All for Liberty

Jeff Strickland tells the powerful story of Nicholas Kelly, the enslaved craftsman who led the Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion, the largest slave revolt in the history of the antebellum American South. With two accomplices, some sledgehammers, and pickaxes, Nicholas risked his life and helped thirty-six fellow enslaved people escape the workhouse where they had been sent by their enslavers to be tortured. While Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, and Denmark Vesey remain the most recognizable rebels, the pivotal role of Nicholas Kelly is often forgotten. All for Liberty centers his rebellion as a decisive moment leading up to the secession of South Carolina from the United States in 1861. This compelling micro-history navigates between Nicholas's story and the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, while also considering the parallels between race and incarceration in the nineteenth century and in modern America. Never before has the story of Nicholas Kelly been so eloquently told.

First Bull Run/Manassas

This chapter examines the First Battle of Bull Run, also known as the First Battle of Manassas, and argues that the Civil War’s first battle represented the last battle of antebellum military cultures of free and slave states. Before the Civil War, Americans refused to maintain a large U.S. Army. In the antebellum era, states organized local militia units based on their perception of internal and external threats; fear of slave revolt prompted slave states to maintain larger, more effective units, particularly cavalry units. Troopers who manned cavalry militia also staffed the slave patrols that brutally enforced the slave regime. In contrast, free states had no such fears, and their militias were moribund before the Civil War. When war came, slave states’ superior military capability led to Confederate victory at Bull Run/Manassas. Later, volunteer units from the free states achieved a level of competency that overcame this initial disadvantage.

AN UKNOWN PREFACE FROM DIODORUS’ BIBLIOTHÊKÊ (BOOK 34)?

This paper deals with two fragments (34/35.2.25–6 and 2.33) from Diodorus’ Bibliothêkê that are unanimously considered to belong to the narrative of the First Slave Revolt in Sicily (Book 34). It is the main concern of this paper to demonstrate that they most likely did not, but instead originate from an unknown preface to Book 34. The article begins with a brief introduction into Diodorus’ prefaces and discusses the Byzantine transmission of both fragments. Against this backdrop, three main steps are consecutively applied to prove the hypothesis. First, the narrative order of both fragments within the Byzantine collections is re-examined. Furthermore, the paper establishes a thematic and argumentative relationship between the two fragments. In the last step, the structure and the style of both fragments are analysed.

The Tumultuous Island

The years following Sarah and Isaac’s conversion were ones of great change on the island, rife with controversies and rebellion. On the one hand the Brandon-Lopez-Gill clan was prospering, with both Brandon cousins and Lopez-Gill uncles making important marriages. Yet the synagogue was in disarray, with interracial sex often at the center of controversies. While unmarried Jewish men like Sarah and Isaac’s father suffered no penalties for extramarital affairs, married Jews and religious leaders found themselves repeatedly sanctioned by the synagogue, their intimate affairs laid open. Racial tensions on the island reached a peak in 1816 when a slave revolt broke out near the southern coast. In the years following the revolt, free people of color would seek compensation for their support in suppressing the insurrection. Petitions and religion, rather than open rebellion, became the new path to power.

Nat Turner’s Rebellion

In Southampton County, Virginia, Nat Turner and six other men launched the deadliest slave revolt in the history of the United States. The revolt began in the middle of the night, August 21–22, 1831, and by the middle of the day on August 22 the rebels had killed nearly five dozen whites, including many women and children. Whites responded in many ways. Many panicked, and some rallied to oppose the rebels. Some of these irregular white forces stumbled upon Turner and his men at James Parker’s farm, not far from Jerusalem, Southampton’s county seat. The encounter ended quickly and indecisively, but the whites had stopped the rebel advance. Following this first battle, Turner tried to rally his men, something that became increasingly hard to do as more and more whites from nearby counties in Virginia and North Carolina came to Southampton. By the morning of August 23, the rebels were defeated at a series of engagements and the organized phase of the revolt ended. Whites quickly and brutally reasserted their control over Southampton, torturing many of the accused and killing roughly three dozen black suspects without trials. Worried about the possibility of a more extensive bloodbath, white leaders in Southampton, who knew that owners were compensated for the value of their slaves who had been condemned by the state, soon clamped down on the extralegal massacre of suspected rebels. On August 31, 1831, trials of suspect rebels began. By the time that the trials were finished the following spring, thirty slaves and one free black had been condemned to death. Of these people, nineteen were executed in Southampton, and twelve had their sentences commuted to transportation from the state of Virginia. Turner himself, one of the condemned, was hanged on November 11, 1831, although not before Thomas R. Gray, a lawyer who was defense council for other slave rebels, interviewed the jailed rebel leader. Gray published this transcript as The Confessions of Nat Turner, which presented Turner’s religious motivations. Immediately after the revolt, several southern state legislatures took up laws regulating slavery; the Virginia legislature also considered and rejected a gradual emancipation scheme. Since the revolt, Nat Turner and his legacy have been contested by many, including scholars, novelists, artists, and filmmakers.

Digital Commemorations of Slave Revolt

This article presents, troubles, and ultimately seeks to answer two simple questions: What does the digitization of slave resistance look like, and can it serve as a virtual memorial commemorating historic events where markers are lacking in geographic places, such as locations where slave revolts occurred? In four main parts, this article presents an example of digital commemoration of slave resistance in a now defunct online list of shipboard rebellions; it then contrasts this digital resource to material monuments to slave revolt leaders and to diverse types of museum displays (as at the International Museum of Slavery at Liverpool); the next section profiles online resources about slave revolt, including Vincent Brown’s animated map of slave insurrections in Jamaica and repositories, archives, and databases of newspaper advertisements for runaways, arguing that these resources can sometimes be understood not merely as educational tools but also as digital commemorations of slave revolt. Finally, engaging with theory on monuments, memory, and history, this piece explains why digital commemorations existing in virtual space might productively acknowledge our discomfort with the existent archive and the insurmountable gaps in our knowledge of history.

Decidedly Antislavery

Back in the United States, proslavery and antislavery positions become polarized. Ben Major had not come to his decision to free and colonize his slaves in a vacuum but found support from some others in his denomination, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and his community. Their views are not universally accepted. A few abolitionists support colonization; most fervently oppose it. Some slave owners support colonization; others vilify their peers who free slaves for migration. The slave revolt aboard the Amistad and the subsequent 1841 Supreme Court decision fuel the debate in America over slavery and increase interest in colonization.

Would a Virtuous Person Grandstand?

This chapter discusses moral grandstanding from the standpoint of virtue ethics. Three common approaches to virtue ethics are considered. A virtuous person would not grandstand according to the classical conception of virtue, on which virtue is doing the right thing for the right reason. People would be disappointed if they found out that a widely admired, historic speech turned out to be grandstanding. Vanity, the general character trait most closely associated with grandstanding, is not plausibly a virtue according to virtue consequentialism. Finally, grandstanding is an abuse of morality, like the one Nietzsche labels the slave revolt in morals, as grandstanders use moral talk as an underhanded shortcut to satisfy their will to power.