Talk:Gabriel's Rebellion

message: I am curious about what is meant by "neutrality" in a biographical article about a leader of a slave revolt, dead for two centuries. I presume we are not trying to present both the good and bad aspects of slavery, or be neutral as to whether Gabriel had a moral right to organize a revolt (although if we were writing in 1800, we literally would have had to do just that to be "neutral.") If we are to be neutral as to WHETHER he organized a revolt at all, someone will have to present some FACTS indicating that he did not. Contemporary authorities in Virginia were quite terrified that he did, and that he came close to success. Finally, as I have noted before, Edgerton's work provides the most thorough parsing of facts that exists, although his conclusions, derived from those facts, are subject to debate. There is not much more neutrality to offer than to state that openly. The link below leads to a very good factual summary, with a solid bibliography.
Superslum needs to do some reading, a LOT of reading, before he has anything credible to say. All comments posted here reflect his own personal fantasy of what slavery was, having no basis in history, or in the reality lived by those who were slaves.
The NPOV note is conclusionary. It is UNLIKELY??? that planters made deliberate choices in response to Gabriel's rebellion? Planters, and the Virginia government in which they were the dominant element, made substantial changes in laws, and in organization of militia and slave patrols, in DIRECT response to this rebellion. That response MADE slavery the institution it became in the decades prior to the civil war!
User : Llawnrodded — Preceding undated comment added 00:33, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Definitions

message: This would be quite a feat, that is to sail north on a schooner from Richmond and reach Norfolk.  The James River runs east and west and Norfolk is about 90-100 miles east of Richmond.  I don't believe there is a way to sail north from Richmond on a schooner.  
:Perhaps they equipped a wagon with sails, and then "sailed north" across the land.  The claim that they "sailed north" from Richmond proves that people will submit all sorts of nonsensical statements into Wikipedia.  Wikipedia contains many more similar fabrications.  Velocicaptor 15:49, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Um, so fix it? --Dhartung | Talk 17:12, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It is impossible to fix this article because someone will promptly discard the correct statements.  "Anyone can edit" means that "no holds barred" editing is allowed.  Changing some of the articles in Wikipedia is impossible.  The sentence that claims that "Gabriel's plan" would have affected the Presidential of 1800 is a very strange statement.  Slaves did not produce plans.  How many white men were slain by those slaves?  Probably none.  Who was "Author Douglas Edgerton?"  Why is he the primary authority being cited?  Was he a Ku Klux Klansman?  Velocicaptor 23:03, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: If you're that cynical about Wikipedia, participating may not be very rewarding for you, is all I can say. I do know that the Egerton additions were added as argumentative and I and other editors succeeded in confining them to its own section. The main rationale seems to be that he wrote a book recently. There are other primary sources that could be cited. --Dhartung | Talk 23:22, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Sailing North from Richmond

message: Please forgive me for my inability to properly use html, I'm simply a history teacher who has read Egerton's book on Gabriels rebellion and wanted to offer some insight into your discussion. First of all, Gabriel Prosser wasn't the typical slave you've descrbied, barefoot etc. He was a skilled artisan and was well read. He knew of the Revolution of 1800 and felt that it would be an oppurtune time to try to abolish slavery. The election of 1800 has been refferred to the Revolution of 1800 because it was a peaceful transfer of power from the federalists to the Democratic Republicans(Antt-Federalists). Thomas Jefferson it was well known was against slavery. Prosser knew this and figured that it would be an oppurtune time to stage a rebellion because he would have the sympathy of the nations highest office. 
As a result of Prossers skills as an artisan he saw himself lent out to plantations all over. As a result Prosser was able to interact with slaves on a level that that lay people today would consider improbable if not impossible. Because of Gabriel's status with whites and his abilities he naturally had great standing among his peers and it became easy for him to convince people that such a rebellion would not only prove possible but would work. As his plan grew, so did the number of skilled slaves that could visit other plantations. As a result, you could liken Gabriel to a General issuing orders to his field commanders(the other artisans) and they in turn disseminated that information along to the grunts (slaves throughout the various plantations.) Please note that this rebellion took two years in planning and was unlike other slave rebellions you've read about in history books. The south was compleletly alarmed because of the widespread scale of this rebellion as well as the details that went into it. 
As for the weapons issue. One of Gabriel's conspirators was going to leave one of the armorys unlocked so that the slaves could indeed arm themselves. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by "Wunderer" 163.150.15.246 (talk • contribs) .
:Much of what you say above is accepted and tangential to the dispute. The major problem, going back a year or two here, occurred because someone came in and edited the article with conclusionary attribution to Egerton and forced the article to argue with itself, e.g. "Smith was a solicitor. Actually Smith was not a solicitor, but a barrister. Writer Jones says that all the historians who say he was a solicitor were anti-Smith."  It isn't so much that Egerton's conclusions were startlingly different but that they were presented as argumentative when they did not need to be. --Dhartung | Talk 17:52, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Some insight

message: Do most people think that it is safe to remove the NPOV tag? It is kind of confusing why it is even there, as it is right smack in the middle of a section where information about a book is being presented. The strange person who added the tag has been blocked from editing Wikipedia. I'm, totally, removing the tag speak up if this was a bad choice.
Leondegrance — Preceding undated comment added 23:26, 8 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: NPOV

message: ::As the contributor who first introduced Edgerton's research, coming back after two years or so, I am amazed at all the pseudo-controversy. I introduced it because it needed to be part of any article, and I carefully delineated it as one scholar's recent research, because I knew it would be controversial. If I wished to simply impose my own view of what is credible, Edgerton would be it. But even so, nobody ever gets ALL the truth, or perfect accuracy, in any book. There has been a good deal of mythology about Gabriel, first because the authorities tried to suppress contemporary information, then, because people with a dramatic flair or their own agenda looked back from 100 years or more later and wrote pure fantasy. Edgerton is the only detailed scholarship to look back to remaining contemporary sources that anyone has produced -- of course he has, as do we all, a point of view which guided his interpretation of the data. But he offers much better data than any other published source. As to PBS, I would want to see a FOOTNOTED transcript, and then check THEIR sources, before accepting it as anything but drama, potentially informative drama, but hardly authoritative. The point that Gabriel did not plan to make himself "King of Virginia" is well taken. He was a republican, in the sense used at that time, and fully intended to live in a multi-racial republic once the point had been forcefully made that all slaves were to be freed. After all, he worked and socialized with "white" people of his own class (industrial artisans) as did others of his color and occupation, free and slave. The article is looking rather good right now, everybody has done well at adding details and shaping it coherently. --Llawnrodded   —Preceding undated comment was added at 18:05, 10 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Notes on Edgerton 

message: This usually means looking at how historians have treated a topic over time.  Most of the discussion here seems to be about Egerton's book, and it's not even clear what the controversies were.  I doubt if many historians really worried about whether the man was known as Gabriel or Gabriel Prosser. In the past it may have been considered easier, or even more respectful, to use a surname for Gabriel,  whether or not he had formally adopted one for himself. There were probably many different versions in different records. I understand that people should no longer assume that slaves adopted masters' names; many freedmen after the Civil War, for instance, adopted new names, names that had meaning for them.--Parkwells (talk) 21:47, 23 July 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Historiography

message: Well, for all the back and forth in discussion, the article presently looks quite good, and well balanced in the best sense of the word, presenting many reasonably well researched facts which might support a number of conclusions, none of which are definitive.
A breif noted about "sailing north from Richmond." During that period, roads were abysmal, so the most efficient way to get from Richmond to Norfolk was to sail down the James River, then south along the coast to Norfolk. It would have taken much longer to go overland. Since rivers run where they run, and no canal had been dug the other way, it was necessary to "go with the flow."
Llawnrodded (talk) 17:06, 5 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Looking Good

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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