Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (91 page)

D
URING THE COURSE OF THE
1790S the earlier enthusiasm of those in the Upper South to liberalize their society and to create a looser slave regime began to dissipate. Probably nothing did more to diminish the initial optimism of many whites in Virginia about the end of slavery than the black rebellion in the French colony of Saint-Domingue on the island of Hispaniola. The rebellion began in 1790 with an uprising of free coloreds, a diverse group who numbered about thirty thousand and included French-educated planters, tradesmen, artisans, and small landowners. The insurgents had been infected with French revolutionary principles and now demanded equality with whites. The whites numbered about forty thousand, but they were bitterly divided between the grands blancs and the disorderly and marginalized petits blancs. Beneath the whites and the free coloreds were five hundred thousand African slaves.

Neither the free coloreds nor the whites realized the extent to which their clash over equality and the principles of the French Revolution was affecting the slaves. In August 1791 the slaves on the northern plains rose up, soon becoming a force of twelve thousand that began killing whites and destroying plantations. Brutal retaliation by the whites did not stop growing numbers of slaves from deserting the plantations. Confronted with this rebellion from below, officials in France belatedly sought to forge an alliance between the whites and the free coloreds and sent six thousand troops to put down the slave rebellion. But the whites and free coloreds were so divided by factions that the fighting became worse and eventually spilled over into the Spanish portion of Hispaniola (the present-day Dominican Republic). With the end of the French monarchy and the outbreak of war between France and England in 1793, English forces invaded the island and soon became entangled in the brutal racial wars. Although the great ex-slave leader of the revolt François-Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture tried to preserve a multi-racial society, he could not contain the chaos that spiraled into what became the rebellion’s eventual goal of eliminating from the island both slavery and whites.

Most Americans, including slaves, knew what was taking place in Saint-Domingue. Between 1791 and 1804 the American press carried regular reports of atrocities on the island. Moreover, thousands of refugees, both white and black, fled from the chaos, many of them to the United States, especially to the cities of Charleston, Norfolk, and Philadelphia. By 1795 as many as twelve thousand Dominguan slaves had entered the United States, bringing with them knowledge that slaves in the New World were capable of overthrowing white rule. Governor Charles Pinckney of South Carolina was not alone in realizing “that the day will arrive when [the Southern states] may be exposed to the same insurrection.”
⁵⁸

Frightened of the contagion of this West Indian slave rebellion, most Southern states, but not Virginia, barred Dominguan slaves from entry. Consequently, many of them ended up in Virginia and throughout the decade of the 1790s stimulated wild fears of slave insurrections in the state. In June 1793 John Randolph reported overhearing two slaves planning “to kill the white people.” When one of the slaves expressed skepticism about the plan, the other reminded him “how the blacks
has
kill’d the whites in the French Island . . . a little while ago.” News of the rebellion in Saint-Domingue was everywhere, and the island could not help becoming a symbol of black liberation. Throughout the 1790s major slave conspiracies were uncovered in the Spanish colonies of Cuba and Louisiana, and slave rebellions actually broke out in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Curaçao, and Grenada. As Federalist Rufus King pointed out, “
the example upon our slaves in the Southern states
” was obvious.
⁵⁹

During the 1790s talk of slave insurrections in the United States became increasingly prevalent—eroding whatever liberal feelings the Upper South hitherto had toward the ending of slavery. By the end of the decade, as one Virginia slaveholder put it, “the emancipation fume has long evaporated and not a word is now said about it.”
⁶⁰

I
N 1800 WHAT THE
V
IRGINIAN SLAVEHOLDERS
had long dreaded finally arrived—a widespread conspiracy among their slaves to rise up and abolish slavery. In the area around Richmond a group of artisan-slaves enjoyed a much greater degree of liberty and mobility than they
had in the past. Slaves with skills were often able to hire themselves out where needed, pay their masters a share of their wages, and thus earn some money for themselves. These slave-artisans often mingled with both free-black and white artisans in a shadowy interracial underworld that floated between freedom and slavery. The twenty-four-year-old blacksmith Gabriel, owned by planter Thomas Prosser of Henrico County, in which Richmond was located, participated in this borderland world in which heady talk of liberty and natural rights was increasingly common. Already convicted and branded for fighting with a white man, Gabriel was on fire to destroy the system of slavery. He was not alone: as one of the black rebels, Jack Ditcher, declared, “We have as much right to fight for our liberty as any men.”
⁶¹

The timing of the conspirators was influenced by the explosive atmosphere of 1799–1800 when the Federalists and Republicans seemed to many to be on the verge of civil war. The Federalists in Virginia, who were mostly merchants and bankers confined to the thriving commercial cities of Richmond, Norfolk, and Fredericksburg, predicted that a Jefferson victory in the election of 1800 would lead to a liberation of the slaves, or worse, a slave insurrection. At the same time, the artisans in the towns, like their brethren in the North, were advocating a more equitable distribution of wealth and were attacking the Federalists for being rich drones who lived off of other men’s labor. Amidst these kinds of charges and counter-charges with predictions of violence and armies clashing, Gabriel and other slave artisans thought that their slave insurrection would become part of a larger upheaval in Virginia and, perhaps, even in the nation.

Gabriel and his conspirators envisioned not simply a slave revolt but a republican revolution against rich merchants that would transform Virginia society. They believed that “the poor white people” and the “most redoubtable democrats” in Richmond would rise with them in rebellion against the existing order. But if the whites would not join the insurrection, then they would all be killed, with the exception of “Quakers, Methodists, and French people,” since they were “friendly to liberty.”
⁶²

Although Gabriel may not have originated the conspiracy, he quickly became its leader. Beginning around April 1800, he and other slave artisans began recruiting rebels in the taverns and religious meetings of Richmond and other towns. Five or six hundred men at least orally agreed to participate in the insurrection. Hoping eventually to have a thousand-strong army, the leaders tried recruiting from the rural
plantations with less success than they had among the artisans. The rebels planned everything with military precision. They stole guns, made swords from scythes, and organized their army into three groups that would march on Richmond, the capital, under the banner of “Death or Liberty.” Two of the groups planned to set diversionary fires in the warehouse district, while the main group led by Gabriel would seize the state’s treasury, the magazine where military supplies were stored, and Governor James Monroe. The attack was set for August 30, 1800.

On the appointed day two slaves informed their master of the uprising, and at the same time a torrential rain flooded roads and bridges, making it impossible for the rebels to meet and coordinate their plans. The rebellion was doomed from the start.

At first some whites scoffed at the idea of a massive conspiracy, but as the white militia over the next several weeks hunted down dozens of rebels, white Virginians became more and more terrified as they learned of the scope of the miscarried insurrection. Eventually twenty-seven men, including Gabriel, were tried and hanged for their participation in the conspiracy; others were sold and transported out of the state. Some of the rebels knew only too well how to make the white Virginians squirm. One of them, speaking at his trial, declared, “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 endeavouring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am a willing sacrifice in their cause.”
⁶³

Governor Monroe thought it “strange” that the slaves should have embarked on “this novel and unexampled enterprise of their own accord.” After all, he said, “their treatment has been more favorable since the revolution,” and because of the end of the slave importations into the state, there were proportionally fewer of them. Unable to understand why the rebellion should have come from those slaves who suffered the fewest restrictions and experienced the greatest taste of liberty, Monroe could only conclude that some outsiders put them up to it.
⁶⁴

Virginia Federalists, eager to make political capital out of the conspiracy, were quick to blame the Republicans for their constant sermonizing on the doctrine of “liberty and equality.” “It has been most imprudently propagated for several years at our tables while our servants were standing behind our chairs. It has been preached from the pulpits, Methodists and Baptists alike without reserve. Democrats have talked it, what else then
could we expect except what has happened?” We have learned a lesson, said the Virginia Federalists. “There can be no compromise between liberty and slavery.” We must either abolish slavery or continue it. “If we continue it, it must be restricted, all the vigorous laws must be reenacted which experience has proved necessary to keep it within bounds.. . . If we will keep a ferocious monster within our country, we must keep him in chains.” The two decades of liberalization had to come to an end. Otherwise these Virginians believed they would end up with “the horrors of St. Domingo.”
⁶⁵

The New England Federalists picked up the refrain and taunted the Southern Republicans for having brought their misery upon themselves. “If any thing will correct & bring to repentance old hardened sinners in Jacobinism,” said the
Boston Gazette
, “it must be
an insurrection of their slaves
.” Hamilton’s friend Robert Troup joked to Rufus King about how the Virginia Republicans “are beginning to feel the happy effects of liberty and equality.”
⁶⁶
Of course, the New England Federalists had little to fear from slave rebellions and were even willing to support the slave insurrection in Saint-Domingue as long as it hurt the Jacobinical French. The Adams administration supplied arms to Toussaint and at one point in 1798 actually intervened with naval support on Toussaint’s behalf; it even encouraged the black leader to declare independence from France.

With the end of the Quasi-War with France in 1800 and Jefferson’s election as president, American policy inevitably changed. After Napoleon failed to recover the colony for France in 1803, Haiti, as the black rebels called their new republic, finally became the second independent state of the New World; unlike the United States, Haiti succeeded in ending slavery and proclaiming racial equality at the moment of its independence. Although the United States was usually eager to encourage revolutions and during the nineteenth century was often the first state in the world to extend diplomatic recognition to new republics, in the case of the Haitian republic the nation behaved differently. Not until the Civil War did the United States recognize the Haitian republic.

G
ABRIEL’S CONSPIRACY
was the final straw. The earlier liberal climate was already dissipating; now it definitely had to be eliminated. The planned slave insurrection convinced many Virginians that they had been terribly mistaken in loosening the bonds of slavery in the aftermath of the Revolution. They now sensed that slavery could not easily exist in a
society that extolled freedom. They agreed with Federalist critics that too much preaching of liberty and equality undermined the institution of slavery. The South would have to become a very different place from what many of them had envisioned in the 1780 s. The earlier leniency in judging “freedom suits” in Virginia ended, and manumissions in the state rapidly declined. Southerners began reversing their earlier examples of racial mingling. The evangelical Protestant churches ended their practice of mixed congregations. The Southern states began enacting new sets of black codes that resembled later Jim Crow laws, tightening up the institution of slavery and restricting the behavior of free blacks. With the possibility of slaves running away to the free states of the North, despite the fugitive slave clause (Article IV, Section 2) of the Constitution, the planters of the Upper South could no longer regard truancy with the casualness they had earlier. Free blacks now had to carry papers or wear arm patches affirming their status; of course, this was partly for their own security, but the practices only reemphasized the identity between blackness and slavery.

Indeed, the very presence of free blacks now seemed to threaten the institution of slavery. “If blacks see all of their color [as] slaves,” declared a Virginia lawmaker, “it will seem to them a disposition of Providence and they will be content. But if they see others like themselves free, and enjoying rights they are deprived of, they will repine.”
⁶⁷
This logic led the South to seek to expel all its free blacks and to abandon its earlier expectation that slavery would eventually come to an end.

In 1806 the Virginia legislature declared that any freed slave had to leave the state. In reaction Maryland, Kentucky, and Delaware prohibited those free blacks from seeking permanent residence within their borders. The Methodists and Baptists in the South revoked their previous stand against slavery, and the Southern societies promoting antislavery found themselves rapidly losing members. Virginia, which had been a symbol of hope at the time of the Revolution, increasingly turned inward and acted frightened and besieged. It developed an increasing contempt for the getting and spending—the capitalism—rapidly developing in the North and began to extol and exaggerate all those cavalier characteristics that Jefferson had outlined in the 1780 s: its liberality, its candor, and its aversion to the narrow, money-grasping greed of the hustling Yankees.