Tag Archives: Slave Revolt

New York Slave Revolt ► Throwback Thursday

April 6, 2017Slave Revolt, Slavery, The Great Slave AuctionHeadly Westerfield

We have to go all the way back to 1712, before this country was even a country, for this week’s Throwback Thursday.

At the time New York City was merely a small town, in a province of Britain, on the opposite side of the Atlantic Ocean. The crown colony known as New York (as opposed to old York, of course) was much larger than the current state. It included “all of the present U.S. states of New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Vermont, along with inland portions of Connecticut, Massachusetts and Maine, as well as eastern Pennsylvania“, as the WikiWackyWoo tells us.

Slavery, on the other hand, had been around forever. According to the Smithsonian Institute:

Life was wretched for the slaves brought to New York. Many of the city’s early landmarks, from City Hall to the eponymous wall of Wall Street were built using slave labor. The city even constructed an official slave market in 1711, Jim O’Grady reported for WNYC News in 2015.

“It was a city-run slave market because they wanted to collect tax revenue on every person who was bought and sold there,” historian Chris Cobb told O’Grady. “And the city hired slaves to do work like building roads.”

It is generally agreed that the New York Slave Revolt probably could not have happened elsewhere.

In the bustling town of New York, with its population at about 6,000 people, it’s estimated that about 10-15% were slaves owned by others. These slaves worked and lived in close proximity to one another, unlike the plantations of the south where there might be great distances between small groups of slaves. That immediacy allowed the slaves to talk to each other, to make plans, to foment rebellion.

Rebellion or Revolt?

On the night of April 6, 1712, resentment reached a flashpoint. It began in, what was then, the middle of town, on Maiden Lane. There about 23 slaves met and began their rebellion. I’ll let Colonial New York’s Governor Robert Hunter pick up the story:

I must now give your Lordships an account of a bloody conspiracy of some of the slaves of this place, to destroy as many of the inhabitants as they could….when they had resolved to revenge themselves, for some hard usage they apprehended to have received from their masters (for I can find no other cause) they agreed to meet in the orchard of Mr. Crook in the middle of the town, some provided with fire arms, some with swords and others with knives and hatchets. This was the sixth day of April, the time of the meeting was about twelve or one clock in the night, when about three and twenty of them were got together. One…slave to one Vantilburgh set fire to [a shed] of his masters, and then repairing to his place where the rest were, they all sallyed out together with their arms and marched to the fire. By this time, the noise of the fire spreading through the town, the people began to flock to it. Upon the approach of several, the slaves fired and killed them. The noise of the guns gave the alarm, and some escaping, their shot soon published the cause of the fire, which was the reason that nine Christians were killed, and about five or six wounded. Upon the first notice, which was very against them, but the slaves made their retreat into the woods, by the favour of the night. Having ordered the day following, the militia of this town and the country of West Chester to drive [to] the Island, and by this means and strict searches in the town, we found all that put the design in execution, six of these having first laid violent hands upon themselves [committed suicide], the rest were forthwith brought to their tryal before ye Justices of this place….In that court were twenty seven condemned, whereof twenty one were executed, one being a woman with a child, her execution by than means suspended. Some were burnt, others hanged, one broke on the wheel, and one hung alive in chains in the town, so that there has been the most exemplary punishment inflicted that could be possibily [sic] thought of.

Not surprisingly conditions for slaves became worse following the rebellion. Laws were quickly passed that prevented slaves from gathering in groups of 4 or more. They could not carry firearms, nor could they gamble. Punishment for those crimes was a whipping. However, the new laws also demanded the Death Penalty for property crimes, rape, and conspiracy to kill. In addition, owners who wanted to set their slaves free would be required to pay a tax of £200, which was far more than they could get by selling the slave to someone else.

It wasn’t until 1799 that New York outlawed slavery, but “it remained an intrinsic part of city life until after the Civil War, as businessmen continued to profit off of the products of the slave trade like sugar and molasses imported from the Caribbean” not to mention the products from the south.

Slavery is ‘Merka’s original sin. The sin of Racism continues to this very day.

Nat Turner Sentenced To Be Hanged ► Throwback Thursday

November 5, 2015institutional racism, Nat Turner, Racism, Rebellion, Revolt, Slave Revolt, Slavery, Throwback Thursday, Throwback ThursdaysHeadly Westerfield

Benjamin Phipps, a local farmer, accidentally
discovers Nat Turner almost 2 months after the revolt

On this day in 1831, Nat Turner was tried, convicted, and sentenced to be hanged as leader of the slave revolt of two months earlier.

Turner believed his revolt was ordained by God. According to History:

He was born on the Virginia plantation of Benjamin Turner, who allowed him to be instructed in reading, writing, and religion. Sold three times in his childhood and hired out to John Travis (1820s), he became a fiery preacher and leader of African-American slaves on Benjamin Turner’s plantation and in his Southampton County neighbourhood, claiming that he was chosen by God to lead them from bondage.

Believing in signs and hearing divine voices, Turner was convinced by an eclipse of the Sun (1831) that the time to rise up had come, and he enlisted the help of four other slaves in the area. An insurrection was planned, aborted, and rescheduled for August 21,1831, when he and six other slaves killed the Travis family, managed to secure arms and horses, and enlisted about 75 other slaves in a disorganized insurrection that resulted in the murder of 51 white people.

Afterwards, Turner hid nearby successfully for six weeks until his discovery, conviction, and hanging at Jerusalem, Virginia, along with 16 of his followers.

Racist cartoon depicting the revolt

If Nat Turner thought his revolt would lead to freedom for slaves, he was sadly mistaken. In fact, as the WikiWackyWoo tell us, it got worse for all Black folk, Free Black and slave alike.

In total, the state executed 56 blacks suspected of having been
involved in the uprising. But in the hysteria of aroused fears and anger
in the days after the revolt, white militias and mobs killed an
estimated 200 blacks, many of whom had nothing to do with the rebellion.[32]

[…]

The fear caused by Nat Turner’s insurrection and the concerns raised
in the emancipation debates that followed resulted in politicians and
writers responding by defining slavery as a “positive good”.[34] Such authors included Thomas Roderick Dew, a William and Mary College professor who published a pamphlet in 1832 opposing emancipation on economic and other grounds.[35]

Fears of uprisings polarized moderates and slave owners across the South. Municipalities across the region instituted repressive policies against
blacks. Rights were taken away from those who were free. The freedoms
of all black people in Virginia were tightly curtailed. Socially, the
uprising discouraged whites’ questioning the slave system from the
perspective that such discussion might encourage similar slave revolts. Manumissions
had decreased by 1810. The shift away from tobacco had made owning
slaves in the Upper South an excess to the planters’ needs, so they
started to hire out slaves. With the ending of the international slave
trade, the invention of the cotton gin, and opening up of new territories in the Deep South,
suddenly there was a growing market for the trading of slaves. Over the
next decades, more than a million slaves would be transported to the
Deep South in a forced migration as a result of the domestic slave
trade.

Nat Turner was hanged on November 11, 1831, just 6 days after he was tried, convicted, and sentenced.

Is Toussaint L’Overture Packing Heat? Again?

August 3, 2012Black Napoleon, Dominican Republic, François-Dominique Toussaint L'Ouverture, Haiti, Miami, Reparations, Slave Revolt, Statue, Toussaint L'OuvertureHeadly Westerfield

Anyone who has studied the history of Haiti will know the name François-Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture, sometimes known as the Black Napoleon. L’ouverture led the only successful slave revolt in the western world, back in 1791. Rather than go into the long and complex history of Haiti here, I suggest you visit the Toussaint Louverture Historical Society, and these other links, for a much fuller explanation of his life and the times he lived in than I can give here.

The City of Miami has seen fit to honour L’Ouverture with a stature in a rough little parkette at the corner of NW 62nd Street and N. Miami Avenue. The park is not very big, occupying an irregular wedge of land that would have been difficult to develop. However, the stature of Toussaint L’Ouverture is impressive. His pose is similar to the painting at left, showing L’Ouverture dressed in western refinery after the revolt. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to find out that sculptor James Mastin used the painting as a source for his larger-than-life sculpture. There are only so many images of L’Ouverture.

However, if one views the statue from one particular angle it looks as if L’Ouverture is holding a handgun, ready to go into battle all over again:

Optical illusion of Toussaint L’Ouverture packing heat.

While presumably accidental, it seems entirely appropriate that L’Ouverture appears to be holding a weapon. When news of the revolution in Haiti reached the shores of ‘Merka it had slave owners quaking in their boots. The news was kept from slaves, lest they get the idea that they could throw off the yoke of slavery and free themselves.

And, while L’Ouverture may have won the war, Haiti lost the battle. Eventually, the island was split in two, with Haiti occupying the western half and the Dominican Republic the eastern half. Forced reparations, international isolation, and years of ‘Merkin occupation explain why the western half of Hispaniola has languished to this very day.

***

***