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Extensive archival and anecdotal sources support Michael Mullin's description of slavery as it was practiced in tidewater Virginia, on the rice coast of the Carolinas, and in Jamaica and Barbados. Drawing upon case histories, Mullin offers new and definitive information about how African people met and often overcame the challenges and deprivations of their new lives through religion, family life, and economic strategies.

Justin Pope’s ground-breaking work tells the story of an era of slave unrest that swept through the Atlantic World in the first half of the eighteenth century. Provinces along the eastern coast of North America and around the Caribbean Sea experienced more insurrections and conspiracy trials in the 1730s and 1740s than in any period before the Age of Revolution. The governor of Jamaica warned his king that slaves were spreading a “dangerous Spirit of Liberty” throughout the West Indies, concerns echoed by European colonists on the northern mainland. African-born slaves rose in rebellion and captured the Danish island of Saint John, and Maroons waged a successful war in Jamaica, events that became news in the wider Atlantic World. By the early 1740s, word of emancipation and widespread rebellion had taken hold in slave communities from the coast of South America to the harbors of New York City. Colonial authorities responded to rumors of slave plotting with brutal conspiracy trials, exhorting false confessions and executing hundreds of men and women in travesties of justice in need of retelling. Scholars have long noted this period of intensified slave unrest, not unlike the era of the Haitian Revolution, but no one has conducted a full-length study of this early tumult across empires. This book explains the causes behind this rash of insurrections, both real and imagined, and explores the consequences for the peoples of the eighteenth-century Atlantic World.

Dangerous Spirit of Liberty's distinguishing feature is its focus on the role of communication in the development of a rebellious early eighteenth-century Atlantic. Most historians of slavery have presupposed that slave unrest was confined to small locales in the first half of the eighteenth century. In fact, slaves found ways to share news across provinces to great effect. Benefiting from research in the archives of Great Britain, Spain, Barbados, Bermuda, Jamaica, Antigua, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the mainland United States, the book reveals new evidence of slave communication networks and shows how people of African ancestry shared rumors of emancipation and rebellion in this period. Slaves laboring in colonial commerce and working aboard ships helped foster an increasingly restive Black community. Banished slaves, convicted conspirators accused of plotting insurrection, carried their experiences with them in exile to neighboring colonies. By reconstructing the path of news, the book reveals rumors and reports that particularly resonated among slaves in the early eighteenth century.
 

Questions traditional assumptions about power and agency in slave women’s everyday lives.

Through their open defiance, women like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth had a significant impact on the institution of slavery. But what of the countless other women who did not commit public or even private acts of resistance? Are their stories worthy of our attention? While some scholars imply that only the struggle for freedom was legitimate, Jenny Sharpe complicates the linear narrative-from slavery to freedom and literacy-that emerged from the privileging of autobiographical accounts like that of Frederick Douglass. She challenges a paradigm that equates agency with resistance and self-determination, and introduces new ways to examine negotiations for power within the constraints of slavery.

In Ghosts of Slavery, Sharpe introduces a wider range of everyday practices by examining the lives of three distinctive Caribbean women: a maroon leader, a mulatto concubine, and a fugitive slave. Through them she explains how the diasporic experience of slavery enabled black women to claim an authority that they didn’t possess in Africa, how concubines empowered themselves through their mimicry of white women, and how less-privileged slave women manipulated situations that they were powerless to change. Finding the highly mediated portrayal of slave women in the historical records limited and sometimes misleading, Sharpe turns to unconventional sources for investigating these women’s lives. In this fascinating and historically rich account, she calls for new strategies of reading that question traditional narratives of history, and she finds alternative ways to integrate oral storytelling, slave songs, travel writing, court documents, proslavery literature, and contemporary literature into black history. Ultimately, this layered approach not only produces a more complex picture of the slave women’s agency than conventional readings, it encourages a more nuanced understanding of the roles of slaves in the history of slavery.

This gripping study examines slave resistance and protest in antebellum Florida and its local and national impact from 1821 to 1865. Using a variety of sources such as slaveholders' wills and probate records, ledgers, account books, court records, oral histories, and numerous newspaper accounts, Larry Eugene Rivers discusses the historical significance of Florida as a runaway slave haven dating back to the seventeenth century and explains Florida's unique history of slave resistance and protest. In moving detail, Rivers illustrates what life was like for enslaved blacks whose families were pulled asunder as they relocated from the Upper South to the Lower South to an untamed place such as Florida, and how they fought back any way they could to control small parts of their own lives.

Against a smoldering backdrop of violence, this study analyzes the various degrees of slave resistance--from the perspectives of both slave and master--and how they differed in various regions of antebellum Florida. In particular, Rivers demonstrates how the Atlantic world view of some enslaved blacks successfully aided their escape to freedom, a path that did not always lead North but sometimes farther South to the Bahama Islands and Caribbean. Identifying more commonly known slave rebellions such as the Stono, Louisiana, Denmark (Telemaque) Vesey, Gabriel, and the Nat Turner insurrections, Rivers argues persuasively that the size, scope, and intensity of black resistance in the Second Seminole War makes it the largest sustained slave insurrection ever to occur in American history.

Meticulously researched, Rebels and Runaways offers a detailed account of resistance, protest, and violence as enslaved blacks fought for freedom.

The local community around the Nat Turner rebellion

The 1831 Southampton Rebellion led by Nat Turner involved an entire community. Vanessa M. Holden rediscovers the women and children, free and enslaved, who lived in Southampton County before, during, and after the revolt. Mapping the region's multilayered human geography, Holden draws a fuller picture of the inhabitants, revealing not only their interactions with physical locations but also their social relationships in space and time. Her analysis recasts the Southampton Rebellion as one event that reveals the continuum of practices that sustained resistance and survival among local Black people. Holden follows how African Americans continued those practices through the rebellion’s immediate aftermath and into the future, showing how Black women and communities raised children who remembered and heeded the lessons absorbed during the calamitous events of 1831.

A bold challenge to traditional accounts, Surviving Southampton sheds new light on the places and people surrounding Americas most famous rebellion against slavery.