to be earned.  Evidently officials were negligent in the discharge of their duty, but even if offenders were apprehended it did not necessarily follow that they would receive effective punishment.  President Madison in his message of December 5, 1810, said, “It appears that American citizens are instrumental in carrying on a traffic in enslaved Africans, equally in violation of the laws of humanity, and in defiance of those of their own country”; and on January 7, 1819, the Register of the Treasury made to the House the amazing report that “it doth not appear, from an examination of the records of this office, and particularly of the accounts (to the date of their last settlement) of the collectors of the customs, and of the several marshals of the United States, that any forfeitures had been incurred under the said act.”  A supplementary and compromising and ineffective act of 1818 sought to concentrate efforts against smuggling by encouraging informers; and one of the following year that authorized the President to “make such regulations and arrangements as he may deem expedient for the safe keeping, support, and removal beyond the limits of the United States” of recaptured Africans, and that bore somewhat more fruit, was in large measure due to the colonization movement and of importance in connection with the founding of Liberia.

[Footnote 1:  See DuBois, 95, ff.]

[Footnote 2:  Niles’s Register, XIV, 176 (May 2, 1818).]

Thus, while the formal closing of the slave-trade might seem to be a great step forward, the laxness with which the decree was enforced places it definitely in the period of reaction.

3. Gabriel’s Insurrection and the Rise of the Negro Problem

Gabriel’s insurrection of 1800 was by no means the most formidable revolt that the Southern states witnessed.  In design it certainly did not surpass the scope of the plot of Denmark Vesey twenty-two years later, and in actual achievement it was insignificant when compared not only with Nat Turner’s insurrection but even with the uprisings sixty years before.  At the last moment in fact a great storm that came up made the attempt to execute the plan a miserable failure.  Nevertheless coming as it did so soon after the revolution in Hayti, and giving evidence of young and unselfish leadership, the plot was regarded as of extraordinary significance.

Gabriel himself[1] was an intelligent slave only twenty-four years old, and his chief assistant was Jack Bowler, aged twenty-eight.  Throughout the summer of 1800 he matured his plan, holding meetings at which a brother named Martin interpreted various texts from Scripture as bearing on the situation of the Negroes.  His insurrection was finally set for the first day of September.  It was well planned.  The rendezvous was to be a brook six miles from Richmond.  Under cover of night the force of 1,100 was to march in three columns on the city, then a town of 8,000 inhabitants,