A Nation Rising (14 page)

At the same time, Napoléon reversed the emancipation decree and restored both slavery and the slave trade to the French colonies. The decision reawakened the rebellion on Saint Domingue. The French watched helplessly as appalling numbers of men fell victim to yellow fever; they buried their dead at night in an attempt to disguise their horrific losses. Now led by one of Toussaint's lieutenants, General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the islanders were fighting to free themselves from enslavement. The French also ratcheted up their cruelty. Rebel prisoners were staked to the ground by the French,
and starving dogs were let loose on them. As is often the case, the French atrocities strengthened the resolve of the resistance.

Then, in what was ultimately a catastrophic decision, Napoléon chose to launch a war against England again; the Saint Domingue campaign became a sideshow. By the end of 1803, France had lost more than 50,000 soldiers on the island. These losses were greater than those Napoléon's armies later suffered at Waterloo, his signal defeat in 1815.

On January 1, 1804, Toussaint's successor, Dessalines, proclaimed the republic of Haiti—an Arawak word for “mountain.” The French retreated to the other side of the island. Saint Domingue had lost more than half its population, and the country was devastated. But its rebellious former slaves had defeated the two most powerful nations on earth. In one last strike at the hated whites, Dessalines, in an orgy of ruthless recrimination, ordered the massacre of 3,000 of the remaining Frenchmen on Saint Domingue.

Having abandoned hope of retaking the island as a stepping-off point for a campaign in North America, Napoléon decided instead to raise cash for his strapped armies by selling off France's North American territory in Louisiana. Unexpectedly, in 1803, Thomas Jefferson was the recipient of a very valuable gift—made possible by the rebellious slave armies of Saint Domingue.

 

T
HE EVENTS IN
the Caribbean hardly went unnoticed in America, even before Thomas Jefferson was elected and was able to complete the Louisiana Purchase. The grim spectacle of slaves humiliating
and murdering large numbers of their white owners powerfully concentrated the attention of American slave owners. The revolution in Saint Domingue sent shivers through slaveholding America and helped inspire draconian new codes meant to tighten controls over American slaves. Chief among them was a prohibition against teaching slaves to read. American slaveholders thought that keeping slaves illiterate would prevent them from learning about the uprising in the Caribbean. But even illiterate slaves were soon whispering Toussaint's name. And in 1800, even as Jefferson, Burr, and Adams campaigned for the presidency, Richmond, Virginia, was about to get a firsthand taste of what slave insurrection actually meant.

 

W
RITING IN THE
United-States Gazette
in September 1800, a correspondent from Virginia warned:

The man responsible for generating that very real fear was a slave who went by the name of Gabriel Prosser. Born in 1776 on a Virginia plantation, Gabriel would be caught up in the feverish air of freedom and democracy then blowing through the country. He and his owner, Thomas Henry Prosser, had practically grown up together. Besides his plantation, Thomas Prosser owned an auction
and real estate business, as well as a tavern located on the outskirts of Richmond. Gabriel had become a blacksmith, like his father, and was allowed to hire himself out and keep a portion of his earnings. He was hired out so frequently, in fact, that many believed he was a freedman.

Gabriel possessed another unusual distinction for slaves of his day: he could read. Standing well over six feet tall, and physically imposing, as a man shaped by years of blacksmithing typically was, Gabriel was a proud and impressive figure whose literacy and limited freedom to move about the countryside made him a dangerous black man.

Using his license to move in and about Richmond and its outlying plantations, Gabriel and his two brothers recruited a small army of slave and free blacks willing to revolt against their masters, clearly inspired by the exploits of Toussaint-Louverture. They even had a silk banner inscribed with words that would be familiar to any Virginian of that day: D
EATH OR
L
IBERTY
.

Carrying mostly crude weapons, including scythes that had been fashioned into swords, Gabriel's secret army prepared to march on Richmond, home to some 5,700 residents, half of whom were black. Because there were another 4,600 slaves on nearby plantations, whites were actually in the minority in the region. Gabriel planned to take the guns stored in the Richmond armory. The only whites to be spared were Quakers, the French, and others known to oppose slavery.

On August 30, 1800, in the muggy Tidewater heat, Gabriel set out to begin his assault. But before the march on Richmond could get under way, two frightened slaves betrayed him and the “con
spiracy” to their owner, who immediately rushed to tell Governor James Monroe of Virginia about the imminent attack. In the midst of campaigning for Thomas Jefferson, Monroe quickly called out the militia and had light artillery dragged into defensive positions around Richmond. A torrential rainstorm that night swamped the rebels' plans. The rebel slave force—estimated variously at between 150 and 1,000 men—never reached the city. With the assistance of the informers, an extensive manhunt was begun the next day. Although Gabriel evaded arrest for a few weeks, he was finally captured on September 25. He was swiftly interrogated, tried, and hanged, along with fifteen others, on October 7. Before being executed, one of the rebels told the court, “I have nothing more to offer than what General Washington would have had to offer had he been taken by the British and put to trial. I have adventured my life in endeavoring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am a willing sacrifice in their cause.”
¹²

After Gabriel's defeated conspiracy, Virginia and other slave states enacted even harsher new codes that restricted slave meetings on Sundays after work was finished. More important, slave literacy was to come to an end. A little learning for slaves was clearly a dangerous thing. And Virginia issued another rule: that all freed blacks had to leave the state within a year of their emancipation.

Still, the conspiracies and hints of conspiracies continued. As little as two years after the Gabriel rebellion, another slave tried the same thing in Richmond, though again without success.

The next incident that caused tremendous fear and trembling among American slaveholders was also inspired by events in Haiti. It took place in 1811 and became one of the largest slave revolts in
United States history. It started in the area upriver from New Orleans, on the evening of January 8, 1811, with a group of slaves led by a mulatto named Charles—who was from Saint Domingue and whose owner, named Deslondes, had brought him to New Orleans in 1793 following the rebellions on the island. Charles later may have been given his freedom by Deslondes's widow, but he was still working as a paid laborer on the Andry plantation, about thirty-five miles from New Orleans. His emancipation apparently was not enough for Charles. He and his followers overpowered Andry, killed Andry's son, and then began to march toward New Orleans, carrying cane knives, a few guns, and other improvised weapons.

Gathering recruits among slaves on neighboring plantations, and maroons—fugitive slaves who lived in secret hidden communities—the rebellion of Charles Deslondes quickly grew from a small plantation uprising into a major assault on New Orleans. As they marched down the River Road, the insurrectionists began to burn plantations and crops, capturing additional weapons and ammunition as they went. Without any real planning, a rebellion like the one on Haiti seemed to be unfolding in New Orleans. Charles may have hoped to enter New Orleans with an army of freed slaves large enough to capture the arsenal at Fort Saint Charles, expel all whites from the city, and turn New Orleans into a haven for southern slaves.

At the time, New Orleans was one of America's largest cities, with a population of about 25,000, nearly 11,000 of them slaves, and another 6,000 free blacks and other people of color; the city's white population was about 8,000. New Orleans was also the center of trade for American goods coming down the Mississippi and was a crucial port in the valuable trade with the rest of the Caribbean.

Initially met by a small force of local militiamen, Charles's army, now numbering some 200 men, made camp at a farm near New Orleans. By the following day, however, the alarm had been raised. Federal troops and local militia forces confronted the rebel army at the farm and overwhelmed them in a pitched battle. The combined forces, which included members of the New Orleans mulatto militia, killed or captured most of the slaves.

As Ira Berlin recounts in
Many Thousands Gone
, “The insurgents marched on New Orleans. When confronted by United States regulars, they did not break and run but ‘formed themselves in a line' and returned the fire…. Eventually, American soldiers subdued the rebels and hanged and beheaded Deslondes and his confederates. Their mutilated remains hung in public as an object lesson to those who dared to challenge the slave regime.”
¹³
Most of the 200 slaves who had rebelled were returned to their owners, some in exchange for testimony against Charles and the other leaders.

The rebel slaves of Saint Domingue were also an inspiration to Denmark Vesey, a former slave who had purchased his freedom after winning a lottery. A skilled carpenter, Vesey lived in Charleston, South Carolina, and was a leader in its black church. He had supposedly visited Saint Domingue as a sailor and was also aware of Gabriel's failed conspiracy in Richmond in 1800.

In 1822, Vesey began to plot an insurrection along the same lines as Gabriel's. His forces would strike Charleston's armory, seize its weapons, burn the city, slaughter its white populace, and make their way to Haiti aboard stolen ships. Vesey recruited as many as 9,000 blacks from surrounding plantations. But as the plot built toward its
culmination, another slave betrayed Vesey. By June 1822, Vesey was arrested and executed, along with more than thirty of his followers.

Madison Washington and his fellow slaves on the
Creole
were more fortunate. When they sailed into the port of Nassau in the Bahamas, a British colony where slavery had been illegal since 1833, they were welcomed with cheers by Nassau's free black community. The
Creole
“mutineers” were jailed briefly in Nassau, where two of the men died, one from wounds suffered in the fighting aboard the ship, the other from natural causes. The British authorities freed the seventeen remaining men without prosecuting them for either murder or piracy. The chief justice in Nassau told them: “It has pleased God to set you free from the bonds of slavery; may you hereafter lead the lives of good and faithful subjects of Her Majesty's government.”
¹⁴

With that, Madison Washington disappeared from history. But his story was told for years to come among the abolitionist forces then beginning to gather strength—and make powerful enemies—in the United States. The most famous escaped slave of the time, the abolitionist leader and internationally renowned lecturer Frederick Douglass, frequently introduced the story of the
Creole
when he spoke. And of course, in 1851, Douglass published
The Heroic Slave
, his fictionalized and highly idealized account of the incident.

But few besides the most committed fringe of abolitionists cheered the British decision or saw these mutineers, or any insurrectionary slaves, as heroic. Slave owners were outraged at the British action. Secretary of State Daniel Webster was forced to pursue the British, even threatening war—though tepidly—over the incident. The case dragged through the courts until 1853, when the British
government, following a ruling by an international commission, paid $110,000 to the masters of the
Creole
and its insurers.
¹⁵

In America, the case stirred the forces for and against slavery. On March 21, 1842, while the British still held the men who had mutinied on the
Creole
, and Secretary of State Webster was issuing his threats to the British, an abolitionist, Congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio, introduced a series of resolutions in the House of Representatives. Asserting that the slaves violated no law in assuming their natural rights, Giddings contended the United States should not try to recover them. Giddings's colleagues attacked him, and the House formally censured him for breaking the “gag rule,” which had been used to table any discussion or petitions regarding slavery in the House. Giddings resigned and appealed to his constituents, who immediately reelected him in a landslide.

The small but rising number of abolitionists were still viewed as a “lunatic fringe” in American politics at the beginning of the 1840s. But the situation was changing, as Henry Mayer points out in his biography of the abolitionist firebrand William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of
The Liberator
and perhaps the most uncompromising of American abolitionists: “Giddings' reelection, which Garrison had fully supported in
The Liberator
, suggested that politicians who defied the South might do better at the polls than those who placated it. If such straws in the wind indeed proved indicators of a shift in public opinion, the days of the gag rule were numbered and Congress, instead of avoiding debate on the slavery question, would find itself talking about little else.”
¹⁶

Three years later, the “gag rule” was repealed by the House;
this repeal was a powerful portent of the growing strength of the antislavery forces in American politics.