding to their condition.

Insurrection was generally the most serious form of slave resistance, discounting revolution. Using the directive that a slave insurrection should include a minimum of ten slaves aiming to obtain freedom, Aptheker claims there were approximately 250 uprisings or conspiracies in American territories, and I will briefly cite a few famous examples. The Nat Turner slave rebellion in Southampton Co, Virginia in August 1831 is possibly the bloodiest of all insurrections with Turner leading 60 followers that killed 55 whites before the revolt was put down. Also in August, but some 31 years earlier, Gabriel Prosser, with the intention of creating a free black state in Virginia, gathered together as many as 1000 armed slaves ready for action before bad weather and the betrayal by two slaves prevented any action taking place. Finally, sandwiched in the middle of these two plots was the Denmark Vesey conspiracy in 1822. Vesey, a former slave drew up a complex plot involving thousands of Negroes in and around Charleston, but again a slave betrayal ended the chances of rebellion. So therefore historians such as Aptheker use the many examples like these above to show that slaves consistently responded to their condition with insurrection plots.

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However, some have criticised the weakness and limited extent of the slave revolts in America, especially when compared to those in the Caribbean and South America. The largest slave revolt in the United States in Louisiana in 1811 involved around 300-500 slaves. Genovese compares these to slave revolts such as Tacky’s rebellion in Jamaica in 1760; which numbered about 1000 slaves, or in Demerara in 1823 where between 10,000 and 20,000 slaves on around fifty plantations rose up. As Genovese deduces, “in sheer numbers and power the whole record of the slave revolts in the Old South did not equal ...

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