“The Past Is Never Dead”
The Continuity of African and European Warfare Practices
Traditions of exterminatory warfare employed by the peoples of Europe and West Africa in their own countries reemerged around the African diaspora over the issue of black freedom and the institution of enslavement. Despite British efforts to control them, Africans who survived the Middle Passage were aggressive in their resistance to enslavement in the West Indies and American colonies and throughout the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary era. Whites’ fears of their destruction in a servile war shaped plantation owners’ theories that only the severest and most traumatizing reprisals would keep the slaves from getting the upper hand and dismantling the entire system. Yet despite brutal retaliation, blacks continued to rebel, making white mastery over the enslaved seem elusive. European settlers knew that for Africans, as well as for themselves, “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.”1
Africans in the diaspora used their military backgrounds to foment insurrections and revolts across the Atlantic World.2 They attempted to kill whites to free themselves and their families from enslavement, while whites enacted internecine violence against blacks to maintain or reinstate enslavement. The details of how bloody and terrible this violence became reveal that the enslaved were highly intelligent strategists who constantly challenged their condition of servitude for generations. As historian Vincent Harding articulated and scholar Manisha Sinha rightly confirms, these early freedom fighters were the first to call for and organize around the abolition of slavery. Indeed, black men and women were the originators of the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement.3 From the slaveholders’ perspective, enslaved Africans were endowed with considerable power to overwhelm them. Visions of black extermination evolved to become the option of last resort if a slave uprising was successful or if those enslaved refused to accept their condition of servitude. Denmark Vesey’s attempted insurrection in 1822 demonstrates that African and European ideas of being at war with one another were ubiquitous. But what really concerned white slaveholders, what they really feared, was black freedom. The manifestation of those fears of a black revolution eventually occurred in Saint-Domingue and resonated throughout the African diaspora into the nineteenth century.
Closely read reports about slave insurrections occurring all over the West Indies and North America served as sober reminders to slave owners that many Africans remained well trained in the arts of war. This fueled an intense fear among whites of their enslaved black population that was as much a part of the legacy of America as slavery was. Europeans developed a “circular fallacy” that somehow it was inherently part of the Africans’ nature, that it was the enslaved Africans’ fault that whites feared their slaves, not the unnatural condition of servitude.4 From slave trader Robert Norris’s perspective, slaves brought their misery on themselves and because of this “are subject to correction, as a punishment for [their] own vices, and for the instruction of others.”5 The notion of correction, however, oversimplifies the conditions in which slavery existed. It was to the colonists a serious contest of wills, played out repeatedly across the Atlantic World with deadly and unpredictable consequences.
African tactics of warfare, very visible during the insurrections of those enslaved in the English colonies, generated the severity of white reprisals. Barbados, South Carolina’s early trading partner, offers an excellent example of how Afro-Barbadians continuously rebelled for over a century despite the fact that they were tortured, worked to death, starved, whipped, and occasionally killed by whites who threw them into boiling vats of sugar. A combined effort in 1649 of white servants and slaves who were “so haughty in their resolutions, and so incorrigible” in their intention to “revenge themselves” or else die trying, led to the execution of eighteen of their leaders. Alleged to be a well-thought-out plan, their intention was to seize “their Masters, and cut all their throats, and by that means, to make themselves not only freemen, but Masters of the Iland.”6 The slave rebellion of 1675 had similar intentions, but according to Governor John Adkins, slaves from all over the island were organized with “a damnable design . . . to destroy them [whites] all.” Governor Adkins admitted that he found the rebellion “far more dangerous than was at first thought, for it had spread over most of the plantations, especially amongst the Cormantin negroes, who are much the greater number from any one country, and are a warlike and robust people.”7 Accounts were published and distributed in all the English colonies, as many of the first settlers in South Carolina were from Barbados. There was also great comfort found in the reports that the “numbers of those that were burned alive, beheaded, and other wise executed for their horrid crime” eliminated further threats.8 Of the seventeen who were found guilty, six were burned alive, and eleven were beheaded; the headless bodies were “dragged through the streets” and then “publicly burned.” Twenty-five more slaves were executed, five committed suicide, and seventy were either deported or returned to their masters “after a savage flogging.”9 Still another insurrection plot uncovered in Barbados in 1692 in which the “slaves entered into a well concerted plan for exterminating the white inhabitants” led the South Carolina House of Assembly to propose a bill that year that “inhibited the Importation of such slaves as have been conserned in any plott in Barbados.”10
Jamaican slaves also suffered hard usage under British colonialism, which resulted in their being “very troublesome” in their aggressive resistance to enslavement.11 A Jamaican plantation owner wrote a report that circulated in the South-Carolina Gazette in 1734 that “our rebellious Negroes are to[o] numerous that they attack us everywhere, and are not afraid of our greatest Force. . . . About ten Days ago they attacked near 100 men, most Soldiers. . . . [M]ost of our people fled; we can get no body to stand before them.”12 What concerned Jamaican slave owners the most was that “we are at present more apprehensive of a Civil War than a Foreign War, and it is feared, if some effectual Means are not taken to reduce them [the slaves] they may in a Little Time render themselves stronger than the Force that can be sent against them. . . . The Number of Negroes on this Island are computed to be about Eighty Thousand, and the Whites not Nine Thousand, which strikes them all with a general consternation.”13
The Maroons, slaves living in the hills of Jamaica, successfully fought against the British until they signed a treaty in 1739. Yet, as Sylviane Diouf argues, they did not just run away from their plantations and masters and fight against recapture. Maroonage represented a wholesale rejection of British culture. These West Africans did not want to assimilate; instead, they chose to coexist with Europeans on their own terms, with their own cultural traditions intact.14 It is because of this that the formerly truant African slaves and their offspring were given freedom in perpetuity and semiautonomous governing of the Maroon towns of Trelawny, Saint James, Saint Elizabeth, and Saint George, all located within the interior regions of the colony.15 The South-Carolina Gazette’s extensive coverage of the remarkable and troubling story of the negotiated truce in Jamaica signifies the intense concern that slaveholders had about the replication of this disastrous turn of events in their own colony.16
The British treaty with the Jamaican Maroon population did not resolve, however, colonists’ fears of the rest of their African slaves rebelling. These fears were realized in 1760 when a slave named Tacky, “a Koromantyn Negro . . . who had been a chief in Guiney,” led other enslaved Africans “carrying death and desolation” in their attempt to exterminate many of the residents of Saint Mary’s Parish. But following African tradition, according to overseer Thomas Thistlewood, white plantation owners were warned ahead of time, as a “Col: Cudjoe Wrote to Col: Barclay & the gentlemen off this Parish a good While agaoa to warn the[m] off this that has happened.”17 Other warning signs, as well as examples of African warfare traditions, can be found in Thistlewood’s observation that “at the beginning off the Rebellion, a Shaved head amongst the Negroes was the Signal off War.” Amongst those who did so were some of the enslaved under Thistlewood’s care, as that “very day Jackie, Job, Achilles, Quasheba, Rosanna, etc. had their heads Shaved.”18
Nevertheless, “in one morning they murdered between thirty and forty Whites, not sparing even infants at the breast, before their progress was stopped.” This “very formidable insurrection of the Koromantyn or Gold Coast Negroes . . . spread through almost every other district of the island.”19 In one district, “a negroe Carrying the Wooden Sword adorned with parrot Feathers (being the sign of union, in Some Part of guinea [Africa] [),] was discover’d by a Capt: off a guinea Man, Who saw it Carrying in procession at Spring path, had the fellow Seized and he discover’d the affair.” In all, the plan, according to Thistlewood, was that “Fire was to have been Sett to the Towns in many places at once, and all the Whites who Come [to] Extinguish them, are to be Murdered in the Confusion, Whilst the Estates Negroes engaged their Overseers, &c at the Similar time.”20
Tacky was not the only leader: there were others who had significant military and leadership experience before becoming enslaved. According to Thistle-wood, who may have gotten the information from John Cope, the owner of the Egypt plantation in Westmoreland Parish, “The Rebell Aguy was a hunter ffor his King in Guinea. Simon was one off the Said Kings Captains. . . . Wager alias Aponga, was a prince in guinea, tributary to the King off Dorme [Dahomey]: the King off dorme so Conquer’d all the Country ffor Miles round him. Aponga . . . He was Surprize’d and took prisoner when hunting, and Sold ffor a Slave, brought to jamaica & Sold to Capt: Forest. . . . Wager come to this Country 6 or 7 years ago.”21 The mission of Tacky, Cudjoe, Aguy, Simon, Aponga, and many other men and women insurrectionists was freedom.22 In order to achieve that goal they intended to “kill all the Negroes they Can [who supported the whites] . . . fire the plantations thay Can, till they fforce the Whites to give them Free[dom].”23 Besides those engaged in direct confrontation with the militia and troops, many others in the enslaved community participated in acts of resistance. They openly defied the rules and walked around “Without Ticketts.” They refused to work in the fields and deliberately trampled on the sugarcane to “brak them.” And they set fire to the symbols of their oppression, the plantations. Many of the enslaved had great faith in the rebel leaders, and they helped to dismantle the system of enslavement “in expectation off being free.”24
Although “an old Koromantyn Negro, the chief instigator and oracle of the insurgents . . . administered the Fetish or solemn oath to the conspirators, and furnished them with a magical preparation which was to render them invulnerable,” Tacky was eventually caught and decapitated.25 Yet Thistlewood noted that “Col: Cudjoe’s Negroes behved with great bravery.” Even when the insurrectionists were tortured after capture, the enslaved Africans “never flinched, moved a foot nor groan’d or Cried oh.” According to John Cope, “Cardiff, Who was Burnt at the Bay, told him and many others present that Multitudes of Negroes had took swear that iff they ffail’d off success in this rebellion, to rise again the Same day [in] two year[s] and advised them to be upon their guard.”26 Indeed, very few of the rebels willingly surrendered, and many instead committed suicide. The British militia “frequently came to places in the woods where seven or eight were found tied up with whites to the boughs of trees, and previous to these self-murders, they had generally massacred the women and children” who had joined the rebel cause as cooks and porters.27 According to Thistlewood, “The Dead Negroes in the Woods Smell like Stinking . . . oyl.”28 In the end, the enslaved killed sixty whites during the rebellion—but that number seems minuscule in comparison to the three to four hundred slaves who were killed or committed suicide, the one hundred slaves who were executed, and the five hundred slaves who were transported out of Jamaica in response to their suspected resistance to enslavement.29
Events in Antigua reported in the South-Carolina Gazette also aroused fears among South Carolinians about the militancy of their slave population. A report to the governor of Antigua, William Mathew, published by the Gazette in 1737 almost in its entirety, outlined an attempted insurrection that was led mostly by Africans from the Gold Coast (Coromantees) and by Creole slaves. A man named Court was the leader of the African contingent, and according to the report given to Governor Mathew, he was “of a considerable family in his own country, brought here at ten years of age.” After growing up in Antigua, Court assumed the “title of King.” The other leader, Tomboy, who was a Creole, along with Hercules, Jack, Scipio, Ned, Fortune, and Toney, made up the other half of the “negro conspiracy.” The plan of the insurrectionists was that “three or four parties of 300–400 slaves were to enter the town and put the whites to the sword; forts and shipping in the harbour were to be seized,” whereby “a new government was to be established when the whites were extirpated.”30 According to Billy Johnson, a free black, all whites were to be killed, because “it would be better if we had the country to ourselves.”31 In order to affirm solidarity in their effort to free themselves, oaths were taken: a person would drink “a health in liquor with grave-dirt and sometimes cock’s blood infused, and sometimes the person swearing laid his hand on live cocks. The general tenor of the oath was to kill the whites.”32 Additionally, a “military dance” was done during the day
of which whites and negroes not in the secret would be spectators yet ignorant of the meaning. It is the custom of Africa when a coromantee king has resolved on war to give public notice that the ikem-dance will be performed . . . the people forming a semicircle about him. The king then begins the dance. . . . When several have danced, the king dances again with his general and swears an oath to behave as a brave prince should or forfeit his life. If he is answered by three huzzas from those present it signifies a belief that the king will observe his oath.33
In the opinion of a confessant, “Tomboy was the greatest of generals.” Not all the Gold Coast slaves supported the initiative, however, as “some of the coromantees, knowing that a war was intended, tried to stop the dance being performed,” perhaps indicating their fear of white reprisals. It is also significant that an Akan ritual remained culturally intact despite the slaves’ removal from their African homeland.34 This evidence supports what historian John Thornton has argued with respect to Angolan and Congolese people: “Military dancing was a part of the African culture of war . . . as much a part of military preparation as drill was in Europe.”35 Indeed, it seems that not only Angolan and Congolese Africans but also Africans from many other ethnic groups performed military dances.
Because of the British discovery of their plot, eighty-eight slaves were put to death. Five were broken on the wheel, six were starved to death on gibbets, and seventy-seven were burned alive. Another forty-four slaves were sold away from the island of Antigua. Although no slave women were deported or executed, Judge Valentine Morris believed that African females had had a role to play in the rebellion and that they were complicit, because he sensed “by their Insolent behavior and Expressions [they] had the utter Extirpation of the Whites as much at heart, as the Men, and would undoubtedly have done as much Mischief by Butchering all the Women and Children.”36
The continuation of African methods of war and white reprisals can be found outside of the British colonies as well. Evidence given after an attempted insurrection on the Dutch island of Saint Croix in 1759 indicated that the oath-taking practices performed in Antigua were pervasive throughout the diaspora. One informant told the judge that when making the oath to fulfill their plot, “French and Davis cut themselves in the finger in his presence, mixed the blood with earth and water, and drank it with the assurance that they would not confess to the conspiracy no matter what pain they were subjected to.” A black woman taken up in an attempt to gather evidence about her husband, William’s, involvement indicated that “the most binding oath that a Negro could take, was when he took earth from a dead Negro’s grave, mixed it with water and drank it.”37 This conspiracy in Saint Croix resembles others within the British colonies in that after “setting the plantations on fire,” the Africans purportedly planned on “killing or burning all whites who collected to put out the fires.”38 One does not have to wonder if the explicit details of the punishment that those accused received were similar as well. The husband of the “negress” above was “Wm. Davis, free negro, convicted by [testimony of] witnesses, and confessed. He cut his own throat. His dead body was dragged through the streets by a horse, by one leg; thereafter hanged on a gallows by a leg, and finally taken down and burned at the stake.” Another description is that of “Franch, (or French) free negro, convicted by [testimony of] witnesses, but confessed nothing himself. He was broken on the wheel with an iron crowbar, laid alive on the wheel, where he survived 12 hours. The head was then set on a stake, and the hand fastened on the gallows.” Finally, “Will, belonging to Soren Bagge, is convicted by [testimony of] witnesses, but made no confession. Was burned alive, lived in the fire 14 minutes.”39 These three examples demonstrate the high level of commitment that the decision to rebel required of those enslaved, as they clearly understood the expected and torturous outcome of failure. The torturing of dead bodies is also indicative of the level of violence that Europeans exerted in revenge against the enslaved and of their determination to deter any future efforts at liberation in the West Indies or in colonies such as South Carolina.
White South Carolinians also had troubles controlling their slaves, and they knew that Africans had the capacity to organize and fight for their freedom as effectively as Europeans.40 Indeed, South Carolinians had huge populations of saltwater Africans who had significant influence over the second and possibly third generations of country-born, or Creolized, African Americans as late as the end of the eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth century.41 The anxiety that large numbers of Africans engendered in the minds of white slave owners influenced how the institution developed in America.
Early recorded accounts of insurrectionary impulses in South Carolina indicate that aggressive resistance began in 1711, when “several Negroes [ran] away from their masters, and keep out, armed, and robbing and plundering houses and plantations, putting the inhabitants of this Province in great fear and terror.”42 Similar to how Native Americans were treated when they rejected British imperial policy, African slaves involved in a plot in Charleston in 1720 were brutally crushed. Almost one hundred slaves were burned and hanged for attempting to “destroy all the white People in the country.” A letter sent to King George in 1721 relayed that “black slaves . . . were very near succeeding in a new revolution, which would probably have been attended by the utter extirpation of all your Majesty’s subjects.”43
In 1730 well-armed slaves involved in plotting their insurrection intended to meet for “a great Dance” and then descend upon Charleston to “rise and destroy” all the whites.44 The “Chief of them, with some others” were stopped before they could execute their rebellion, but the ritual of dance and the assignment of leadership titles demonstrate how African military culture remained intact throughout the African diaspora.
South Carolina planters had the same concerns as Jamaican plantation owners about the numerical imbalance of slaves to whites in their own province, which made them feel vulnerable. Indeed, a man named “Mercator” published a letter to the editor of the South-Carolina Gazette in 1737 warning that “when it is considered that for the four years last past we have had imported 10,447 Negroes . . . I believe most People will agree with me . . . if some Method is not speedily taken to prevent this large importation of Negroes, it will . . . be of the most fatal consequences to this Province in many Respects to obvious to all thinking Men.”45
As if fulfilling these predictions, the Stono rebellion in 1739 began with twenty African men, many of them Angolans, breaking into a store, where they acquired ammunition. These men would have been familiar with the use of arms either as slaves in South Carolina or as African soldiers from the Congo region, which was plagued by continuous intercontinental wars for power and control of the slave trade.46 With Jemmy as their leader, approximately fifty rebels set about killing everyone living within the houses they passed on their way to freedom. For ten miles they killed men, women, and children, sparing just one man, an innkeeper who had shown kindness to his slaves.47 After slaying twenty whites, they stopped in a field, where they began “dancing, Singing, and beating Drums to draw more Negroes to [join] them.” Using the customs of African warfare to unite in battle those willing and those fearful of reprisals, these enslaved men demonstrated remarkable confidence in their ability to successfully reach their destination of Saint Augustine, Florida.48 It has been suggested that because the South Carolina region was suffering from a smallpox epidemic and a potential confrontation with Spain, whites appeared distracted enough for the conspirators to determine that freedom was obtainable. They held onto these beliefs even after an equally large band of white militia suppressed their effort.49 According to an account of the Stono rebellion, passed down orally for nearly two centuries, by the great- great-grandson of Cato, “Commander Cato speak for de crowd. He say: ‘We don’t lak slavery. We start to jine de Spanish in Florida. We surrender but we not whipped yet, and we’ is not converted.’ De other 43 say: ‘Amen.’ . . . He die but he die for doin’ de right, as he see it.”50
Much like what occurred in Jamaica, roughly one-third of the insurgent slaves remained at large after the initial confrontation on the field. It took an entire week before the bulk of them were captured and punished. Many were “put to the most cruel Death.” It took another three years before the authorities found and killed one of the ringleaders. About sixty African slaves lost their lives in the aftermath, “some shot, some hang’d, and some Gibbeted alive.”51
The reprisals, however, did not quell the possibility of another insurrection: in 1740 between 150 and 200 slaves planned to escape bondage after they seized Charleston. Repeating the model of the Stono rebels, this group intended to take weapons from a local storehouse in order to supply everyone with arms. One slave, Peter, told of their plot, however, and through entrapment, fifty bondspeople, ten each day, were hanged to deter the others from the crime of attempting to insurrect.52 “So many Enemys to the Government” led the South Carolina legislature to put a duty on newly imported slaves in 1740 and to impose a hiatus on the importation of African slaves for three years.53
As blacks continued to foment insurrections, so did the determination of whites to suppress them. In 1816 Governor Williams ordered Maj. Gen. Youngblood to use the militia under his command to “either capture or destroy the whole body” of Maroons living in the swamps near the Combahee and Ashepoo Rivers whose “forces now became alarming, not less from its numbers than from its arms and ammunition with which it was supplied.”54
These early insurrection attempts were wars waged by slaves for their own liberation. In each rebellion, slaves either claimed to be or attempted to engage in an armed struggle against those whites who they believed were their enemies, as the progenitors of racialized chattel slavery, a distinct form of bondage that African people rejected. Indeed, the successful insurrection in French Saint-Domingue at the end of the eighteenth century not only represented the determination of the enslaved to be free but also served as a harbinger of white colonists’ greatest fears.
The revolution in Saint-Domingue was an inspiration to enslaved populations throughout the African diaspora and a horrific nightmare for white slave owners in South Carolina and across the Atlantic World. This beacon of hope, however, came at an astronomical cost for the enslaved Africans and the whites who lost their lives. The terror that ensued became a haunting example of the possibility of exterminatory warfare and black freedom, which struck fear in the hearts and minds of whites living among enslaved peoples across the Americas.
Like many other islands in the West Indies, Saint-Domingue, a French colony on the island of Hispaniola, had a large population of enslaved blacks. The first major effort of resistance there began in 1751 with François Mackandal, a Guinea African who attempted to unify the Maroon population with the intention of destroying slavery. Six years later, Mackandal was captured and burned at the stake. But by 1789 there were thirty thousand whites, twenty-eight thousand mixed-race people of color, and approximately five hundred thousand slaves, most of whom were African born, who provided the means for the first successful revolution to end enslavement in the Atlantic World.55
Vodou priest “Zamba” Boukman emerged as the leader of the revolution in Saint-Domingue that began in 1789, culminating in black freedom in 1804. Boukman, a coachman on the Clement plantation in Acul, organized large numbers of Maroons and plantation slaves. They took over the entire Northern Province, where the majority of the white elites lived, and by 1792 controlled over one-third of the island.56 According to one anonymous source, the “vast project” was “the destruction of all whites except some who didn’t own property, some priests, some surgeons, and some women, and of setting fire to all the plantations.” This was necessary in order to make “themselves masters of the country.”57 A Creole soldier raised in France and fighting on the side of the French remembered that “one feared being slaughtered by one’s servants. . . . [O]ne wept for a relative assassinated or exposed to the dangers of a war of extermination.”58 According to the account of M. Gros, a white lawyer taken captive, “those who believe in the false imprisonment and peaceable disposition of their negroes” were living in a fantasy land. Gros argued that “quite the reverse was their temper of mind: their whole intent was the entire annihilation of the whites.”59 Indeed, a Creole soldier admitted, “We were crushed by this war. One hundred thousand slaves in full revolt. . . . [T]heir musicians made a hideous din beating cauldrons—all this as an accompaniment to the accustomed shrieking of warring Africans.”60 In the end, the enslaved in Saint-Domingue destroyed many of the symbols of their oppression—hundreds of sugar, coffee, and indigo plantations—an oppression grounded in extreme violence and, as Laurent Dubois notes, “the threat of atrocity.”61
Traditions of African warfare are evident during the capture and execution of a “negro whose regalia caused me to judge him to be one of the principle [sic] chiefs.” Another soldier discovered that “on his chest he had a little sack full of hair, herbs, bits of bone, which they call a fetish; with this, they expect to be sheltered from all danger; and it was, no doubt, because of this amulet, that our man had the intrepidity which the philosophers call Stoicism.” The continuity of African military traditions was not only observed by whites but also feared: “For the first time, I saw bows and arrows used; the latter fell about us like rain, and the fear that they could be poison did not cheer us.”62 Gros and other French colonists concluded, “We are now convinced of this grand truth, ‘that the Negroes will never return to their duty, but by compulsion, or a partial destruction of them.’” Indeed, in Gros’s view, who was made a prisoner of war by the black army, “the Negro women were infinitely worse, more hardened, and less inclined to return to their duty than the men,” making enslaved women eligible for slaughter as well.63
For many planter elites, the massacre of so many white citizens demanded retaliation. Whites, denying that it had begun on both sides as an “exterminating war,” believed that the “still steaming corpses seemed to demand that we take revenge for them.”64 According to one eyewitness, when whites overcame the black camps, it was terrible because “of the awful rage that had seized some of the inhabitants of Le Cap. . . . [S]ince men of color were their enemies, they wanted nothing less than to destroy all of them. . . . [T]wentyeight Negroes and Negresses taken prisoner by our troops . . . were hacked to death. . . . [F]ifty Negroes were shot in trenches. . . . [T]wenty black brigands who had been captured were put on a boat and drowned in the sea. . . . Some Negroes and Negresses were shot at the parish house.”65 According to this Creole soldier’s account, when his troops met with those enslaved, “we overcame them, and the camp was littered with the hacked remains of the victims.”66
French soldiers thought that once they captured and killed Boukman the “brigands would sue for peace.” Determined to regain complete mastery over the colony’s African slaves, the French sought to denigrate the symbol of the slave insurgency’s leader and instill fear among the rebels. They made a spectacle of “one of the most famous chiefs” by making their “entry into the town . . . [with] the head of Boukman on a pike.”67 Although this greatly unsettled many of “the brigands,” black military leaders still remained in charge of their forces: “The chiefs went in mourning and ordered a solemn service to be performed . . . and caused a dance or Calinda to be held for three days.”68 The mulatto generals, Jean-François and Biassou, made an offer to negotiate an agreement for peace with the French, but they did not get a response. Gros’s account tells us that it was then that Jean-François and “his counsel . . . unanimously decided to continue the war and complete the destruction of what remained, whether of the plain, or the mountains.”69 Their offer for peace was rejected by French Lieutenant Colonel Touzard because he believed that Africans were disposable: “The whites are more willing to lose all their remaining possessions and to annihilate the present race of rebellious slaves than to consent to a shameful agreement. . . . [T]he whites will have only a single aim: the complete destruction of the rebels and of their chiefs.” Although Touzard understood that “the fate of all the Antilles, [was] threatened by this revolt,” he foolishly underestimated the African and gens de couleur revolutionaries, whose actions, he believed, could “only bring them misfortune.”70
The enslaved and mulatto forces were victorious in their battle for freedom after they nearly destroyed the largest city and busiest port in Saint-Domingue, Cap Français, in June 1793. French commissioners Léger-Félicité Sonthonax and Etienne Polverel aligned with free blacks and those enslaved in order to thwart the military efforts of Governor François-Thomas Galbaud, who refused to enforce an April 4, 1792, French law giving some citizenship rights to free people of color, generally the mulatto children of slaveholders, some of whom were landowners themselves with considerable wealth. The result was that by the end of 1793, Sonthonax had issued emancipation proclamations throughout French Saint-Domingue that ended slavery. One eyewitness recounted that “citizens of color . . . wonderfully aided by the blacks they had armed . . . were no longer men bent beneath the yoke of contempt and servitude; inspired by hatred and revenge, these men had thrown off their masks. No more truce between master and the slave in revolt. . . . [T]he spell was broken.”71
Emancipation, however, occurred in the middle of the chaos of war, during which many white colonists were killed. The terrorized “whites, pale and frightened . . . asked each other what they ought to do, where they ought to go. . . . In the face of this pressing danger, some of them assembled . . . with the intent of reestablishing order and bringing back tranquility.” But as the colonists made their way to Government House, “they were treacherously fired on by the mulattoes and blacks who were hidden there.” A white woman was told by some blacks she knew that whites “had been killed in piles” during the night. Other whites heard blacks say as they sought to take over the city, “We should kill them all. The colony’s got to be either all white or all black.” Though Commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel successfully repelled Governor Galbaud’s assault, the city of Cap Français burned for two weeks in 1793, and many white citizens were massacred. “When the fire died down somewhat,” one white eyewitness reported, “I left . . . to return to town. . . . I found nothing but dead bodies: the streets were strewn with them.”72
The atrocities committed by white colonists and by mulattoes and black slaves diminished significantly under Toussaint L’Ouverture’s leadership. L’Ouverture’s military accomplishments eventually enabled him, with the full support of the black and mulatto community, to restore order and proclaim that Saint-Domingue was free from French rule. A constitution established under L’Ouverture’s guidance declared that Saint-Domingue had the right to self-governance, and it was the first European colony to become a sovereign black state in the Atlantic World. The price of independence would be high, however, and internecine warfare would again plague the island.
French monarch Napoleon Bonaparte was outraged that L’Ouverture would presume independence. Despite his assertions in 1799 to the “brave blacks” that “the French people alone recognize your freedom and the equality of your rights,"73 Bonaparte sent his brother-in-law, Gen. Charles LeClerc, to Saint-Domingue to reestablish French rule. LeClerc was given secret orders to restore slavery as well. LeClerc and his successor, Governor-General Donatien-Marie-Joseph de Vimeur, vicomte de Rochambeau, were brutal in their attempts to defeat L’Ouverture’s troops. Large numbers of blacks were murdered in order to, as LeClerc instructed, “inspire great terror.”74 In desperation because blacks continued to resist, however, LeClerc wrote Napoleon that “we must destroy all the Negroes of the mountains, men and women, and keep only children under twelve, destroy half of those of the plain. . . . [O]therwise it will never be calm.” To LeClerc, the Africans in Saint-Domingue were now too corrupted by freedom to ever submit to enslavement, so the French would need to exterminate the adults and older children and then import new ones.75 Although the French legislature recognized as “unfortunate that part of the human race is condemned by nature or social institutions to servile labor and slavery,” the overseas colonies represented too much wealth and were too important to the industries that sustained the empire to not do whatever was necessary to recover Saint-Domingue. Men in the First Consul, merchants, and ship owners believed that “without our slave colonies, no more trade with Africa, no more way of increasing our fisheries . . . our agriculture and industry would decline, along with our East Indian commerce, our naval power would suffer. . . . All this would result from freedom for blacks.”76
According to one American newspaper:
The French exercise[d] the greatest imaginable cruelties on the blacks which fall into their hands:—at St. Marcs, 600 of them were paraded and ordered to be disarmed; and because they resisted the measure, they were all massacred. The dead bodies of the negroes were seen floating on the water by American vessels coming out of the bite of Leogane. It was said, that every week a vessel took 100 to 150 negroes on board at Port-Republic, carried them to sea, stifled them in the hold with brimstone, and then threw the bodies overboard; and that a brig frequently took blacks on board at the Cape, went to sea, and in a few days returned empty.77
They also “executed officers and their families.”78
Mulatto and black soldiers used similar tactics in order to thwart any attempt to reestablish slavery or French rule in Saint-Domingue. Toussaint L’Ouverture instructed Jean-J acques Dessalines to “tear up the roads with shot; throw corpses and horses into all the fountains; burn and annihilate every-thing, in order that those who have come to reduce us to slavery may have before their eyes the image of the hell which they deserve.”79 Eventually, L’Ouverture was tricked into believing that French forces would work alongside his troops to keep the peace. The “Old African,” as one plantation owner called L’Ouverture, was subsequently deported to France, where he died in prison. Nevertheless, after Dessalines betrayed L’Ouverture and joined the French army, he discovered that the French did indeed intend to reestablish slavery in Saint-Domingue as they had done in Guadeloupe. He then switched sides again and led his forces to “join their color” in the struggle against the colonial forces.80
Dessalines went on to fulfill the orders of devastation and destruction that both LeClerc and L’Ouverture had commanded against one another, only this time Dessalines told his black freedom fighters, “We don’t need whites among us anymore.”81 French colonists once again assumed that after the arrest and capture of L’Ouverture everything would go back to normal: “When Toussaint was arrested it was suppose’d that war was finished.”82 They did not anticipate that Dessalines would galvanize his “indigenous army” by having them recall “the memories of slavery” and by invoking “stories of cruelties committed by certain white plantation owners.” He effectively rallied the formerly enslaved population and “whipped up, their burning desire to get revenge for the worst treatment.” According to one white captive’s account, “Their unanimous cry” was that “you punished me, now I will punish you.” Soon the “signal for a general massacre was given. . . . The whites of the canto . . . were soon pursued and collected from all over. Their brains, flying in all directions, stuck to the blood-spattered walls. . . . [P]erfidious balls struck old people and children without distinction.” In the final months of what would become known as the Haitian Revolution, Dessalines made 1,436 white men of all description and rank leave their homes in Cap Français in 1804. Over the course of three days, Dessalines had them all killed, “their bodies thrown one above the other so as to form a mound of dead bodies.” It was said that Dessalines had them murdered so that the “country negroes” could “look at their masters and no longer depend on them” and no longer fear being reenslaved by them. A “second wave of massacres” occurred in 1804 that was “aimed at white women and children.”83 Out of the thirty thousand whites who lived in the colony in 1789, approximately twenty thousand either lost their lives or were forced to flee the island.
Freedom, however, did not come without cost. More than 166,000 out of 500,000 enslaved Africans also lost their lives in the struggl.84 The success of this servile insurrection in Saint-Domingue astounded Europeans. Dessalines, reclaiming the island’s ancient aboriginal moniker, renamed it Haiti.85 White reports about Dessalines described him as “ferocious, ignorant, and savage.” But Dessalines’s response was that the slaves had done nothing that Europeans had not already done to them. “Yes, we have rendered . . . war for war, crime for crime, outrage for outrage,” and in doing so, Dessalines argued, “I have saved my country” from reenslavement and white violence.86 Americans were especially troubled by France’s willingness to grant freedom and civil rights not only to the mulatto population but also to those formerly enslaved as well. At that moment and as long as slavery continued in America, the Haitian Revolution served as a sober reminder of the powerful capacity of the African military forces that white Americans might face among their own slaves in rebellion. White fears were not without cause, as Dessalines did encourage those enslaved in Martinique and other parts of the African diaspora to rebel. And he incentivized ship captains to engage in helping those enslaved and other free people of color to escape white oppression by offering them “forty dollars for each black person” who was brought to the island of Haiti.87
Thus, the French refugees who fled to the mainland with their slaves, five hundred by 1793 and three thousand by 1816 in South Carolina alone, made many Carolinian colonists fearful of insurrections in their own communities.88 They expressed strong concerns about “Frenchmen” escaping from Saint-Domingue who might “come to this country, who would fraternize with our Democratic Clubs,” and who would therefore instigate a slave insurrection in America that would result in civil equality among the races and black freedom. Plantation owner Ralph Izard feared that because of the importation of slaves from this region, “the foundation of more serious troubles has [already] been laid in South Carolina.”89 For South Carolinian Mary Pinckney, the arrival of whites from Saint-Domingue with their slaves was indeed unsettling and “has given us a great deal of concern—We dread the future, and are fearful that our feelings for the unfortunate inhabitants of the Wretched island of St. Domingo may be our own destruction.”90
The seeming inevitability of slave rebellions, based on nearly two centuries of Africans attempting to fight their way to freedom, plagued the minds of white colonists in South Carolina well into the nineteenth century. Certainly, Denmark Vesey’s insurrection attempt in 1822 affirmed two things: despite the brutal exhibitions of power, whites still had trouble controlling their slaves, and future incidents of aggressive resistance and the threat of white extermination would continue to hover over the anomalous institution of chattel slavery in the American South.
The endurance of African military culture, the pull of the African homeland, and black resistance to enslavement are apparent in Denmark Vesey’s insurrection attempt in 1822, but so are white trepidations about a servile war in South Carolina.91 Denmark Vesey’s birth name was Telemaque. He was a free black carpenter who was born enslaved in Saint Thomas around 1767. While the plot of his insurrection is well known due to the transcript of the trial, sections of the document also describe African ideas of warfare that enslaved people brought with them from their ancestral homes. There is no way to ascertain whether all of the facts left as a record of the event are true,92 as the courtroom was closed to outside spectators, which the prosecuting attorneys, Lionel H. Kennedy and Thomas Parker, argued had precedence in the insurrection trials in Antigua in 1736 and the “Negro plot” of 1741 in New York.93 Yet the countless witnesses who testified to Vesey’s plan to build large armies and acquire weaponry for the soldiers of those armies demonstrate his continuity with traditional African practices of warfare. There was also an Afrosyncretic adoption of the terminology “nits make lice” in alignment with the past exterminatory warfare practices of Europeans and some Africans.94
Like their West Indian predecessors, black South Carolinians worked at developing an army that replicated the forces in Saint-Domingue. Monday Gell confessed that he was “shown paper about the battle that Boyer had in San Domingue.” And Rolla, Governor Bennett’s slave, was told by Vesey, who had been sold by slave trader Capt. Joseph Vesey to a slave owner in Saint-Domingue, where he lived a short while, that “we must unite together as the Santo Domingo people did.” Jack Purcell said Vesey was constantly reading newspaper articles to him about Haiti. Vesey, who could read and write in French and English, sent letters to Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer, a free mulatto who fought with Toussaint L’Ouverture in the early years, asking for his assistance. The letters were delivered to a ship’s steward whose brother was a general in the army95 The South Carolina insurgents used the revolution in Haiti as a model to outline how they needed to organize, and continuous references to Saint-Domingue as the touchstone for what was to follow made it infinitely easier for Vesey and his leaders to articulate how a successful war would be waged.
Of particular interest is the idea of Africa as a liberator. Much like the Native American populations in the Southeast who formed pan-Indian alliances to maintain cultural unity and to protect their communities from the destructiveness of the Indian slave trade, black South Carolinians looked to their native land for assistance in freeing themselves. Bacchus, a slave belonging to Benjamin Hammet, along with a slave named Charles Drayton, consulted with an African named “old daddy” who was “marked on both sides of his face” about their plans to bring the “Country Negroes” down. They told him that “he must be in readiness” to “receive them” at the onset of the revolt.96 Vesey asked to see an elderly Guinea slave named Peter, who agreed to join their effort.97 Although there is no way to know what transpired, the fact that these consultations were mentioned suggests that “old daddy” and Peter may have retained essential experiences and wartime strategies from Africa that Vesey valued.
Vesey and his followers attempted to encourage participation by stating that Haiti and Africa were intimately involved in their struggle against enslavement. Rolla told a witness that “a large army from Santo Domingo and Africa were coming to help us.” Another rebel warrior believed that once they “raised an army” and began the insurrection, soldiers from Africa and Haiti “would come over and cut up the white people.”98 The perception of kinship between Africans sold into slavery and Africans who facilitated the purveyance of slaves to the Americas remained. More deeply, perhaps, these affirmations of solidarity indicate a psychic need for Africa as a symbol of possibilities: Africa too, as a body of nations, would realize the strengths within its shores and end support for the expatriation and enslavement of its own people.
Other slaves had the more pragmatic view that the war they talked about “against the whites” was to be waged by them alone. Thus, they would need to be “making arms for the black people” so that they could achieve their goal of “slaying the whites.” Some of the weaponry was to come from “some Frenchmen, blacks very skillful in making swords and spears, such as they used in Africa.” Another witness said that a slave named Tom Russell who was a blacksmith “was making arms for the black people.” A slave named Smart Anderson testified that he observed that “spear’s were brought into Monday’s shop,” and Peirault, one of Vesey’s main recruiters, admitted that he, a slave named Dean, and Vesey “met purposely to make a collection of spears,” weapons used by African soldiers in the past. The organizers planned to obtain guns for their entire army once the insurrection began by seizing “the Powder Magazine and the Arsenal on the [Charleston] Neck” in South Carolina.99
Vesey and his team of leaders had been working for four years to organize large numbers of men. Denmark Vesey, Governor Bennett’s slaves Rolla and Ned, Jack (Purcell), Peter (Poyas), Gullah Jack (Pritchard), and Monday (Gell) kept lists of all who agreed to join the effort. They recruited from as far away as Columbia and as close to Charleston as Goose Creek and Dorchester, where purportedly 6,600 slaves signed on to insurrect against their masters and where they divided their “regular army” across ethnic and regional lines. Monday Gell, an Igbo, was in charge of the “Ebo Company.” Then there was the “Gullah Company,” led by Jack Pritchard. The “French Band” was composed of slaves who spoke French and who “had been ready a long time.” Finally, there were the “countryborn,” or American-born (versus “saltwater,” or African-born), slaves, who were not trusted by many members. Joe, the slave of Mr. Jore, stated that he “did not know how to trust countryborns,” whereas Jack Pritchard boasted that he had no trouble with the countryborn joining because they all believed “he was a doctor” and were perhaps afraid of his using magic “charms” of conjure on them. As the leader of the Gullah Company, Jack was “their general” in the war. As part of his leadership strategy, he gave all his men charms of crab claws to put in their mouths and “parched corn and ground nuts” to eat prior to battle so that they would not “then be wounded.”100
During the recruitment process, men took oaths much like the one used by African slaves in Jamaica, Antigua, and Saint Croix. All members were required to swear oaths of secrecy by standing and raising their right hand. Vesey, a saltwater African, asserted this was necessary so that they would “not tell if we are found out, and if they kill us we will not tell on anyone.” Gullah Jack had his men eat a halfway-roasted fowl “as evidence of union.” These oaths were to demonstrate serious commitment, and as the authors of the Trial Record noted, “not one of the leaders betrayed their associates; the companies of Vesey, Peter, Ned, Rolla, and Gullah Jack have escaped detection and punishment; with the exception of a few of Gullah Jack’s band, who were discovered in consequence of one of his men, betraying those companions he knew, together with his leader.” Yet the court grudgingly observed that Jack was to them a “savage who indeed had been caught but not tamed.”101
The importance of secrecy had a long history in West African communities, especially among the Igbo in the Bight of Biafra region, the Ashanti/Fante of the Gold Coast, and the Yoruba and Dahomean of the Bight of Benin, as well as in the mandatory participation in the Poro (male) and Sande (female) societies in Sierra Leone and Liberia. The function of secret societies in Africa as political and social organizations and, importantly, as arbiters of justice assisted the collective organizing of African slaves in South Carolina. And the amazing resilience of those leaders implicated in Vesey’s insurrection attempt exemplifies how powerful cultural continuity was despite the oppressiveness of bondage. As historian Michael Gomez points out, “Some order and sense had to be fashioned out of New World disorder. To achieve this, the African antecedent was drawn upon, and in the process the African-based community began to see itself in heretofore unimagined ways.”102 Secrecy was the cornerstone of all insurrectionary attempts, and the continuation of military rituals practiced in Africa and the New World was reflected in the valuations given to honor and death.
Although Monday Gell testified in his confession that he was opposed to the idea, he avowed that everyone else agreed with Vesey’s plan “in the murder of all.” Their mission, similar to the tactics used by Europeans in, for example, the Pequot War, was to “set the town on fire in different places and as the whites come out we will slay them.” It has been argued that Vesey found the ideas for his plan in the Old Testament, and the record indicates that passages from the Bible were used frequently in the meetings of the leaders to affirm that slavery was a sinful and immoral institution. In Vesey’s view, fighting for their freedom as outlined by the Israelites was part of God’s plan for black people, and Rolla recounted that this meant that “all should be cut off, both men, women, and children.” Although some members confessed resistance at “killing ministers, women, and children,” Vesey argued that “it was not safe to keep one alive, but to destroy them totally. . . . [T]he Lord has commanded it.”103 This evidence of Vesey’s intent was repeated in another confessant’s testimony that was given to a “Reverend Hall.” Much like the English had done for centuries, Vesey seemed to use the idea that God commanded extermination as articulated in the book of Joshua to justify his actions.104 Or perhaps Vesey used Joshua and the Old Testament to confound white theological interpretations, turning the tables on the spiritual hierarchy established by the planter class. Perhaps as the “new Israelites,” Vesey and his followers were waging war against a people he believed were outside of God’s covenant, thereby challenging slaveholders’ claims to racial superiority and white notions that slavery was endorsed by Christianity at its core.105
Moreover, Vesey’s affirmation that it was not enough to just kill white men and his usage of the European shibboleth of “what was the use of killing the louse and leaving the nit” flayed slave owners with their own historic rationale for killing children in Ireland and indigenous children in America.106 Thus, Vesey signified his awareness of and attention to European methods of warfare that white South Carolinians no doubt would have preferred to remain invisible. Vesey boldly determined that “if you kill the lice you must kill the nits,” because in his view whites were the ones who were uncivilized, as they kept black people enslaved against their will.107 Yet the killing of women and children was also part of African traditions of war, as evidenced during the Atlantic slave trade. And so although Vesey may have appropriated European terminology to convince countryborn and saltwater slaves of the wisdom of his methods, his plan was also consistent with the type of exterminatory warfare practiced in some parts of Africa and in America.
Certainly, Vesey’s usage of Old Testament scripture would have proved a valuable tool in winning the support of the over 1,848 black members of Charleston’s Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.108 Church leaders like Vesey, Peter Poyas, Ned Bennett, and Charles Shubrick used church gatherings as an opportunity to instruct other members about the revolutionary ideas contained within the Old Testament and the fundamentals of warfare.109 Indeed, according to T. Hamilton, a black American living in Charleston at the time he called “the Reign of Terror,” Vesey and Peter Poyas were successful because they were revered by the black community as religious martyrs for their “patriotic bravery” in leading the “determined revolutionary spirit of the slaves.”110
Vesey and his followers may have rationalized his war against enslavement as part of God’s commandments, but at the core of his strategy was the certain knowledge that if they proceeded in implementing their plans and were unsuccessful, retaliation would be severe, that “we should all have been destroyed.”111 They knew that success would only occur if they were able to escape from South Carolina and the American continent, which was the final stage of their plan.
Concerns over retribution must have been pervasive. Although a convicted slave named John was instructed by Monday Gell that “the Northern Brothers would assist them” in their insurrection, Gell also told them that “if they failed ’twould be no disgrace.”112 Amherst Lining, a slave acquitted of all charges against him, stated that although he was not involved in the insurrection attempt, he was concerned that “in the confusion, he would be in danger of losing his life whether he was engaged in it or not.” Another witness expressed concerns over retribution, which focused on the responses of “the whites in the back country, Virginia, [who] when they hear the news will turn to and kill you all.” William, a slave belonging to John Paul, made a concerted effort to protect the women out of fear that the justices were considering whether women should be charged. He begged, “You won’t take up Sarah, for no woman knows anything about it.”113 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, with an eye toward this possibility, concluded in his analysis of the event that the conspirators “took no women into counsel,—not from any distrust apparently, but in order that their children might not be left uncared-for in case of defeat and destruction.”114 Yet we know that in the Dahomean and Igbo nations, women did serve in the military, did engage in warfare, and were also taken as captives of war.115 Enslaved women also assisted on board in slave ship insurrections, so it is plausible that they might have been involved in insurrectionary efforts that occurred on land as well. 116 The court justices were aware that at least three black women, if not many others, knew about the rebellion and did not try to stop it. A slave named Edwin stated that “I have heard everybody, even the women say . . . that they wondered why Denmark and Monday Gell were not taken up.” Sally testified against a slave named Jesse that he had told her that “all the white people would be killed.” Another slave named Prudence said that she was “told a fort night ago about the plan.” Then one of “Colonel Cross’ wenches” said the head of the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, Rev. Morris Brown, knew all about it.117
Thus, the threat of a large-scale violent confrontation between blacks and whites was a real consideration. The dark prediction that Virginia whites would come and “kill you all,” and the slaves’ subsequent careful protection of black women and children, evidences an awareness of that reality. The fact that enslaved and free blacks attempted to rebel anyway only affirms their determination to be free and that slaves and whites were locked in a never-ending contest of wills that ultimately made them fearful of one another.
Indeed, the white community was traumatized by the fact that some witnesses testified, probably in exaggeration, that an army of nine thousand was ready to commence warring against the whites of South Carolina on Sunday, July 16, 1822.118 The subsequent trial lasted for five and one-half weeks, long enough for South Carolina officials to charge 131 blacks. One white child described the executions as “a sight to strike terror in the heart of every slave.”119 This youth’s observations were not off the mark, as Justice William Johnson wrote to Thomas Jefferson that “you know the best way in the world to make them tractable is to frighten them to death.”120 Yet all references to the affair within the white community were silenced out of fear that “something further of the same nature” might come to pass. No day of prayer, no day of “public thanksgiving” was deemed appropriate despite Rev. Richard Furman’s assertions that “Divine Interposition has been conspicuous; and our obligations to be thankful are unspeakably great.”121 Anna Johnson believed that “our own God has saved us from horrors equal if not superior to the scenes acted in St. Domingo.” Indeed, she claimed, “There is a look of horror on every countenance.”122 Mary L. Beach wrote that she “heard it remarked by several that all confidence in them [the enslaved] now is forever at an end!”123
Yet at the same time, many South Carolinians recognized in private that Vesey’s plot was “a good plot—an excellent plot.”124 They said that his “plan denoted a fine military tact and admirable combination” and that the leaders “met their fate with the heroic fortitude of Martyrs.”125 Others said that Vesey and his men “were true warriors—Not a single Woman knew a word of their plan.”126 Indeed, the owner of several of the insurgents and the governor of South Carolina, Thomas Bennett, defined Vesey’s insurrection attempt in the lexicon of American Revolutionary action in remarks to then South Carolina congressman John C. Calhoun: “It ought to excite no astonishment with those who boast of freedom themselves, if they should occasionally hear of plots and desertions among those who are held in perpetual bondage. Human beings, who once breathed the air of freedom on their own mountains and in their own valleys, but who have been kidnapped by white men and dragged into endless slavery, cannot be expected to be contented with their situation. White men, too, would engender plots and escape from their imprisonment were they situated as are these miserable children of Africa.”127
Proslavery writer and Charleston editor Edwin Holland noted that there had been a pattern. The attempted insurrection in 1816 in Camden, South Carolina, was motivated by just such “wild and frantic ideas of the rights of man, and the misconceived injunctions and examples of Holy writ” Clearly, Holland believed that Vesey’s organization was different: it represented a political movement, a radical challenge to established authority, a racialized opposition to the existing order. He revealed that the recent insurrection attempt was more than just rowdy heathens trying to start trouble: “Let it never be forgotten” that “our Negroes are truly the Jacobins of the country; that they are the anarchists and the domestic enemy; the common enemy of civilized society, and the barbarians who would, IF THEY COULD, become the DESTROYERS of our race.”128
Still, Holland clung to the idea that if a war did commence, black people would lose, evidencing that both blacks and whites had similar ideas that no doubt created a volatile atmosphere in the South that was thick with fear: “The struggle, it is true, might be a bloody and awful one; but it would be limited to a very short period. A few hours would decide the conflict and the utter extermination of the black race would be the inevitable consequence. In such an event, it would be difficult to discriminate. The innocent, as well as the guilty; would alike fall a sacrifice to the vengeance of violate humanity.”129 Perhaps Holland felt confident about his threats against rebellious blacks because he was familiar with the federally sanctioned action against Native Americans in the Battle of Horse Shoe Bend, commonly called the Red Sticks Massacre, led by Andrew Jackson in 1814. In this nationally celebrated event, nine hundred Creek Indians were killed, the largest death toll of any Anglo-Indian war.130 Or perhaps Holland was really speaking to an audience of whites who viewed Vesey’s actions as a warning that one day God would “raise up a Toussaint, or a Spartacus, or an African Tecumseh to demand by what authority we hold them in subjection” in order to let them know, from the South’s perspective, how disastrous that would be.131
Despite these warnings, whites’ fear of the African slaves in their midst remained as indelible in 1822 as it had been in the colonial era. Slaves were now executed for things that they had previously only been whipped for.132 There were calls for strengthening and the further development of the military in South Carolina; a special guard of 150 men was established to protect Charleston. Lawyer and plantation owner Robert J. Turnbull went ahead and organized a voluntary militia outside the purview of government regulation in 1823 for the protection of the port city as well.133 The South Carolina legislature required that any free black sailors, cooks, or stewards employed on board ships be kept in jail until the ship’s departure; male slaves were no longer able to hire out their time; free black males over the age of fifteen had to have a guardian; free blacks not living in the state for more than five years had to pay fifty dollars per year in order to remain in South Carolina; and no slave could be brought in from the West Indies, Mexico, South America, or north of Washington, D.C.134
Harking back to earlier European American accomplishments in war, the members of the Charleston court told the ten convicted conspirators that the “plot [was] so wild and diabolical . . . [that it] would have probably resulted in the destruction and extermination of your race.”135 The past was not dead. Slavery was just, and the racialized privilege of redemptive warfare belonged to white Americans who would respond to the “great law of nature,” which was “self preservation.”136 Whites knew that blacks understood total warfare from every perspective: how it was used against Native Americans to take away their land, how it was used by European Americans to sustain their power, how Old Testament Israelites had used it to ensure that their nation would remain free, and how Africans used it first to enslave their own people and then as a strategy for liberation in America.
Africans brought across the Atlantic strategies of warfare that were used in procuring slaves for sale; the enslaved then used these strategies in their efforts to free themselves. British colonists, having fashioned their own templates of war, were determined to thwart any insurrectionary attempts with a callous ruthlessness intended to make the enslaved dread white retaliation. Yet Europeans knew from experience that many Africans had carried their African military heritage unambiguously across the Atlantic Ocean. Thus, the institution of enslavement was always pregnant with the possibilities of an internecine war. Although Vesey’s rebellion and all the other insurrections that took place from the colonial to the early national period (with the exception of the Haitian Revolution) were not successful, they do reveal what both sides believed was at stake, what they believed was required in effectively fighting for or in obstruction of black freedom. The potential of exterminatory warfare would continue to be part of the slave-owning/slave-resisting lexicon well into the antebellum era. Never did it waver in its intended ferocity and prophecy of doom for the slave or as a strategy of liberation amongst blacks in America, that is, until 1831, when the trauma that the black community experienced after Nat Turner’s insurrection in Virginia effectively changed the way the enslaved approached resistance to bondage in America.