The Black Tradition of Armed Self-Defense and Rebellion in America: The Answer to the Christian Uncle Tom Problem

Discovery of Nat Turner, an 1884 Wood Engraving Illustrating Benjamin Phillps's Capture of Nat Turner--Turner with a Sword, Phillps with a Rifle

First published in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin sold millions of copies in the United States and around the world and became perhaps the single most influential expression of abolitionist rhetoric.  And yet, as I have indicated in previous posts, some black abolitionists criticized her for depicting Uncle Tom as a submissive Christian slave who followed the Bible's admonition "Slaves, obey your masters."  In the 1950s, black author James Baldwin renewed this criticism and made "Uncle Tom" a term of scorn for blacks who passively submitted to their own exploitation and thus confirmed the racist depiction of blacks as unmanly in their servility.

Perhaps in response to this kind of criticism, Stowe seemed to change her mind in 1856 with the publication of her second novel Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp.  Her hero in this novel--Dred--is a leader of violent slave insurrections who sneers at the meek passivity of Christian slaves.  Speaking to a slave, he declares:

"When a man licks his master's foot, his wife scorns him--serves him right. Take it meekly my boy! 'Servants, obey your masters.' (Ephesians 6:5) Take your master's old coats--take your wife when he's done with her--and bless God that brought you under the light of the Gospel! Go! You are a slave! But, as for me, . . . I am a free man! Free by this," holding out his rifle. "Free by the Lord of hosts, that numbereth the stars, and calleth them forth by their names. Go home--that's all I say to you! You sleep in a curtained bed.--I sleep on the ground, in the swamps! You eat the fat of the land. I have what the ravens bring me! But no man whips me! --no man touches my wife--no man says to me, 'Why do ye so?' Go! you are a slave!--I am free!" (199-200)

To those of us who think of the history of the modern civil rights movement as dominated by the Christian nonviolence taught by Martin Luther King and others, it might seem strange to think of American blacks as made free by their rifles.  But, in fact, there is a long American black tradition of armed self-defense and rebellion from the seventeenth century to the present.  The best single history of that tradition is Nicholas Johnson's Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms (Prometheus Books, 2014).  

What I see in this history is the black assertion of the Lockean natural right to keep and bear arms in defense of one's life and liberty--a natural right that has been made a civil right in Anglo-American law such as the Second Amendment to the Constitution.  Whenever people find themselves in circumstances where they cannot rely on governmental authorities to protect their life and liberty, they are thrown into a state of nature with what Locke called "the executive power of the law of nature"--the power and the right to punish those who aggressively attack them.

Johnson shows that there have been four periods in American black armed violence.  In the first, from the earliest colonial settlements with slavery in the 17th century to the end of Reconstruction in 1877, blacks used armed violence both in personal self-defense and in rebellion against slavery.  In the second period, from the end of Reconstruction to the early 1960s, blacks employed armed violence for individual self-defense, but they usually avoided political violence.  Then, in the early 1960s, a few black radical leaders recommended political violence to achieve "black power," which provoked a backlash from both black and white leaders who said that while violence in self-defense could be justified, political violence was foolish and unjustified.  Finally, beginning in the late 1970s, the high rate of black-on-black gun violence led many black leaders to recommend a complete ban on the private ownership of all guns as the only way to reduce gun crime in black neighborhoods.

ARMED VIOLENCE FOR SELF-DEFENSE AND REBELLION, 1712-1877

In colonial America, there is evidence that slaves often fought back in self-defense against their masters.  For example, some studies of the legal records shows that violence against masters was the most common form of slave crime (Johnson 2014: 32, 36).

There is also plenty of evidence of armed violence in slave rebellions.  Historian Herbert Aptheker identified over 250 slave uprisings involving 10 or more slaves (Aptheker 1943).  Consider three examples.

In the early 1700s, about 20 percent of the population of New York City were enslaved black people.  On the early morning of April 6, 1712, a group of over 20 black slaves set fire to a building, which served to distract the white colonists who tried to put out the fire.  The slaves were armed with guns, swords, and hatchets; and they killed 8 whites and wounded 7.  The slaves were captured almost immediately.  As many as 70 blacks were arrested.  21 were convicted and executed.  After the revolt, the city and colony passed restrictive laws for black slaves, including prohibiting blacks from carrying firearms (Hughes 2021).

On September 9, 1739, a Sunday, 20 slaves led by Jemmy Cato assembled near the Stono River southwest of Charlestown, South Carolina, with the hope of fleeing to Spanish Florida, where they would become free under a 1733 proclamation by the Spanish King.  Cato could read and write, which made it easier for him to learn about the King's proclamation. They did this on a Sunday because most of the planter families would be in church, and because by tradition slaves were left unsupervised on Sundays to work for themselves.  The slaves first attacked a warehouse belonging to a Mr. Hutchenson.  They killed some white people there, and they seized many small arms and ammunition stored there.  They plundered and burned other houses and killed other white families.  They began marching south towards Florida, carrying a banner that said "Liberty."  Other slaves joined while they marched until there were as many 100 in the march.  Colonel Bull, Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina, happened to be riding in the area.  Bull rode off to spread the alarm and to raise a militia to pursue the slaves.  When the militia attacked, many of the slaves ran away, but as many as 40 fought to the death.  It was all over by the end of the day.  Overall, about 40 blacks and 20 whites were killed (Hoffer 2011).  

The story of this rebellion shocked white people in South Carolina and elsewhere.  It was especially disturbing in South Carolina, where slaves outnumbered whites, and thus whites feared a general slave uprising.  New laws were passed restricting slavery such as prohibiting slaves from being taught to read and write and from carrying firearms.

On August 21, 1831, Nat Turner led a slave rebellion in Southhampton, County, Virginia.  Turner was a deeply religious preacher who believed that God had told him to lead a slave insurrection.  He planned the rebellion carefully over many months telling only a few trusted slaves.  Starting with a few, the rebellion expanded to over 70 slaves and freedmen.  They were armed with knives, hatchets, and clubs.  They had not been able to collect any firearms.  Turner ordered his men to "kill all the white people."  They moved across the countryside freeing slaves and killing whites.  

The rebels killed as many as 65 white people before the rebellion was suppressed by the state militia on the morning of August 23.  The militia greatly outnumbered the rebels.  The militia was also well armed with guns and even artillery.  Turner, however, escaped; and he survived in hiding for over two months.  On October 30, Turner was discovered by a farmer--Benjamin Phipps--who turned him over to the authorities.  Turner was tried and convicted.  He was hanged on November 11, and his body was mutilated.  During this time false rumors about a spreading slave rebellion led militias and mobs to kill over a hundred blacks who were falsely assumed to be rebels (Oates 1975).

These three slave rebellions illustrate a general pattern for such rebellions.  The number of rebels is small--usually no more than a few dozen, sometimes up to a hundred.  Remarkably, even in places like South Carolina, where the slave population was the majority, the rebels could not spark a general insurrection, which could have overwhelmed the white population.  The rebellion is quickly suppressed within one or two days.  The rebels fail because they are outnumbered and outgunned by their white opponents.  Notice in the picture of Nat Turner being captured by the farmer that Turner has only a sword, while the farmer has a rifle.

And most significantly, none of these rebellions led to the abolition of slavery.  Turner's rebellion in 1831 did provoke the Virginia Legislature in 1832 into a debate over the possibility of abolishing slavery.  Thomas Jefferson's grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, warned that if slavery were not soon abolished peacefully by the legislators, it would someday be abolished violently by the rebellion of slaves.  He proposed a version of his grandfather's plan for the gradual emancipation of slaves and then sending the freemen to colonies in Africa.  Although the proposal was defeated, it had strong support.  The principal objections had to do with the impracticability of the plan.  Notably, no one in this long debate spoke of slavery as a good that should be preserved forever (Root 2008).  But within a few years, some Southern thinkers began for the first time to defend slavery as naturally good for slaves because of their biological inferiority to white people and the need of black people for paternal care by whites.  By 1837, John C. Calhoun defended slavery on the floor of the United States Senate as a "positive good" (Calhoun 1992: 474).

Some historians have argued that black slave rebellions show that blacks were not dependent on white abolitionists for their emancipation, because the slaves emancipated themselves by their aggressive resistance to slavery.  But, as I have noted in a previous post, historians like Joao Pedro Marques have pointed out that while slaves for thousands of years resisted their enslavement, slaves never sought the abolition of the system of slavery.  In fact, many emancipated slaves have become slaveholders themselves.  The abolition of slavery in the 19th century depended on the Enlightenment idea of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and endowed with equal liberty, and therefore slavery is inherently unjust.  Slavery was abolished not by slave rebellions, but by the ideology of abolitionism.

Through most of our evolutionary history as hunter-gatherers, in which our human nature was shaped, slavery did not exist, and human adults lived as free and equal individuals.  But then with the establishment of agrarian societies and formal bureaucratic governments, slavery arose and became so deeply established that a "slaveless world" seemed so unimaginable that even while slaves sought every opportunity to liberate themselves, they could not conceive of a world without some being enslaved to others.  It was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that the Liberal Enlightenment--from John Locke to Adam Smith--introduced the rhetoric of bourgeois equality and liberty that was expressed in the Declaration of Independence, which gradually, in the nineteenth century, led to the abolition of slavery, which was a return to the equality and liberty of the evolutionary state of nature. 

Marques is correct in saying that slaves did not abolish slavery through their slave rebellions alone.  But slave rebellions contributed to the abolition of slavery once those armed slave rebellions became part of the moral and political movement to secure the natural rights to equal liberty promised by the Declaration of Independence.  One can see that in the resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, in the Civil War, and in Reconstruction.  In each case, black armed rebellion was in the service of the principle of equal liberty as demanding the abolition of slavery.

To be continued . . .