Category: Slave Revolt Fears

The South’s Great Fear

By the early 1700s, Liverpool’s dominance in slave ship construction had been surpassed by Providence, Rhode Island, with New England prospering greatly from trading Yankee notions for slaves held by African tribes. These ships returned to the Western Hemisphere with their human cargo for West Indies and British American plantations.

Then came the cotton gin which increased the speed that cotton fibers were separated from the seeds – invented and patented in 1794 by Massachusetts tinkerer Eli Whitney. This new device increased the need for more laborers in the South to harvest more cotton to be sold to Northern and European markets. Before the gin, cotton separation was a slow process which restricted the harvesting to local farm clothing usages, which likely would have doomed the American slave economy in a peaceful manner.

The South’s Great Fear

“Only three years before the Whitney invention, an event occurred which caused tremors in plantations across America and caused many slave owners to seriously rethink the safety of owning slaves. This tragedy was the bloody uprising of African slaves in the French colony of Saint Domingue, or Santo Domingo, and known today as Haiti.

This uprising of some 500,000 Africans was led by a voodoo priest named Boukman in a revolt against the French colonists and possibly inspired by the bloody French Revolution of the same time. On Saint Domingue, about 5,000 white colonists, men, women and children, were butchered in massive riots that swept the island. White men were beheaded, drowned or burned to death; women were raped, butchered and disemboweled, and if pregnant their babies were torn out of their wombs. White children were impaled on spears and carried through the streets as symbol of the revolt.

After two months of this living hell, over 1,000 farms and sugar plantations had been burned to the ground. After news of this revolt reached American shores, relations between white and black took a new turn with daily slave patrols becoming the norm, and every slave uprising in America, real or imagined, would be compared to Santo Domingue.”

(Countdown to Manassas, The Antebellum Chronology: July 4, 1776-July 21, 1861. Ken Drew; Ken Drew Publisher, pg. 8; 10)

 

Seward Insists Upon Servile War

Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward promised the cotton-dependent British an early end to war with “Northern victories releasing the raw cotton” of the South to England. Seward’s claim that New Orleans would soon be under his control was quickly dashed, and all were aware that Southern plantation owners would sooner burn their cotton bales than allow them to fall into enemy hands.  A desperate Seward then followed Virginia’s Royal Governor’s (Lord Dunmore) November 1775 edict to incite race war in the South, threatening both Britain and France that any aid to the American Confederacy would unleash a bloody slave uprising there. This would not only destroy Europe’s cotton source but also repeat the Haitian massacres of the early 1790’s which saw the slaughter of 4,000 white men, women and children. In retaliation, some 15,000 Africans were killed by the French.

Seward Insists Upon Servile War

“Fearing the growth in England, especially, of an intention to intervene, Seward threatened a Northern appeal to the slaves, thinking of the threat not so much in terms of an uncivilized and horrible war as in terms of the material interests of England. In brief, considering foreign attitude and action in relation to Northern advantage – to the winning of the war – he would use emancipation as a threat of servile insurrection, but he did not desire emancipation itself for fear it would cause that very intervention which it was his object to prevent.

On May 28, 1862, Seward wrote to US diplomat Charles Francis Adams, emphasizing two points: first, US diplomats abroad were now authorized to state that the war was, in part at least, intended for the suppression of slavery, and secondly, that the North if interfered with by foreign nations would be forced to unleash servile war in the South.

Such a war, Seward argued, would be “completely destructive of all European interests” and a copy of this was given to Britain’s Lord Russell on June 20th . . . and that any attempts a European mediation of the conflict would result in servile war unleashed upon the South. On July 13, Lincoln told Seward and [Gideon] Welles of the planned [gradual and compensated] emancipation proclamation and that this was his first mention of it to anyone.

On July 28, after Lord Russell reviewed Seward’s arguments, commented on the fast- increasing bitterness of the American conflict which was disturbing and unsettling to European governments, and wrote: “The approach of servile war, so much insisted upon by Mr. Seward in his dispatch, only forewarns us that another element of destruction may be added to the slaughter, loss of property, and waste of industry, which already afflict a country so lately prosperous and tranquil.”

(Great Britain and the American Civil War. Ephraim Douglas Adams. Alpha Editions, 2018 (original manuscript 1924), pg. 388-390)

An Important Sectional Irritant

One of American history’s greatest ironies is that the Southern colonies, and later States were populated with Africans who were transported in the holds of English and New England ships, both growing prosperous and wealthy through this iniquitous maritime trade. The result was a million American dead by mid-1865.

An Important Sectional Irritant

Antebellum anti-slavery Republicans, in criticizing Southern anti-abolitionist literature policies, linked the laws making the education of Negroes a crime with other violations of freedom of speech. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the egalitarian radical, early in his career attacked the Southern States for rifling the mails to destroy anti-slavery publications emanating from the North. A Republican colleague of Sumner criticized the restrictions “as being uncivilized.” In 1860, Sen. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi responded in the United States Congress:

“When men employ their time in writing tracts, in publishing newspapers, to indoctrinate crime into the Negroes – to teach them to commit arson, theft and murder – then there is reason growing out of the crimes of our neighbors which it imposes it upon us, as a duty of self-protection, to prevent the Negroes from reading, as the means of shutting out your unholy work . . . that, I imagine, is the foundation of all the objection which has existed to their being taught to read.” (Congressional Globe, 1687, 1860).

“In Georgia the circulation of any newspaper, pamphlet, or circular inciting insurrection, revolt, conspiracy or resistance by slaves, free Negroes or colored persons, was made punishable by death. Louisiana punished any writings designed to produce discontent or insubordination among Negroes, slave or free, with death or life imprisonment.

Not only did Virginia punish the making of abolitionist speeches or writings, but the State required every postmaster to notify a local justice of any mail with abolitionist literature and then burn this mail. And, if the addressee of the abolitionist material had subscribed to it, knowing its character, he was guilty of a crime.

These laws were constantly the subject of discussion in Congress and constituted an important sectional irritant. Northern members of Congress attacked them as violating freedom of speech, while the South defended them as essential to forestall slave revolts and bloody massacre of white Southerners. The specter of the early 1790’s massacre of Haiti’s white population was an ever-present fear in the American South.”

(School Segregation and History Revisited. Alfred Avins, PhD, Cambridge University. The Catholic Lawyer, Vol. 15, No. 4, Autumn 1969, pp. 311-312)

 

Southern Aristocracy?

Greatly concerned in the mid-1700s over their growing African populations, both Virginia and North Carolina petitioned the British Crown to end its slave trade. This was denied while New England’s transatlantic slave trade continued.

Southern Aristocracy?

“That subordination of the black race which was called slavery gave rise to a certain development of society, not at all English, however, bore some features of an aristocracy. But this was by no means so general as might be inferred from much seen lately in print about the subject of the “slave oligarchy” of the South. It was by no means the controlling force. In South Carolina alone, by her peculiar Constitution, could it be correctly said that the slaveholders as a class held the political power.

The anti-slave element was always strong in Virginia; but for external agitation, I have no doubt slavery would have been abolished there long ago, or have been greatly modified. The same is true of North Carolina.

Throughout the South no feeling was more general, none stronger with the voting majority, than a deep-seated detestation of the very name “Aristocracy.” I do not think there was a county in Georgia where a man could have been elected to the State Legislature, or to any other office, upon the principles of an aristocracy, or if he were ever known to favor such a doctrine.

Eight-tenths of the people of Georgia, I believe, were thorough Jeffersonian Republicans and would have been as thorough abolitionists as Jefferson if they could have seen what better they could do with the colored people than they were doing.

They had a hard problem to solve, and the external agitation kept down internal inquiry and discussion as to whether there was any proper and safe solution [to the slaves among them].”

(Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens: His Diary While Imprisoned. Myra Lockett Avary, ed., LSU Press, 1998 (original 1910), pg. 422)

New York City in 1712

New York City in 1712

[The population of New York City in 1741] “numbered only about ten thousand, one-fifth of which [were] negroes, who were slaves. Their education being wholly neglected, they were ignorant and debased, and addicted to almost every vice. They were besides, restive under their bondage and the severe punishments often inflicted upon them., which caused their master’s a great deal of anxiety.

Not isolated as an inland plantation, but packed in a narrow space, they had easy communication with each other and worse than all, with the reckless and depraved crews of the vessels that came into port.

It is true, the most stringent measures were adopted to prevent them from assembling together; yet, in spite of every precaution, there would now and again come to light some plan or project that would fill white New Yorkers with alarm. They felt half the time as though walking on the crust of a volcano, and hence were in a state of mind to exaggerate every danger and give credit to every sinister rumor.

Only thirty years before occurred such an outbreak as they now feared. On the 7th of April 1712, the house of Peter Van Tilburgh was set on fire by negroes, which was evidently meant as a signal for a general revolt.

The cry of “fire” roused the neighboring inhabitants, and the rushed out toward the blazing building. They saw . . . in the red light of the flames, a band of negroes armed with guns and knives . . . who fired and then rushed on them with their knives, killing several on the spot. The rest, leaving the building to the mercy of the flames, ran to the fort on the Battery and roused the Governor who ordered a cannon to be fired from the ramparts to alarm the town. The soldiers hurried forward towards the fire while more negroes joined the rioters, who stood firm until the gleam of bayonets and a single musket volley forced them to flee toward what is now Wall Street.

The scattered white inhabitants the rioters encountered were attacked with their knives, killing and wounding several as the black mob made for the nearby woods and swamps. Some, finding themselves closely pressed and all avenues of escape closed off, deliberately shot themselves, preferring such a death to the one they knew awaited them. How many [colored] were killed and captured during the morning, the historian does not tell us. We can only infer that the number must have been great, from the statement he incidentally makes, that “during the day nineteen more were taken, tried and executed – some that turned State’s evidence were transported. Eight or ten whites had been murdered,” and many more wounded.

It was a terrible event and remembered by the present inhabitants with horror and dismay. Many middle-aged men, in 1741, were young men at the time and remembered the fearful excitement that prevailed then.”

(The Great Riots of New York: 1712 to 1873. Joel Tyler Headley. Dover Publications, pp. 26-28)

Pondering “Juneteenth” in Texas

In mid-June 1865 a northern general and his brigade landed at Galveston to officially proclaim the war at an end; Texas was now under the rule of his government in Washington. He also reminded the colored people in Texas of their ability to work for whom and where they wished. Both white and colored people in Texas were already aware of Lincoln’s 1863 emancipation edict, and that any Texas slave desiring emancipation from their condition could have, before and during the war, simply crossed the Mexican border to freedom.

Pondering “Juneteenth” in Texas

“In the 1850s there existed fears of slave revolt, with one uprising in Colorado county in 1856, perhaps motivated by John Brown’s influence and example. It was reported that a number of Negroes had acquired and secreted arms for the revolt, with a goal of killing white persons and fighting their way to Mexico “and legal freedom.” The plot was discovered, a number of Negroes killed and about 200 severely punished, with a claim that it was instigated by area Mexcians.

Some runaway slaves were reported who faced a bleak country to live off of, as well as hostile Indians who may also enslave them. The record shows that most runaways returned home after a harrowing life in the wilds of Texas.

[But] there is ample evidence that owners had a genuine interest in the material welfare and contentment of their black workers. This was especially true of plantations south of the Guadalupe or Colorado Rivers where the border with Mexico was not far off. It was true that plantation slaves more often led better lives, materially, than the poor whites of Texas. The diet of slaves, referred to as “hands” on the plantation, was equal to that of the average white farmer. They were given their own plots to garden for their own supply of greens. The most important consideration was the valuable medical care provided to the hands, and they fared far better than the average white people on the frontier. As was common in the pre-Civil War South, no planter could afford a sick slave, and he could afford doctors.

One horror of the war waged upon the South, including Texas, was the disappearance of medical supplies, especially anesthetics, due to the northerner blockade. This caused Southern hospitals, both military and civilian to become tragic and hideous places late in the war.

But one remarkable aspect of the war years in Texas was the behavior of the Negro slaves. Thousands of able-bodied men were left in charge of women, old men and boys on the river bottoms. A region that had long been haunted by the specter of slave revolt – it was only months since the hysteria of John Brown in 1859 – did not record a single incident. As the chief justice of Texas stated: “It was a subject of general remark that the Negroes were most docile and manageable during the war than at any other period, and for this they deserve the lasting gratitude of their owners in the army.”

The fact that slaves labored mightily and peaceably through the war has never adequately been explained. But certainly, more humane treatment helped, and many slaves seemed to have been genuinely caught up in a feeling for the plantation, land and society in which they had no stake. There were dozens of instances where a white mistress directed the efforts of dozens of slaves, in isolate places. No white woman or child was ever molested, and even more remarkably, fewer slaves tried to run away than in previous years.

But in the immediate postwar, thousands of the occupation troops in Texas were composed of Negro regiments. In every locality where they were stationed, there was trouble, without exception. At Victoria, the Negro garrison terrorized the town. At Brenham, Negro troops burned down the town and no solider or officer was ever brought to trial for this act. Men who were known Southern veterans, which included 90 percent of the population, were frequently publicly humiliated.

In Texas, this outside rule was not to last a few months, but for nine long years.”

(Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans. T.R. Fehrenbach. Collier Books. pp. 316-319; 357-358; 395)

 

Lincoln’s Dark Days

Many European observers saw Lincoln’s early proclamation of September 1862 as simply imitating the actions of Virginia’s Royal Governor Lord Dunmore eighty-six years earlier. In the face of “insurrection,” Dunmore demanded loyalty oaths from colonists while proclaiming African slaves “free.” A desperate Lincoln did the same.

Lincoln’s Dark Days

“The war had indeed approached a crisis in late July [1861]. There had been little encouraging news from the Western theater since April, when the victory at Shiloh had been followed by the occupation of New Orleans. These victories were disappointing in that they seemed to be leading nowhere. The high hopes accompanying McClellan’s advance up the peninsula below Richmond had been cruelly dashed.

Waiting for victories, [Lincoln’s] Cabinet received news in late August of the most humiliating defeat of the entire war. General John Pope allowed his army to be trapped at Manassas, Virginia, practically on the doorstep of the Capitol, between the armies of Longstreet and Jackson; it was hurled back toward Washington in a retreat that was actually a rout.

When the full impact of this latest disaster was at last known in the North, a real desperation gripped the public. “That we are in serious danger of being whipped cannot be denied” wrote Edward Atkinson, “and there is scarce a man now in Boston, who would not thank God to hear of a serious insurrection among the slaves, such a change has this disaster wrought.”

Dr. Milton Hawks, perhaps the most fanatical missionary at Port Royal [South Carolina], repeated his belief that, unless emancipation were the goal of the war, the South would establish her independence. “The greatest kindness that a man could do this government today,” he wrote furiously, “would be to assassinate Pres. Lincoln – He stands directly in the way.”

Lincoln’s course was mysterious to the general public [but after the dubious victory at Antietam], the President seized the slim occasion for his [preliminary emancipation] Proclamation . . .”

(Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment. Willie Lee Rose. Oxford University Press, 1964, pp. 184-185)

Inciting Insurrection

After his military’s defeat at Second Manassas in August 1862, Lincoln thought that threatening to free black laborers at the South might help his prospects in his war against the South. Despite those who thought it a barbarity to incite insurrections, he replied: “Nor do I urge objections of a moral nature in view of possible consequences of insurrection and massacre at the South.”

In New York City, a French-language newspaper opined: “Does the Government at Washington mean to say on January 1st, 1863, it will call for a servile war to aid in his conquest of the South? And after the blacks have killed the white people of the South, they themselves must be drowned in their own blood?”

Inciting Insurrection

“In the Senate, Stephen A. Douglas, pursuant to the Constitution, introduced a bill to punish those people who seek to incite slave insurrections. “Abraham Lincoln, in his speech at New York, declared it was a seditious speech” – “His press and party hooted it.” “It received their jeers and jibes.” (pg. 663, Stephen’s Pictorial History).

Then came the election of President. The party of [black] insurrection swept the Northern States. The people of the South had realized the possible results. With the people of the North making a saint of [John Brown] who planned and started to murder the slaveholders . . . and the Northern States all going in favor of the Republican party which protected those engaged in such plans.  Naturally there were in every Southern State those who thought it best to guard against such massacres by separating from those States where John Brown was deified.

When news came that Abraham Lincoln was elected, the South Carolina Legislature, being in session, called a State Convention. When the Convention met it withdrew ratification of the US Constitution and declared South Carolina an independent State.

In its declaration it said: “Those States have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who have remained have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection. For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing until it has now secured to its aid the power of the general government. “

So, to escape insurrections and ensure public safety, South Carolina separated itself from the United States government to free itself from a government led by a man who was not opposed to the massacre of the Southern people.”

(A Southern View of the Invasion of the Southern States and War of 1861-1865. Capt. S. A. Ashe, Raleigh, North Carolina, pp. 46-47)

Emancipation Explained

Perhaps in anticipation of emancipation, in 1862 the constitutional convention in Illinois proposed in Article XVII that “No Negro or mulatto shall migrate or settle in this State; No Negro or mulatto shall have the right of suffrage or hold any office in the State; The general assembly shall pass all laws necessary to carry into effect the provisions of this article.”

Emancipation Explained

“As incident to the war of 1861 “and as a fit and necessary war measure” in September 1862, was issued a paper which (with a sequel 100 days later) is called “proclamation of emancipation.” By this in portions of the country called rebellious, slaves were made free, unless by the 1st of January 1863, said communities ceased to rebel. Slave ownership was to be the reward of loyalty, slave abolition the penalty of rebellion.

This might be translated: “Negroes shall continue to be slaves to their masters if only their masters will be slaves to us. Let us have in peace the jobs which are in sight and your slaves may reap in peace your harvests, taxed only by our tariffs. We will let you have your slaves if you will let us have your freedom.”

After this offer had been made and rejected, who had the right to say that the South was fighting to preserve slavery, or Lincoln for the slave’s freedom? As in the South construed, the motive was not to free the slave but to enslave the free.

In October 1863, Lord Brougham (an abolitionist ab initio) referring to this proclamation said: “Hollow we may well call it for those who proclaimed emancipation confess that it was a measure of hostility to the whites and designed to produce slave insurrection from which the much enduring nature of the unhappy Negro saved the country.”

(Brilliant Eulogy on Gen. W.H. Payne from Good Old Rebels Who Don’t Care, Leigh Robinson, Southern Historical Society Papers, Vol. XXXVI, R.A. Brock, ed., 1991, Broadfoot Publishing, pp. 328-331)

A War of Conquest, Not Philanthropy

Fearing slave rebellion from its highly concentrated black population, the South wanted free access to the Territories to lessen this; the North wanted to restrict black people to the South and open the Territories to white-only immigration. A great irony of history is the blame the American South receives for African slavery: the South did not bring the black man to America, British and New England slave ships did after purchasing their human cargoes from African chieftains.

A War of Conquest, Not Philanthropy

“The initial sympathy of the British people for the North because of the belief that the South had seceded to set up a slave state and that the North stood for freedom of the slave was soon to be destroyed, and a strong conviction arose that the freedom of the slave was not an issue in the war. One can hardly escape the logic of events which forced this conclusion upon the English mind.

During the winter of [early] 1861, it will be recalled, numerous compromises of the American troubles were discussed, the most important of which was the Crittenden compromises conceding a permanent share of the territories to slavery. The Economist upon hearing of such proposals spoke of the measures as iniquitous, and was not willing to believe that Lincoln would yield to them.

But the final disillusionment came when in his inaugural address Lincoln said: “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where is exists . . . I believe I have no lawful right to do so and I have no intention to do so. “

This was, in truth, the death knell of British sympathy based upon the moral righteousness of the Northern cause. If freedom was not the cause, then what was it?

The Economist late in the summer of 1861 pronounced a little stronger upon the issue of the war: It was not for freeing the slave on the part of the North or preserving slavery on the part of the South, but was for dominion and power on the part of the one and the right of self-government on the part of the other.

After Lincoln’s message to Congress, which was as tender of the rights of slavery as had been in his inaugural, the Economist was completely convinced, if there had been any doubts, that Lincoln and the North would be more than glad to continue or restore the old Federal union on the basis of slavery and all its abuses if the South would only return.

The inevitable conclusion was that the war was “a war of conquest and not of philanthropy.”

(King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America, Frank L. Owsley, University of Chicago Press, 1931, pp. 187-188)