John B. Boles

Historians generally recognize only a handful of major slave revolts in the American South, and the most notorious of those— Gabriel Prosser’s Insurrection of 1800, Denmark Vesey’s conspiracy of 1822, and Nat Turner’s Rebellion of 1831—all failed. In contrast, Brazil witnessed an estimated twenty-five slave revolts in the nineteenth century, which culminated in the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888. There were also slave revolts in other areas of Latin American and the Caribbean that were more violent and more successful than those in the United States.

In the following viewpoint historian John B. Boles of Rice University argues that geography and the culture of plantation society in the Old South combined to make slave rebellions in the region both rare and very unlikely to succeed. While these...