Revolts and Abolitionism

This chapter covers the various revolts and eventual emancipation of all enslaved people. Very few slave uprisings disrupted slaveholding regions in the Americas after 1815 because enslaved people understood the risks. It was therefore not by chance that the three largest uprisings over the subsequent fifteen years occurred in Great Britain's colonies: enslaved people could both rely on the abolitionist movement that had led to the end of the slave trade and give it renewed momentum by demanding the total and immediate emancipation of every slave in British America. These three slave revolts that erupted in the British colonies between 1816 and 1831 were prompted by rumors of emancipation or of improved living conditions for slaves. All three demonstrated that at least some enslaved men and women considered their situation to be unacceptable, inhuman, unjust, and revolting.

Marronage and the Purchase of Freedom

This chapter explores the ways in which manumission and the purchase of freedom remained highly dependent on circumstances and geography. Despite the changes caused by wars and the independence of most territories on the American continent, in every state or region in which slavery had not been abolished, slaves, whether Africans or creoles, plantation or mine workers, artisans or servants, continued to use flight as a way to gain their freedom. In Brazil and Spain's former colonies, the opportunities to do so varied considerably. In the French colonies, authorities adapted to the presence of libres de savane and maroons who contributed to the informal economy without directly challenging the system of slavery. In the United States, more and more slaves escaped from Virginia and Maryland toward northern cities where they hoped to blend into small communities of free African Americans; farther south, however, the strengthening and expansion of racial slavery to the detriment of the establishment of free black populations rendered marronage nearly impossible.

The Shock Waves of the Haitian Revolution

This chapter explores the shock waves caused by the Haitian Revolution and the massive slave insurrection that took both the Americas and Europe by surprise. Despite the rarity of large-scale revolts after 1794, the Saint Domingue insurrection did have a lasting impact on the slaves. The greatest lesson they retained from Haiti was that the institution of slavery was neither unchangeable nor invincible. Amid the troubled backdrop of the age of revolutions, many attentively followed the legal changes upsetting their owners, like the Spanish Códigno Negro, the French abolition of slavery, gradual emancipation laws in the northern United States, and the ban of the slave trade by Great Britain and the United States. Furthermore, after 1794, protests during which slaves claimed freedom they believed to have been decreed by the king or the government, but hidden by their masters, multiplied.

From the Slave Revolt in Saint Domingue to the Founding of the Black Nation of Haiti

This chapter discusses the 1791 slave revolt in Saint Domingue and the following impact it had on the entire continent. This uprising marks the first time that thousands of slaves had attacked their exploiters and their plantations to demand freedom with unprecedented violence, implementing a scenario of servile revolt long feared by supporters of slavery. From 1791 to 1804, the slave uprising in Saint Domingue and its transformation into a liberation war panicked the rulers and slaveowners in a large portion of the Americas as well. Following the French defeat in 1803, Saint Domingue was renamed Haiti and became the second independent nation in the Americas and the only one to have irreversibly abolished slavery.

Introduction

This introductory section presents the historiography of the slave trade and the humanity of the slaves involved. How did slaves express themselves as human beings and social actors in their own right, when the laws of the time primarily considered them to be personal property? Spanning the early sixteenth century to 1838 and considering the entirety of the continental and Caribbean Americas, the author utilizes a multidimensional approach to conduct a long-term comparative study of the Americas, revealing the breadth and success of actions taken by slaves to liberate themselves long before abolitionism. This section also examines the particular circumstances of slaves and the actions of slaves who were able to obtain their own freedom, which reveals how slaves ultimately sped up the abolition of slavery. Looking at various forms of slave resistance also demonstrates the affirmation of slaves' intrinsic humanity. Finally, the introduction provides a review of secondary literature that serves as the foundation of Helg's book.

Epilogue

The epilogue briefly examines slave self-liberation strategies and legal emancipation in the fifty years following general emancipation in the British colonies in 1838 up to the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888. The epilogue explores differences in national trajectories to abolition, with particular attention paid to Cuba, Haiti, and the United States in order to show how these national narratives mask a longer history of repression, white compensation, and slave survival. While emancipation was eventually enacted across the Americas, many states' recalcitrance to liberate slaves-or to compensate them once emancipated-meant that even after 1838, slaves still relied on self-liberation in order to gain their freedom. Given the relative rarity of outright slave rebellion, many of the strategies of self-liberation-including self-purchase, flight, and enlistment-used by slaves before 1838 remained central to their attempt to gain freedom in the Americas even after British emancipation.

Conspiracy and Revolt

According to most historians, the first 250 years that followed the conquest of the Americas were interspersed with conspiracies and slave revolts. This chapter shows that, in reality, many of those rebellions only existed in the frightened imaginations of colonial elites and numerous whites. Fears and rumors prior to 1700 led to the making of the slave conspiracy narrative. This chapter discusses various rumored slave revolts and the events leading up to the Seven Years' War. The Seven Years' War would suddenly offer slaves new possibilities for liberation by visibly weakening the colonial powers, thus inciting groups of slaves to take extraordinary risks. At the end of the Seven Years' War, the slave trade resumed and reached unprecedented heights, bringing dozens of thousands of Africans to American ports each year. At the same time, slave escapes and protests increased, prompting increasingly bloody crackdowns. That escalation highlighted the fundamental barbarism of slavery - and the equally fundamental humanity of those subjected to it.

Self-Purchase and Military Service

This chapter explores self-purchase and military service as strategies used by slaves to obtain their freedom. In contrast to marronage, these were forms not of revolt but rather of individual, familial, and at times community resistance that used existing legislative frameworks to escape a condition of servitude. This chapter discusses self-purchase and manumission in Iberian America and the prohibition of manumission in British and Dutch America, as well as The Code Noir and restrictions on emancipation in French America. In every slave society, armies and navies historically employed enslaved men, some of whom were rewarded with emancipation. Though emancipation did not challenge the system of slavery, it demonstrated long before the era of revolutions and independence movements that enslaved men and women were able to pursue freedom for themselves or their families through supplementary labor, unknowingly foreshadowing modernity.

Marronage

This chapter explores marronage as one of the ways in which slaves were able to win their freedom in a context in which slavery appeared unshakable. Marronage represented the slaves' primary form of revolt until the mid-eighteenth century and consisted of slaves running away and creating maroon societies within the inner frontiers of the Americas. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, hundreds of thousands of Africans and Afro-descendants favored marronage and the creation of fugitive slave societies such as unyielding palenques and quilombos. These forms of revolt corresponded well to a context of gradual colonization that left immense spaces uncontrolled by authorities or slaveholders. Though undetermined numbers of fugitives were captured, a great many escaped the yoke of slavery by surviving long-term in forests, mountains, or marshlands. Despite the proliferation of slave codes and the severity of punishments, marronage could not be eradicated.

The Slave Trade and Slavery in the Americas

This chapter outlines the major phases of the slave trade in relation to colonization and the evolution of the institution of slavery. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Christian Western Hemisphere relied on the enslavement of Africans, and as a result, tens of thousands of men, women, and children were deported from Africa to the Caribbean and the American continent for nearly four centuries. This chapter covers slavery in Peru and Brazil in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as the sugar plantations in the Caribbean, Brazil, and North America in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This chapter also covers the topics of cotton, sugar, coffee, and chattel slavery in the U.S. South, Cuba, and Brazil in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and explores the similarities and differences in slave systems in the Americas.