First published in 1943 by Columbia University Press, Herbert Aptheker’s American Negro Slave Revolts redefined the study of slave resistance, challenging decades of racism within academia and popular culture. Written during a time when most authors argued that slaves benefited from white benevolence, American Negro Slave Revolts proved that Blacks—free and slave—repeatedly acted on their own behalf to break the chains of slavery. This classic work, still in print after many editions, can be purchased in a new edition at International Publishers.

 

Author’s Preface to American Negro Slave Revolts (1969 Edition) 

Writing on slave unrest in the United States—and doing this in 1969—one feels more like a news reporter than a historian. While recently the California statesman, Ronald Reagan, found the ghetto rebels of today to be “mad dogs,” a South Carolina statesman of 1823 found plantation rebels of his day to be “monsters in human shape.”

Which humans are dogs and monsters depends, I suggest, upon class and, often, upon color and nationality, too. Thus, early in the summer of 1831, the U.S. press was lavish in its praise of Polish rebels against tsarist oppression; none was more lavish than the Southern press. But then, late in August, came news of the uprising in Virginia of slaves led by Nat Turner; while a week earlier rebels in Poland were “sons of the noble,” now the Virginia rebels were banditti, blood-thirsty wolves and deluded wretches. How shall one explain this extraordinary shift except to observe that now the rebels were at home, not six thousand miles away, and that now the rebels were not white, but black?

Humans, no matter of what color, being humans have rebelled when their treatment was bestial and when opportunity and capacity for rebellion was present.

The point was made nicely during the debates creating the U.S. Constitution. The topic at the moment was tax and fiscal policy. A Maryland delegate suggested that the principle to be followed was to treat all property alike—he meant, hemadded, to include in this slave property. It was not often that the octogenarian, Benjamin Franklin, participated in those debates, but the Marylander’s remark making identical all types of property provoked the Pennsylvanian enough so that he asked Washington for the floor. Getting it, Franklin asked if the Marylander would permit a question.

Permission being granted, Franklin posed one of the most pregnant questions ever asked: Noting that the delegate had equated slave property with all other forms of property, Franklin asked: “Will the gentleman from Maryland tell me of an insurrection of sheep?”

Slavery, being violative of central religious concepts and of the founding principles of this nation, required an elaborate rationalization. Racism provided this; it derived out of as it sustained the system of modern slavery, that is, that system created in the sixteenth century as part of the world-wide development of capitalism and the replacement of feudalism.

Fundamental to this rationalization was the idea at first of the actual subhumanity of colored peoples; when persistence in this became impossible it was altered to affirm the inherent, indelible and significant inferiority of such peoples.

This rationalization made slavery not only appropriate; believers could now feel absolutely philanthropic while exercising their slaveholding “responsibilities”—and enjoying its benefits. Central to this mythology was the idea that colored peoples did not detest or resent enslavement; particularly black peoples, it was held, delighted in their chains.

Of course, this mythology had its contradictions; thus, while it was generally insisted that the black was especially and naturally meek and docile, on the other hand, and simultaneously, it was held that he was—or could be—particularly brutal and “savage.”

But in accordance with the central myth for the United States— the idyllic character of plantation slavery- discontent and rebelliousness were held to be altogether rare and exceptional—whatever might have been true elsewhere and at other times. The centrality of this for the slaveholding class and for their apologists is clear.

The classical exponent and defender of this viewpoint in historiography was Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, whose American Negro Slavery {1918) was the bible of white supremacy in the area of history, as, in about the same period, was Bean’s work in anatomy, Burgess’ in political economy, and Ferguson’s in psychology. Bean was a fraud, Burgess a medievalist, Ferguson a charlatan, and Phillips a devout white supremacist who was as incapable of writing truthfully of what it meant to be a Negro slave in the United States as it would have been for Joseph Goebbels to have written truthfully of what it meant to be a Jew in post-World War I Germany.

Contemporary evidence—newspapers, court records, journals, diaries, letters, speeches—make crystal clear to anyone who views black men and women as human beings that American Negro slavery was a monstrously cruel system of exploitation and that its victims despised it and sought in every possible way to oppose it.

Most meant also, of course, to live through it, and survival is a form of struggle. But everything—from songs to tales, from heroes to villains, from religion to music to action—shows that the central idea and the never absent dream was to end slavery, to be free.

The highest form of protest was rebellion or conspiracy to rebel. This is collective; it involves an all-out commitment with death the sure price for failure and with success not likely. Its development and, especially, its fruition, require enormous care, effort and dedication. It is important to bear this in mind; I mean the fact that rebellion and conspiracy torebel reflect the highest forms of protest. Hence, where this form is present one may properly conclude that it reflects deep and widespread unrest; the insurrection or the plot  was, as it were, the flash of lightning that told of the profounder atmospheric disturbance creating it.

Protest among slaves in the United States took individual and collective forms. Among the former were “laziness,”  “thievishness,” “irresponsibility,” flight, assassination, arson, sabotage of tools and animals, self-injury, infanticide; of the latter were group flights, group arson (verging on insurrection), the existence of maroons— outlying, belligerent fugitive slaves—and conspiracy and uprisings.

Note also should be taken of the fact that among the pioneers and significant members of the organized anti-slavery movement in the United States were many free Negroes (of whom there were 500,000 in 1860) and/or fugitive slaves.

Some generalizations concerning slave insurrections and conspiracies in the United States may be of value. The uprisings and plots came in waves, as though anger accumulated and vented itself and then a period of rest and recuperation was needed before the next upsurge. Certainly, waves were the rule, with clearly defined periods, as: 1710-1722, 1730-1740, 1790-1802, 1819-1823, 1829-1832, 1850-1860. The uprisings were of slaves; that is, free Negro participation was uncommon and white participation (except after 1850) was rare. There is some evidence (especially for the last years of slavery) of plans for land and property distribution as well as an attack upon slavery as such. There is indication also of a pan-Black tie—thus, some talk of the West Indies and even of Africa, though the evidence is sparse and at times ambiguous.

External events had significant influence; for example, reports of unrest in the West Indies; dramatic political campaigns in the United States; war (as that of the Revolution or of 1812)—these, and other disturbing phenomena, reached the consciousness of the slaves and helped stimulate outbreaks.

Slave unrest was especially marked in the decade prior to the Civil War—all forms of unrest. This had a deeper content than before, and often there were evidences of Southern white participation in that decade. It may be added that if this is not understood one can understand neither all the sources nor the impact of John Brown’s effort nor all the sources of the Civil War itself.

Under the circumstances, success was not possible via insurrection. It should be noted, in this connection, that the only people to free themselves through rebellion from chattel slavery were the black people of Haiti—and there they counted 90 per cent of the population, much of the non-slave population was not white, and the rebellion succeeded when the State power was weakened because of the French Revolution.

But the slave plots and insurrections in the United States manifested a magnificent discontent; they did bestow a tradition of past struggle—even if muted in a racist society; and they helped rivet the attention of the nation upon the atrocity of slavery. Certainly, too, they influenced many Abolitionists—from the pacifist Garrison to the militant-resistant. Brown.

They were firebells in the night; cries from the heart; expressions of human need and aspiration in the face of the deepest testing. They manifest that victimization does not simply make victims; it also produces heroes.

They help to give the lie to the basic chauvinist stereotype concerning the allegedly meek, docile, passive black slave as traditionally presented in the Phillipsian mythology. And they give the lie to the more sophisticated apologias for racism—conscious or otherwise—stemming from the “mark of oppression” theory (Ovesey-Kardiner-Myrdal-Moynihan-Elkins-Genovese) which sees the slaves, to quote William Styron, the most widely-read purveyor of this concept, aslargely “reduced to the status of children . . . tranquillized, totally defenseless, ciphers and ants.”

They provide the tie of continuity with the record of activity made by black men and women in the Civil War years, in the great struggles of Reconstruction and Populism; they help make explicable the sources of strength and clarity of a giant like Du Bois. They make clear that the present generation of such men and women now shaking the very foundations of racism in the United States are the inheritors and continuers of a great tradition of militancy.

Finally, this thought: in the days of slavery, the masters and their scribes insisted that the source of plots and insurrections lay in “outside agitators.” Abolitionists replied that this was quite untrue; they added that they had a fool-proof proposal which if implemented would guarantee the end of slave unrest and uprisings. To end slave rebellion, they said, end slavery! Do the one and the other was over; fail to do it and the unrest would continue. Similarly, today, to the innumerable commissions investigating the “reasons” for the ghetto uprisings and the other manifestations of discontent, the present “outside agitator” offers a fool-proof proposal. To terminate the unrest in the United States manifested by black men and women it is necessary only to terminate racism; end one, the other ceases. Do not end it and beware The Fire Next Time.

Herbert Aptheker

January 1969

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A Note for the 1974 Edition 

In the Nixon era, befitting its general corruption and degeneracy, there was a marked intensification of racism in the United States. The election campaign of 1972 was the most chauvinist in United States history and the cut-backs in already inadequate social programs especially hurt Black people. As a result the gap in living conditions between white and Black peoples widened.

Reflecting and bulwarking this development was a heightened racist propaganda in sociology, biology, anthropology, psychology and history, indicated in such names as Banfield, Jensen, Moynihan, Shockley and the ultimate travesty on slavery entitled Time on the Cross by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974). The latter glorified slavery, affirmed an identity of interest between slave and master and presented an idyllic picture that outdid “Gone With the Wind.”

Politically and socially, of course, fight-back persisted; in history-writing, the accumulation of data on the active and militant role of Black people, including Black people who were slaves, continued and the viability of the present book, first published over thirty years ago, persisted. It is this fact which explains the need for a new edition. In the bibliographical section the reader will find now a listing of relevant books and articles going through mid-1974; there is no doubt that future years will see the uncovering of still more data on the resistance offered by the Afro-American people to their enslavement—an experience which tempered them and which should inspire all partisans of human liberation.

Herbert Aptheker

August 1974