Sabotage, Suicide, and Flight: Slave Resistance and Resiliency in the Atlantic World

Sabotage, Suicide, and Flight: ENDNOTES Slave Resistance and Resiliency in the Atlantic World

The reality of slavery in the Atlantic world is dominated by a depiction of slaves as submissive, compliant, and replaceable beings. Contrarily, slave resistance narratives provide a more accurate portrayal of how slaves responded to slavery. Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Moses Roper, to name a few remind contemporary individuals that slaves did not passively accept their horrifying circumstances. Rather than becoming a victim to the institution of slavery, many slaves resisted their enslavement and restored their dignity. Thus, slave resistance frequently stemmed from the desire to re-establish one’s personhood rather than to seek revenge. Viewing slavery through this lens recognizes slavery itself as the sole cause for resistance. Acknowledging slave rebellion, suicide, and flight as a direct response to slavery replaces the portrayal of slaves as a commodity with an image of strength and resiliency.

Slave narratives reveal that slaves resisted for no other reason than to escape captivity. The conditions for slaves were horrific. James Adams captures the appalling reality of slavery: “I look upon slavery as the most disgusting system a man can live under… Men who have never seen or felt slavery cannot realize it for the thing it is.”1 Similarly, Frederick Douglass writes, “We were worked in all weathers… I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died.”2 William Johnson, who lost two toes during his escape from bondage, reports, “My feet were frostbitten on my way North, but I would rather have died on the way than to go back.”3 Moreover, James Seward claims, “Where I came from, it would make your flesh creep, and your hair stand on end, to know what they do to the slaves.”4

These testaments reveal that a person who has never been a slave cannot understand the brutality of slavery and the desperation for liberty. Even slaves did not always understand the extent of their awful circumstances until they were free. Harriet Tubman explains, “I grew up like a neglected weed, - ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it… Now I’ve been free, I know what a dreadful condition slavery is.”5 Despite their unique experiences, each of these individuals resisted their bondage because of slavery. It was not that there was benevolent slavery and malevolent slavery. All slavery engendered resistance. Benjamin Drew contends, “remove the cause and the effects will cease; remove the oppression which induces to emigration, and a fugitive slave will be an impossibility.”6 Resistance to slavery was an integral aspect of slavery.

Sabotage was perhaps the most common form of slave resistance as it offered slaves the chance to impede the functioning of slavery. The most common forms of defiance against masters were open rebellion, feigned illness, destruction of property, machinery, or livestock, and working inefficiently.7 Some slaves attempted to resist enslavement by acting undesirably upon their arrival in the Americas to avoid being bought.8 Whether it be small acts such as hiding for a day or large acts such as ship revolts, slave resistance hindered slave owners’ ability to extract slaves’ labour. Without tools, slave masters, or slaves themselves, slavery could not proceed successfully, hence the willingness of many captives to die in their efforts to rebel.

Margaret Garner declared it better “to fight, and to die, rather than to be taken back to slavery.”9 This determination challenged slave masters’ efforts to limit rebellion. Describing his master, Frederick Douglass recounts, “He asked me if I meant to persist in my resistance. I told him I did, come what might; that he had used me like a brute for six months, and that I was determined to be used so no longer.”10 Evidently, punishing slaves for sabotage did not guarantee future compliance. Contrarily, slaves may have been more motivated to rebel out of anger toward their master.

Slaves occasionally conspired against their masters to plan largescale attacks. In the 1712 New York City slave rebellion, for

The Unionist’s daughter--a tale of the rebellion in Tennessee; (and,) Maum Guinea and her plantation “children,” or, Holiday-week on a Louisiana estate - a slave romance (1861), Wikimedia Commons.

example, two dozen slaves rose up against white planters.11 The Haitian revolution included eighty per cent of the slaves in Saint-Domingue who rose up against the white minority within the French colony.12 Rebellions of this nature typically derived from a utopian desire for freedom.13 Shipboard revolts, however, centered more around the desire to damage the system that made slavery possible.

Igbo slaves sailing to St. Simon’s Island rebelled against their captors, throwing them overboard, and then drowning themselves to evade enslavement. The site of their fatal immersion, known as Ebos (or Igbo) Landing, depicts the resiliency of the captives and the cruelty of the captors.14 The Amistad in 1839 and Creole in 1841 are examples of two successful ship revolts. The Amistad rebellion struck against Caribbean slavery under Spanish rule while the Creole targeted slavery under American rule. The Creole mutiny converted the Africans’ status as enslaved to free, rights-bearing citizens in the Bahamas.15 These collective rebellions demonstrate the refusal of slaves to submit to the system of oppression. By sabotaging against their masters, slaves impeded on the operative establishment of slavery, thus obliterating their passive status in the Atlantic world.

An additional method of slave resistance in the Atlantic world was individual and collective suicide. It is noted that since the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, Africans responded to enslavement with self-destruction.16 Richard Bell recounts a story of six girls who collectively committed suicide as it was “the only means of escaping the most terrible cruelty.”17 Slave suicide was so common that several ships along the middle passage contained nets that prevented captives from jumping overboard.18 Some African slaves drowned themselves as they believed it would bring them back to Africa reincarnated.19 Therefore, it is no surprise that ship mutinies often encompassed slave self-destruction. Since slavery depended on slaves, it was damaging to planters when captives threw themselves overboard. Not only did these slaves free themselves from bondage, but they dismantled one element of the slave trade.

It is assumed that some slaves committed suicide in an effort to limit their master’s level of control. Southern slaveholders in the late seventeenth century actively prohibited suicides as it threatened their claim that the enslaved consented to their enslavement.20 Slaves who attempted or committed suicide directly refuted their masters’ attempt to control them. Suicide, therefore, provided the means for bondsmen to die on their own terms, especially if they were already condemned to execution. The story of Quashi depicts suicide as a means to assert control over a slave master. After pinning his master to the ground, Quashi raised the sword and surprisingly “plunged its cutting edge into his own flesh, tearing a wide gash across his throat.”21 Rather than killing his master, Quashi revoked his passive status and gained liberty. His humanity was revived as, in that moment, he held complete power over his and his master’s fates. In this sense, suicide was deemed admirable and equal to that of martyrdom by slaves in the Atlantic world. After hearing that Anthony Burns was arrested as a fugitive and re-enslaved, one woman cried, “‘Oh! why is he not man enough to kill himself.”22 Evidently, some

individuals interpreted the refusal to self-destruct as a concession to the status as a white man’s property. As an extension of this effort to dismantle slavery, slaves occasionally committed infanticide. By murdering prospective slaves, individuals directly attacked a slaveholder’s property and impeded the future success of slavery.23 In 1837, Lydia Maria Child killed her three sons after

learning that they would soon be sold to a slave trader.24 Likewise, Lou Smith recalls a woman who murdered her child to inhibit her master from selling the infant. She writes, Margaret Garner attempted to kill her four children in order to avoid being re-enslaved, though she failed in her endeavor and was arrested.26 When asked why he attempted to kill a young boy in 1798, Manuel Sante Fe responded by stating that “he considered it best that the little boy did not suffer as he did and be free [of slavery] once and for all now when he was young.”27 Therefore, some individuals did not commit infanticide to sabotage their masters, but because they wanted to shield the younger generation from the horrific nature of slavery.

he owned a woman who was the mother of several chillun and when her babies would get about a year or two of age he’d sell them and it would break her heart. She never got to keep them. When her fourth baby was born and was about two months old she just studied all the time about how she would have to give it up and one day she said, ‘I just decided I’m not going to let old Master sell this baby; he just ain’t going to do it.’ She got up and give it something out of a bottle and purty soon it was deed.25

Lucy Higgs with her daughter Mona escaping slavery from Grays Creek, Tennessee to the Union lines, June of 1862, by Kathy Grant. Wikimedia Commons. A common form of slave resistance in the Atlantic world was flight. Since slaves “lacked personhood under the law,” fleeing from plantations aided captives in obtaining humanity.28 William Grose writes, “I served twenty-five years in slavery, and about five I have been free. I feel now like a man, while before I felt more as though I were but a brute… Now I feel like a man, and I wish to God that all my fellow-

creatures could feel the same freedom that I feel.”29 In an effort to redeem a similar sense of freedom as Grose describes, slaves occasionally ran away from their plantations. Charles Foy notes that coastal cities, most notably New York City, provided slaves with ample avenues to hide or escape on the numerous ships docked in the harbour.30 Fleeing onto ships proved to be advantageous as it was widely believed that getting to Great Britain was the key to perpetual freedom.31 For those without access to a ship, escape proved to be more difficult. Nat Turner hit in a hole in a field for six weeks in an effort to be free.32 Henry Brown escaped slavery by nailing himself in a box which was shipped from Virginia to Philadelphia. He believed that “it would be far better to peril his life for freedom in this way than to remain under the galling yoke of Slavery.”33 Several organizations existed to support runaway slaves. Margaret Garner, for instance, escaped to Canada with the assistance of the Underground Railroad.34 Following a surge of slaves who fled the colony by boat in 1702, a slave code that declared it illegal for ship captains to assist runaways was enacted.35 More established communities of runaway slaves, known as maroon communities, existed throughout the Americas in impassable locations. Though maroon communities were constantly at risk of being eradicated, they lived freely without the assistance or influence of whites.36 Although flight was a high-risk form of resistance, those who succeeded escaped the harshness of bondage with a renewed freedom to live independently. Whether rebelling, attempting suicide, or fleeing, the costs associated with these acts of resistance were severe. Some masters displayed the decapitated or dismembered corpses of slaves who committed suicides on the plantation in order to dissuade others from selfinflicted death.37 This legitimizes the hesitancy of many slaves to resist, including John Seward who longed to run away for over twenty years.38 David West describes the fear that prevented the majority of slaves from rebelling: “I have known slaves to be hungry, but when their master asked them if they had enough, they would, through fear, say ‘Yes.’ So if asked if they wish to be free, they will say ‘No.’”39 Regardless of this trepidation, many slaves did resist, demonstrating their desperation for freedom and humanity. Moses Roper was caught attempting to run away, resulting in him being stripped naked, tied up, whipped fifty times, weighed down by a chain hanging from his neck, and set on fire. Nevertheless, Roper attempted to run away two additional times, eventually succeeding.40 Likewise, Isaac Williams was caught aiding a runaway, causing him to be whipped and thrown in jail. Despite this torture for assisting another runaway, Williams successfully ran away himself.41 Regardless of punishments or deterrents, slaves continued to rebel in an effort to restore themselves as active agents in the Atlantic world. In exploring these forms of resistance, it is clear that slaves were not the submissive commodities that their masters portrayed them as. The stories of sabotage, suicide, and flight reveal the capacity of slaves to sacrifice everything in pursuit of freedom. Frederick Douglass recounts his fight against his slave master and writes,

This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood…

It was a glorious resurrection from the tomb of slavery to the heaven of freedom. My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and now I resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact. I did not hesitate to let it be known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing me.42

Douglass’s rebellion transformed his identity from a slave to a man. The absence of personhood was not an uncommon experience for slaves. Drew contends, “The manhood of [slaves] has not, indeed, been ‘crushed out of them:’ – it has never been developed. They are little children in every thing but bodily maturity.”43 By defying his master, therefore, Douglass developed the ability to see himself as a man.

After Isaac Williams escaped bondage, he declared: “If there were any chance to fight for the slave’s freedom, I’d go and stand up at the south and fight as readily as I would now go out of doors. I believe it would be a just, and a righteous cause. I feel a great pity for the poor creatures there, who long for a way, yet can see no way out.”44 In this sense, rebellion reminded slaves that they deserved freedom as part of their humanity.

The personal liberation from enslavement expanded to a large-scale revival within the Atlantic world. As slave resistance occurred more frequently and openly, the appalling nature of slavery was revealed to the public. The Dying Negro, by John Bicknell and Thomas Day, is a poem about a freed slave who moved to England only to shoot himself after being re-enslaved in America. The poem states, Messages of this nature exposed the injustice of slavery. Suicide, in particular,

Image from Poems Written During the Progress of the Abolition Question In the United States (1837), Wikimedia Commons.

ARM’D with thy sad last gift—the pow’r to die, Thy shafts, stern fortune, now I can defy; Thy dreadful mercy points at length the shore, Where all is peace, and men are slaves no more… For all I’ve suffer’d, and for all I dare; O lead me to that spot, that sacred shore, Where souls are free, and men oppress no more!45

revealed that many slaves would rather die than be robbed of their humanity. Henry Brown felt that in “the condition of a slave … it would be impossible for him to remain.”46 Consequently, antislavery activism increased in the eighteenth century and stories of selfdestruction were used to expose the immorality of slavery.47 David West, an ex-slave, explains that slavery was commonly justified by slave holders because they were given slaves from their fathers, essentially perpetrating the notion that slaves were property, not people.48 As slave activism increased, however, the inequity of this notion was discussed. Naturally, this resulted in a more widely held view that slaves were human beings who deserved rights.

Although the transatlantic slave trade existed for over two centuries, it is clear that captives never consented to their enslavement.49 Despite this, slave masters regularly punished slaves for acts of defiance and justified their treatment by claiming that slaves were their property.50 In analyzing slave testimonies of resistance, however, the humanity of slaves is brought to the spotlight. Regardless of the cause, stories of slave resistance transform the depiction of slaves from submissive to bold, from a commodity to a rights-bearing citizen, and from invisible to a fundamental element of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.

Marker of a Place of Memory at Jan Kock, Curaçao, related to the 1795 armed mobilization of resistance of Africans against slavery. Wikimedia Commons.

Kim Vandermeulen (she/her)

Education major, History concentration, French minor