A Slave Revolt Washed Away
August 30, 1800, might have been remembered as the day that thousands of slaves in Richmond, Virginia, rose up against their masters, took the city armory, killed any whites who resisted them, marched into nearby towns, freed all the slaves, and made Virginia a homeland for displaced Africans. It might have been, had it not been for a storm that flooded bridges and roads.That slavery was more prevalent in the American South than in the North was not simply a matter of ideology. The nation was initially divided into slave and free states largely because of the weather. The problem with owning people is that you have to house and feed them, whether they are working or not. This is not such a conflict in an area with a long growing season. But in the chilly North, the summers were not long enough for the profits from slave labor to outweigh the high cost of maintaining indentured servants.
Thus most slaves ended up in Brazil, the Caribbean islands, and the American South, where the tropical temperatures and long growing seasons made slave ownership profitable. By the Revolutionary War period, 40 percent of African Americans in the northern states were free, compared to only 4 percent in the southern states. A little-known fact is that African slavery was such a vibrant trade, the forced migration of Africans exceeded that of Europeans to the New World until the 1830s. The cumulative total of African migrants continued to exceed that of Europeans until the 1880s.
Eventually, people noticed the North/South slave divide, and tried to come up with a justification or explanation. Many correctly surmised it had something to do with the weather. Their conclusions, however, were often well off the mark. Many in both the North and South came to believe that something about the southern climate was hazardous to whites, but Africans were immune.
Governor Johnson of Georgia summed up this point of view in an 1850 speech: “They cannot hire labor to cultivate rice swamps, ditch their low ground, or drain their morasses. And why? Because the climate is deadly to the white man. He could not go there and live a week; and therefore the vast territory would be a barren waste unless Capital owned labor.”
The weather was also often blamed for slaves’ “poor work habits.” Slave owners dismissed out of hand the notion that people who have no share in the wealth, no prospects for their future, and who are treated as property might be less than enthusiastic about their work. Instead some thinkers of the time blamed the air. “When disposing themselves for sleep,” wrote Dr. Samuel Cartwright of Louisiana, “the young and old, male and female, instinctively cover their heads and faces, as if to insure the inhalation of warm, impure air, loaded with carbonic acid and aqueous vapor. The natural effect of this practice is imperfect atmospherization of the blood—one of the heaviest chains that binds the Negro to slavery.”
While the northern states did not support slave ownership, their economy was also dependant, albeit indirectly, on slave labor. Cotton, grown by slaves, was the nation’s leading export in the early nineteenth century. Low-cost cotton was needed in New England textile mills, and exports to England of the raw material and the textiles powered much of the nation’s economy as a whole. In 1807 the United States passed legislation banning the slave trade, which would take effect in 1808. That same year the British Parliament outlawed the forced migration of Africans, and in 1810, the British negotiated an agreement with Portugal calling for gradual abolition of slave trade in the South Atlantic. But while the African slave trade ended, the institution of slavery did not.
Thus the value of existing slaves began to skyrocket. This meant that even in temperate southern states, it was no longer economically feasible to support a slave year-round. To make up the difference, plantation owners would rent out slave labor during slow seasons, and increasingly young slaves were taught trades to increase their value. Unlike the previous generation of slaves, these skilled tradesmen learned about life off the farm. They interacted with city people and slaves from other plantations. This would prove to be quite dangerous to the institution of slavery.
One such slave-tradesman was a tall, charismatic twenty-four-year-old named Gabriel. He is sometimes recorded as Gabriel Prosser, but “Prosser” was the last name of his owner, not of his parents. He was one of three sons born into slavery on the plantation of Thomas Prosser and his wife, Ann. Someone, perhaps Ann, taught young Gabriel to read and write, making him part of the very small minority, about 5 percent, of slaves with this ability. In order to make the best use of his time, they provided him with training as a blacksmith.
“In a different world, Gabriel would have prospered,” wrote historian Douglas R. Egerton. “His intelligence, his physical size, and his skill would have marked him as a man on the rise. But this was not a different world; Gabriel was a black man in Jeffersonian Virginia.”
He could have done what many in his situation did—run away to a free state. But Gabriel did not want to abandon his brothers or his new wife, Nanny. In any case, running away was abandoning responsibility. Gabriel did not just want his own freedom; he wanted freedom for all slaves. He began to believe that the only solution was ...Continue to Page 2
