4.  Early Insurrections

The Negroes who came to America directly from Africa in the eighteenth century were strikingly different from those whom generations of servitude later made comparatively docile.  They were wild and turbulent in disposition and were likely at any moment to take revenge for the great wrong that had been inflicted upon them.  The planters in the South knew this and lived in constant fear of uprisings.  When the situation became too threatening, they placed prohibitive duties on importations, and they also sought to keep their slaves in subjection by barbarous and cruel modes of punishment, both crucifixion and burning being legalized in some early codes.  On sea as well as on land Negroes frequently rose upon those who held them in bondage, and sometimes they actually won their freedom.  More and more, however, in any study of Negro insurrections it becomes difficult to distinguish between a clearly organized revolt and what might be regarded as simply a personal crime, so that those uprisings considered in the following discussion can only be construed as the more representative of the many attempts for freedom made by Negro slaves in the colonial era.

In 1687 there was in Virginia a conspiracy among the Negroes in the Northern Neck that was detected just in time to prevent slaughter, and in Surry County in 1710 there was a similar plot, betrayed by one of the conspirators.  In 1711, in South Carolina, several Negroes ran away from their masters and “kept out, armed, robbing and plundering houses and plantations, and putting the inhabitants of the province in great fear and terror";[1] and Governor Gibbes more than once wrote to the legislature about amending the Negro Act, as the one already in force did “not reach up to some of the crimes” that were daily being committed.  For one Sebastian, “a Spanish Negro,” alive or dead, a reward of L50 was offered, and he was at length brought in by the Indians and taken in triumph to Charleston.  In 1712 in New York occurred an outbreak that occasioned greater excitement than any uprising that had preceded it in the colonies.  Early in the morning of April 7 some slaves of the Carmantee and Pappa tribes who had suffered ill-usage, set on fire the house of Peter van Tilburgh, and, armed with guns and knives, killed and wounded several persons who came to extinguish the flames.  They fled, however, when the Governor ordered the cannon to be fired to alarm the town, and they got away to the woods as well as they could, but not before they had killed several more of the citizens.  Some shot themselves in the woods and others were captured.  Altogether eight or ten white persons were killed, and, aside from those Negroes who had committed suicide, eighteen or more were executed, several others being transported.  Of those executed one was hanged alive in chains, some were burned at the stake, and one was left to die a lingering death before the gaze of the town.