In 1791, within a few days’ journey from the port of New Orleans, tens of thousands of free and enslaved black men and women had taken up arms. Not only would the black West Indians of Saint-Domingue overthrow slavery in the French colony, but by 1804 they would establish the first free republic in the world. The black republic of Haiti would serve as particular inspiration for (and focus for the fear of) black liberation across the Americas.25 The black republic, whose constitution abolished slavery, was in the unique position to call on the leaders of other newly emerging nations to link their struggles for national independence with the abolition of slavery. In 1815, in return for military assistance, Simón Bolívar—the George Washington of South America—promised Haiti’s republican president Alexandre Pétion that he would abolish slavery should his own independence struggle against Spain succeed. Like Dunmore before him and Lincoln after him, Bolívar would also offer emancipation to slaves who joined his army; thousands eventually served, many of whom formed some of the earliest free black communities in South America.26
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As petitioning efforts in the United States continued in the early nineteenth century, so would slave rebellions, although on far smaller scales than in Haiti, where the demographics were significantly different (over 90 percent of the island’s population was black; by contrast, the black population in the U.S. never reached more than 20 percent). The use of violence by slaves to gain freedom was, besides suicide itself, the most extreme measure they could take; most often, it was suicidal in itself, since proslavery forces were highly organized and armed, ever vigilant for insurrection. African Americans leading armed rebellions would use the same language of freedom in justifying their actions as did those who petitioned for emancipation.
Late in 1800, a Virginian slave artisan named Gabriel Prosser began to amass a slave army. Prosser, a blacksmith, had fashioned weapons from iron tools and scrap metal while he planned a rebellion to seize control of Richmond. On the eve of the attack, however, those set to strike were stalled by a torrential downpour, which inundated the area and washed out key roads and bridges. Later that night Prosser was betrayed and then captured. The slogan Prosser had fashioned for the uprising, “Death or Liberty,” was to be carried by an estimated two thousand slaves recruited from the area. The slogan linked the struggle for black emancipation to the fight for national independence. As one of Prosser’s lieutenants declared at the sentencing trial: “I have nothing more to say in my defense than what General Washington would have had to offer had he been taken and put to trial. I have ventured my life . . . to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and I am a willing sacrifice in their cause.”27
Prosser’s conspiracy, combined with the example of free black Haiti, prompted fear among planters not only in Virginia but across the South. Surveillance of the Southern black population was intensified, and some free African Americans were even deported.28 Within a decade, the “colonization” of free African Americans to Africa was being considered by both proponents of slavery and those against the institution, both groups believing that the free black population would ultimately not be able to assimilate into the dominant white society. The American Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1816, numbered among its members white philanthropists, politicians, and businessmen including Henry Clay, John Randolph, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, and Justice Bushrod Washington (a relative of George Washington). The organization would dedicate itself to promoting the manumission of slaves and the settlement of free African Americans in the colony of Liberia. African Americans from Richmond, where Prosser’s conspiracy continued to loom large, however, responded to the formation and colonization goal of the ACS by declaring: “[We] prefer being colonized in the most remote corner of the land of our nativity, to being exiled to a foreign country.”29
Within weeks of the formation of the ACS, three thousand black men and women, including prominent community leaders such as James Forten (a Revolutionary War veteran who had vigorously opposed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793) and Bishop Richard Allen (founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church), convened at Bethel Church in Philadelphia. While scattered abolitionist activities had been taking place among African Americans since the late eighteenth century, black conventions starting in Philadelphia and Richmond in 1817 would form the precursor to a long series of annual and semiannual meetings beginning in the 1830s. The “Negro Conventions,” meeting statewide and nationally, continued through the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction. They were, along with the black churches, the first set of nationally established black organizations of the nineteenth century in which the pursuit of independent politics was discussed and planned.30
As the nation’s domain continued to expand, driving indigenous populations to the edges of the western and southern frontiers, crises arose between pro- and antislavery political forces over the extension of slavery into new territories acquired or conquered by the republic. A bipartisan compromise in 1820 would temporarily resolve the crisis. Missouri was admitted as a slave state along with the free state of Maine, while slavery was excluded from the Louisiana Purchase land north of 36°30', but left untouched in the South, where state governments continued to enforce the institution. In the face of national political compromises, African American resistance to slavery would take the form of local action.
In 1822, in South Carolina, where an earlier generation of African Americans chanted “Liberty!” on the streets of Charleston in defiance of white authorities, another slave conspiracy was underway. This one was led by a black West Indian carpenter named Denmark Vesey, who had moved to Charleston where he bought his freedom after winning a local lottery. His plan gained the support of the city’s black artisans and ferry boatmen in the state’s coastal parishes. But, like Prosser, Vesey’s plot was uncovered. Sixty-seven men were convicted, thirty-five of whom were hanged, including Vesey himself. The black population faced further reprisals and systems of control (as with the passage of the Negro Seaman’s Act, which stipulated that any visiting free black sailor was to be jailed in Charleston). Both Prosser and Vesey were inspired by the slave revolt in Haiti. Unlike Prosser, however, Vesey was also motivated by deep religious convictions. He was a co-founder of a branch of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the shutting down of which by white officials incited him to action against the oppression all black people faced, free and enslaved alike. Such religious grounding mixed with a sense of collective responsibility, would, in coming years, meet with the trajectory of white religiously inspired reformers, many of whom would also seek to overthrow slavery as part of their moral duty as Christians.31
Driven by Christian egalitarianism, an evangelical revivalist movement, the Second Great Awakening, arose during the 1820s, helping to produce a new generation of abolitionists. For a minority of these men and women, slavery was an abominable sin contradicting the core teachings of Jesus Christ. Drawing on both the Bible and the Declaration of Independence (the latter in the process of being elevated to a kind of scripture), these particular evangelists, most of whom were white, concentrated in upstate New York and parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New England. To advance their holy crusade, they would use the commercial and communication networks that were connecting the nation into a marketplace of products and ideas—canals, the telegraph, the mass circulation of newspapers, and the beginning of railroads. In time, their outspokenness on the issue of slavery would lead to physical intimidation, verbal abuse, and beatings in order to prevent them from proselytizing and spreading their moral message of the depravity of slavery.
In 1829, the year State Supreme Court Justice Thomas Ruffin famously declared in North Carolina v. Mann that “the power of the master must be absolute to render the submission of the slave perfect,” David Walker, a free African American who sold used clothing, called for a general slave revolt if changes were not made.32 In his Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, an incendiary seventy-six-page pamphlet distributed across the