26 - Slave Worker Rebellions and Revolution in the Americas to 1804

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Africans sold as slaves for the Americas rebelled before they even reached the Americas. Shipboard uprisings were comparatively frequent, affecting as many as one in ten slavers. Shipboard conditions, traumatic wrenching from family and homeland, and fears for the future incited action. Rebels rarely succeeded. On the coast, African factors and traders assisted captains and crew, and even slaves who captured their vessels could be recaptured and resold. Slave ships were designed and equipped to resist takeover at sea; a strategically placed, well-armed crew could contain mutinies, but not prevent slaves leaping overboard or renewed attacks in which captains and crews were at times chopped to death. Where rebellion proved impossible, slaves invoked rescue by supernatural means; fetishes found in ships' water tanks were intended, as experienced captains understood, to kill their captors. Whatever the outcome, shipboard rebels began the fight that workers caged in by slave labor regimes continued.

In the Americas work conditions rapidly generated three forms of revolt, quotidian resistance within, escape from, and uprisings against the system. Everyday resistance had a dual function. At an immediate, practical level it engaged most slaves in wide-ranging covert and overt activities to contest, despite their owners' draconian disciplinary powers, their terms of work and living conditions. Their tactics, richly documented in the literature and briefly summarized here, relied in part on individual and collective verbal pleas and pressures and covert cooperation to lower workloads or to acquire goods for consumption and trade and were laced by acts of violence, crops destroyed, occasional owner or manager murders, and spontaneous, explosive workplace revolts.