The World That Fear Made: Slave Revolts and Conspiracy Scares in Early America

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

In an award-winning review article published in the William and Mary Quarterly in October 2001, “Denmark Vesey and His Co-conspirators,” historian Michael Johnson revived historian Richard Wade's controversial claim, that the celebrated Denmark Vesey conspiracy of 1822 was in fact a conspiracy scare, a figment of the white imagination. The terrible bloodshed unleashed against enslaved Carolinians that summer stemmed from the fear among white authorities that the people they had enslaved since the 1670s were plotting to take vengeance. Johnson argued that, contrary to complicated and unclear archival evidence, most historians of this terrible episode had settled on “the heroic interpretation of Vesey,” who, historians claimed, had organized a widespread rebellion to overthrow an oppressive slave society (915). The “conspirators” were not only enslaved rebels; they were also historians who had skirted the strictures of their craft to develop a historical narrative of Black resistance that was politically satisfying.Jason Sharples has elaborated on Johnson's interpretation and applied it to the centuries-long history of slave conspiracies (or were they conspiracy scares?) in the Anglo-Atlantic world. His work covers an impressive expanse of space and time, throughout Britain's Atlantic empire, including the Caribbean and North America, and stretching from seventeenth-century Barbados and Jamaica to the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). He has done impressive archival research, digging out the manuscript reports of numerous such events and reading them alongside the published versions. Sharples does not entirely discount the existence of actual slave conspiracies, and he acknowledges that there were rebellions, but he argues that although the archival record suggests numerous instances of conspiracy to rebel among the enslaved, the documents deceive. The white colonists who generated these documents lived with the perpetual fear that the people they enslaved with such brutal violence would someday turn that violence against them. This fear resulted in conspiracy scares, which led to the incarceration of suspects, interrogation, judicial torture, deportations, public executions, and the ritual brutalization of Black bodies. This archive of slavery, Sharples argues, should be read through the paradigm of white fear, not that of Black resistance.Sharples argues that throughout the long historiography on slave resistance—which dates at least to Herbert Aptheker's American Negro Slave Revolts, published in 1936—historians have conflated conspiracy scares with actual conspiracies and rebellions, which were in fact quite rare. For Sharples, the exemplary model of an actual slave insurrection can be seen in Jamaica during the 1690s, or in Stono, South Carolina, in 1739. On these occasions, a limited group of enslaved Africans took up arms and fled the plantations. Their “primary goal [was] escape more than massacre,” and they were either defeated, as in South Carolina, or established Maroon communities (5). Sharples argues that most other evidence of conspiracies to rebel reflects a long tradition of white panic. With two maps and a series of bar graphs, Sharples represents a pattern of conspiracy scares that began in Barbados in 1675 and averaged about eight per year until 1784 (16–17, 72–73). The most fearful period coincided with the Revolutionary War (1775–84), when there were twenty conspiracy scares, followed by the Seven Years’ War (1755–64), when there were sixteen. In both periods, the tumult of war intensified fear. Other peaks of conspiratorial accusation took place during the plantation revolutions, when the percentage of Africans increased dramatically through the transatlantic slave trade.New masters grew terrified when suddenly outnumbered by those they enslaved, and as a result of this fear, they accused the enslaved of conspiring to rebel.In considering the meaning of rebellions and conspiracies, Sharples has taken on the politics of the plantations, and the interpretation he offers allows very little space for Black actors. This is not plausible. Let us consider the two principal explanations for the spike in conspiracy scares that Sharples has proposed: (1) the demographic impact of the transatlantic slave trade, and (2) the impact of war. Since the 1970s, historians such as Monica Shuler, John Thornton, Michael Gomez, Walter Rucker, and most recently Vincent Brown have observed that many enslaved Africans in the Americas had been soldiers in African conflicts and, in American settings, they used their martial skills, both strategic and tactical, as rebels in the Americas. Whites did not simply fear plotting; enslaved men and women were plotting. Second, an important article by David Geggus published in the William and Mary Quarterly in April 1987 suggested a theory of slave rebellion that situates Sharples's evidence in a very different light. Geggus argued that when slaveholders became distracted by foreign conflicts that depressed garrison levels, or when colonies became embroiled in civil conflict, as happened in Saint Domingue in 1790, an opening resulted for enslaved rebels to strike. This sequence of events can be seen between the War for Jenkin's Ear and the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina; or between the Seven Years’ War and Tacky's Revolt in Jamaica, a conflict in which former African soldiers also played a central role. We see a similar pattern in the British Caribbean during the early nineteenth century when abolitionism threatened masters. Division between imperial officials and colonial elites created an opening, and rebels saw the opportunity to strike, in Barbados in 1816, Demerara in 1823, and Jamaica in 1831. In these situations, the “day-to-day resistance” that pervaded Black life under slavery, the associational activity that Sharples does see in the evidence, intersected with a crack in the power structure that masters oversaw, and enabled rebellion.Sharples's analysis is most persuasive in moments such as New York City in 1741, or in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822, when the most detailed evidence comes from authorities who oversaw interrogations and ordered executions and who came under the critique of white peers who protested that the executions had gone too far. In reading these accounts, it is easy to see fearful white authorities acting on rumors, arresting and incarcerating suspected rebels, interrogating them for further names, and getting carried away by the bloodlust of vengeful mastery. Yet even in circumstances like these, careful research by scholars such as Jill Lepore on New York, and Douglas Egerton and Robert Paquette on South Carolina, has acknowledged white paranoia but also illustrated the validity of white suspicions. Black voices from this era have so rarely survived in the archive, and we should listen to them. The assumption of white paranoia drowns out their sound.