Riots and Rebellions

By: Jesse J. Esparza, Carl E. Prince

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Riots and Rebellions

[This entry contains two subentries dealing with African American uprisings against slavery and discrimination from 1619 to 1895. The first article provides a discussion of the causes, responses, and importance of race-related riots from the colonial period to 1830, while the second article discusses the topic from the antebellum period to 1895, including the mobbing of abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass.]

Riots and Rebellions from the Colonial Period to 1830

After examining African American uprisings in America prior to 1800, a modern historian remarked, “It almost seems as if news of these incidents was suppressed.” As such, one might conclude that the frequency of such upheavals was even greater than would be indicated by the considerable number of known events. Riots among newly captive slaves first took place in Africa itself and occurred even in the face of the virtually hopeless conditions aboard slave ships bound for the Western Hemisphere. The occasional slave rebellions were given as inevitable after slaves' arrival in the original thirteen colonies and during the post-Revolutionary era—even well before the era of militancy ushered in by the founding of the American Society for the Abolition of Slavery in 1831.

Seeds of Rebellion

In Africa newly captured bond servants who threatened rebellion would be beaten and killed by way of example to fellow captives. A direct result of this treatment was, in some cases, not the docility that the captors wanted but instead outright mutiny. A typical trip from Africa to North America would take from four to eight weeks, a seeming eternity of pain, suffering, and often death for the captive slaves. The typical slave ship had three decks, with the slaves shackled in pairs in the nearly airless lower holds—as many as four hundred crammed into an inhumanely small space. Perhaps one in five died aboard slave ships, revealing the perceived cheapness of Africans' lives—and inspiring revolt. The first agitators would be thrown overboard; that mutinies would occasionally follow anyway is indicative of the often miraculous endurance of the human spirit. The uncontained violence of “successful” mutinies almost always left everyone dead—slaves and crew alike—such that only the disappearance of the ship would provide the speculative evidence of uprising. In 1735 the Dolphin was seen by another vessel to go down along with all aboard when the Africans undergoing transport attempted to seize control.

In the young colonies, even before 1650 more certain evidence of incidents of revolt lay in universal legislation prescribing beatings and whippings for runaways and capital punishment for those slaves engaged in rebellion; every North American colony carried such statutes on its books. During the transition from the era of indentured servitude to that of slavery in Gloucester County, Virginia, in 1663, white and black servants banded together in a failed escape attempt, resulting in the execution of some of both races. A 1669 law in that colony exempted owners from punishment for killing rebellious slaves on the ground that it was penance enough for “any man to destroy his own estate.” Virginia was home to by far the largest number of slaves in seventeenth-century North America, and it was repeatedly the focal point of uprisings.

Again, legislation was indicative of the form taken by resistance. In 1672 Virginia Colony put a “bounty on the heads of Maroons”—slaves who banded together and escaped into the wilderness. Maroons formed themselves into makeshift isolated communities in mountains, swamps, and forests or wherever they could put distance between themselves and white owners. That this form of rebellion was widespread can be concluded from the fact that the term itself was institutionalized. Armed militia often sought out and destroyed Maroon communities; often enough as well, Maroons survived on the vast frontier of the developing South.

Neither slavery nor rebellion was limited to the South in the seventeenth century. As early as 1682 in rapidly growing New York City—which would know considerable slave rebellion in the colonial era—legislation addressed the problem of slave conspiracy when it “forbade slaves to leave their owners' property without written permission.” This ended a long formative period characterized by the free movement of African Americans, enslaved and free, in the city. Similar legislation in Virginia that same year imposed more detailed restrictions. Slaves “could not lift a hand against a white person, even in self-defence,” and runaway slaves who refused to surrender could be “killed without penalty.” These early versions of what came to be called slave codes suggest increasing slave resistance in the colonial era and were soon copied in Maryland, Delaware, and North Carolina.

Increased Action and Reaction

By the eighteenth century northern colonies regularly legislated slave punishments without due process—even in Quaker Pennsylvania, which enacted a slave code in 1700 prescribing, after only cursory examination, the whipping or execution of rebellious slaves. By far the cruelest northern colony was New York, where institutionalized slavery carried over during the transition from Dutch to English rule. Laws in 1702 and 1705 allowed for the whipping of any slaves who assembled in numbers of three or more or who assaulted white persons for any reason; death sentences were imposed on runaways. The harshness of the penalties aside, such legislation foreshadowed the rebellion and cruelty that would follow in New York.

A riot in Newtown, Long Island, in 1708 resulted in the hanging of three male slaves and the burning at the stake of a slave woman branded as a ringleader—a differentially gendered penalty all too reminiscent of the witchcraft hysteria so recently evident in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. There followed a brief urban upheaval in the thriving port city, which came to be known as the New York Slave Revolt of 1712; it was a mere prelude to future major slave revolts.

In April 1728 a slave revolt led to the deaths of two white New Yorkers. The upheaval started when twenty-seven armed slaves set fire to an outhouse; when townsmen came to put out the fire, several were hurt in the confrontation that followed. The local militia was called out, and the rebellion was quashed. At least twelve slaves were executed in response, either by hanging or by burning, and six other slaves committed suicide before their executions could be carried out.

This 1728 revolt, too, was testimony to the race tension closing its grip on this increasingly heterogeneous and complex city, as well as to the restiveness among African Americans there, both enslaved and free. Fingers were pointed, and the city shut down Trinity Church's Catechism School for Negroes not only because slave owners feared that the school's French founder, Elias Neau, was inciting blacks to revolt but also because, more essentially, education for blacks in itself would inspire riots. Already by that time, teaching slaves to read and write was forbidden by the evolving black codes in the southern colonies; the perceived lesson of the dangers of education crept into the decision to close the church school. At the same time, the New York City code itself was rendered even harsher: more slave “crimes” would carry the death penalty, including the crime of “conspiracy.”

The 1720s saw a marked increase in recorded slave revolts in the developing southern colonies as well. A slave insurrection occurred near Charleston, South Carolina, in 1720, and in its aftermath an indeterminate number of slaves were hanged, burned at the stake, or sold. A year later in Charleston itself, as white fears mounted, a “Negro Watch” was founded to prevent even the smallest black gatherings. A curfew was set, and “watchmen” were empowered to shoot on sight or whip any slaves caught off plantations without proper passes. As in New York City, in much of the South paranoia was developing over slaves' coming together in increasingly urban settings. In 1722 and 1723 several slave “plots” were exposed in the growing towns in the Chesapeake area of Virginia and in Baltimore, Maryland.

But it was Charleston, South Carolina, that emerged as the most race-conflicted city of the developing South in the early eighteenth century, which dubious distinction it would hold until the opening shots of the Civil War. Spurred by Spanish missionaries in 1739, an organized cadre of Charleston-area slaves set out for the Spanish colony of Saint Augustine, Florida, and the freedom it promised. The escaped slaves made their way south, killing twenty-one whites on the trek, but were overtaken and massacred before they could reach the Spanish border. A year later another group of Charleston-area slaves, led by the bondman Cato, headed toward Florida. Thirty more whites were killed, along with thirty slaves, while twelve made it to their promised land. By 1740 some 60 percent of the South Carolinian population was African American, fueling what was by then justified white paranoia about its restive slave majority. The fruits of that fear were grim indeed; in 1740 alone about fifty slaves were lynched for allegedly plotting to escape southward. It is worthy of note that in the years before American independence, escape routes were almost uniformly south, not north; free black settlements in and around Spanish Saint Augustine provided the lure.

While the cycle of slave rebellion, escape, and retribution played out in the Charleston tidewater area, New York City erupted yet again, this time in the largest African American riot in American colonial history—and that upheaval was but the centerpiece of a wave of slave uprisings that hit the New York City environs. Firefighters in New York City heard a slave at the scene of one 1741 conflagration exclaim loudly, “Fire, Fire, Scorch, Scorch, a Little, damn it, By-and-By”; such became the watchwords for this widespread series of revolts. Evidence of conspiracy seemed to be everywhere, and reprisals were brutal. New York City's governing oligarchy tried dozens of slaves—as well as four white “instigators” alleged to be criminals interested in the turmoil—for conspiracy, rioting, and murder. Executions by burning and hanging were daily occurrences that year throughout the metropolitan New York–New Jersey area. Uprisings were driven by the harsh winter, an ever-changing slave population that was spreading its culture of rebellion, and food shortages within both the enslaved and free African American populations; scholars view the 1741 riots as basically motivated by a growing violent resistance to the institutionalization of northern slavery.

All in all, it was a deadly period of time. The many fires were attributed to organized bands of slaves “who were seeking to take control” of New York City. Poor whites were drawn into the mix through their own grievances, as class mixed with race in the perception of causation among the gentry. While the exact number of executions cannot be fixed, it almost certainly exceeded one hundred; many more were transported to the South and sold there. Again, at their roots, the widespread uprisings of 1741 were attributable to the increasing permanence of slavery in the North. As one modern historian concluded about these riots, “white society closed the door on black freedom and kept it locked shut,” and in their hopelessness slaves “responded with individual acts of resistance” ranging from flight to conspiracy to riot, arson, and murder. Amid all this upheaval, the importation of slaves for profit did not merely continue apace but actually increased in volume, even as the white population grew in both number and heterogeneity. The political activism leading up to the American Revolution, and the War of Independence itself, raised the moral stakes involved in the continuing existence of slavery in the dawning land of the free.

Liberty and the American Revolution

Slaves and free African Americans fought in large numbers on both sides in the Revolution. Whether they were Americans fighting for independence or Loyalists siding with the British, blacks involved in the war had one thing in common: in every instance they were fighting for their freedom. A study of Monmouth County, New Jersey—a hotbed of civil strife and military action—found that African Americans divided in near-even numbers between adherence to the American and Loyalist causes; the former fought either with the local militia or the Continental army, the latter with the green-shirted “Tory Legions” or with local marauding bands of defenders of the Crown. The same divisions were evident in Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Connecticut, New York, and Virginia; black troops were present in the Continental army in all these states. There were black minutemen at the opening of the rebellion at Lexington and Concord, and the free black Crispus Attucks was the first to die in the riot later dubbed the Boston Massacre when insurrectionists were fired upon by British troops in 1770.

A measure of the black presence on the side of the American Revolutionaries was evident in the surge of gradual emancipation measures in the immediate aftermath of the war. Beginning in the 1780s and continuing through the 1820s, state after state in the North imposed the gradual abolition of slavery. Indeed, rebellious African Americans had signaled anew both the inherent immorality of the “peculiar institution” in a nation conceived for the sake of liberty and their growing impatience with regard to their condition in the increasingly egalitarian and open society of the northern states of the new Republic.

The other side of the Revolution should not be overlooked; thousands of slaves left with the British in 1783, having sided with and fought alongside them in the course of the war. This was true throughout the original thirteen colonies, but nowhere more so than in New York City. Some eight hundred slaves retreated to the mountainous regions of New Jersey in 1783, most of them having married or cohabited with German Hessian soldiers in New York from 1776 onward. Ensconced in the Shawangunk Mountains above Mahwah, these “Jackson Whites,” as they came to be called, fought off any attempts to penetrate their ranks in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution. The Jackson Whites were perhaps the ultimate black rebels of the American Revolution; their descendants still inhabit the region. A group of Virginia slaves, also about eight hundred strong, fought on the side of the British as a result of the active recruitment carried out by John Murray, Lord Dunmore, who in 1775, as the last royal governor of the colony, promised freedom to any who would fight for the King. Many of these eight hundred men fought in the Ethiopian Regiment under the banner “Liberty to Slaves.” It is estimated that as many as twenty thousand slaves left the United States along with the defeated British army. The American Revolution, as an internal upheaval, proved to be a catalyst in generating African American rebellion against the institution of slavery, which was by definition inimical to the promise of individual liberty that the Revolution held out to all Americans.

Malcontent in Both the South and North

When the American Revolutionary promise of universal freedom wavered, as it surely did in the southern states after the war, African American resistance was stepped up. In 1802 the slave Gabriel led a huge contingent of slaves—eleven hundred strong—in an assault on Richmond, Virginia, specifically to overthrow the government and end slavery. Gabriel avowedly emulated the revolutionary Toussaint Louverture, whose leadership brought about Haitian independence. While the Virginia uprising failed, like so many other uprisings it stands as a monument to the human spirit—an act of desperation by southern blacks languishing in enslavement. Gabriel and twenty-four others were hanged; in a particularly vindictive act on the part of white authorities, that number included his family. The size and goal of Gabriel's conspiracy introduced organized rebellion into the new century and on a larger scale than theretofore.

By 1810 smaller black rebellions had occurred in Baltimore; Norfolk and Petersburg, Virginia; New Orleans; and Augusta, Georgia. One Maroon community on the frontier of North Carolina was broken up by marauding, armed whites; many African Americans escaped deeper into the mountain wilderness, but several were killed, and the community was destroyed. The assault called attention to the reality that at least fifty Maroon enclaves, with as many as two thousand inhabitants in all, existed on the frontiers of southern states. Under pressure from Georgia slaveholders, who were subject to incursions into the state from Maroons in neighboring Florida who were seeking to provoke slave escape and rebellion, a quasi-legal U.S. military expedition was sent into Spanish Florida in 1816 to eradicate settlements on Florida's northern frontier. Another goal of the expedition, of course, was to intimidate the weakening Spanish colonial structure that governed Florida.

Northern states were not exempt from black insurrection, even as gradual emancipation laws took hold and slavery slowly withered on the vine. In Pennsylvania, George Boxley, a white military officer not content with gradualism, led a slave rebellion originating in Spotsylvania County in 1816. Boxley escaped to his native Virginia when the uprising failed, but at least six slaves were hanged, in a state where relatively few African Americans remained in captivity. A year later, in neighboring Maryland, perhaps two hundred slaves assaulted whites in Saint Mary's County. In this instance the bondmen learned of rumors about the newly founded American Colonization Society's plans to deport slaves to Africa—beginning, they heard, with them. In the era before organized militant abolitionism, a period of major racial turmoil ensued. In short, mass African American actions, while not yet commonplace, were more frequent occurrences—the more so in the increasing anonymity of cities, whose populations were growing.

The Denmark Vesey Conspiracy of 1822 was the milestone event of its kind in early-nineteenth-century America. It traumatized not only South Carolina but also the entire Slave South and was in many ways a precursor to the escalating African American revolts that marked the 1830s and beyond; in this context Vesey's uprising may be seen as a direct forerunner of Nat Turner's rebellion. Vesey's elaborate plans for widespread black revolt in Charleston and beyond were unmasked on May 30. The intended rebellion involved perhaps nine thousand African Americans, indicating how much the ante was being upped in the South. Vesey had been a resident of Santo Domingo before being brought to Charleston as a slave; he worked for his owner as a carpenter. Vesey was both literate and religious—a common combination, for religion provided a reason to learn to read the Bible. He was able enough to be farmed out as an artisan to others in the Charleston area and smart enough to negotiate his keeping some of the earnings he brought in for his master. By 1800 Vesey had saved enough to buy his freedom; thereafter he moved about South Carolina freely, contracting out his services. He came to know both free and enslaved brethren and was described as a leader who inspired confidence. The freedman used his assets over the years to quietly encourage other slaves to aspire to freedom. Christian himself, Vesey taught as many slaves as he could to reject the southern version of the Protestant faith, which taught that African Americans could expect their release only after death, in the world to come.

Using Hampstead, South Carolina, as a base, which community abutted Charleston, Vesey developed a secret network of black operatives that stretched perhaps seventy-five miles west of Charleston. The general uprising was planned for July 1822, when commerce would be quieted and owners and their families would be away, often at spas and vacation spots as far away as Saratoga, New York. Vesey counted on support from the growing numbers of opponents of slavery abroad, in the North, and even in Santo Domingo to intervene and help end southern slavery by force; the visibility of the planned destruction of Charleston would provide the rebels with notoriety enough to draw this outside support. Indeed, what shocked southerners most was the indeterminate but sizable number of whites who supported Vesey's planned rebellion. Vesey even purchased guns and commissioned bayonets and pikes to be made by black artisans in Charleston.

In the end, the conspiracy was betrayed by a house slave. Over one hundred—including four whites—were arrested, Vesey and thirty-five other conspirators were hanged, and many more were sold or deported. Regardless of its failure, the conspiracy's scope and interracial character shocked white America, north and south; in its national visibility, the intensity of black anger was revealed. What followed was the deepening of the institution of slavery in the South; the imposition of gross restrictions on the movements of slaves and even free blacks, who were now encouraged or even forced to head north; and the passage of laws preventing anyone from teaching African Americans, enslaved or free, to read and write, as enforced by severe penalties.

Even in the early nineteenth century, riot and rebellion were not strictly southern phenomena. In Boston, on 28 December 1819, sixty African Americans armed with clubs and knives confronted a combined force of the city's watch and white “volunteers” in an attempt to rescue a recaptured runaway slave. Arrests followed, but the escapee was able to flee once again. Urbanization produced conditions that allowed for upward mobility among free blacks, and race tensions increased apace; as the numbers of free blacks grew significantly, especially in cities, African stores and churches often came under wide attack. In 1819 a white crowd assaulted African American store and stall proprietors in New York City. At about the same time a white gang wrecked an African church in Philadelphia, claiming that it was bothered by the noise of religious services. In 1824, in the Hardscrabble section of Providence, Rhode Island, blacks leaving church refused to step off the sidewalk for whites, and a riot ensued in which some twenty African American houses were set ablaze, in an effort to drive the blacks out of the neighborhood.

While African Americans incited similar disturbances, press references to black rioting were relatively rare, so fewer details are known. In one instance in York, Pennsylvania, in 1825, twenty-five black vigilantes captured and severely whipped a white man tracking down runaway slaves. In general, in the 1820s gradual emancipation fed deepening racial tension in the North. Freedmen resented efforts to retard their economic independence, while the first generation of whites that did not know slavery only slowly came to accept such independence.

In the era before the appearance of organized radical black and white abolitionism, black uprisings seem to have occurred on a relatively small scale, compared with what would follow in the 1830s. Nevertheless, over the two centuries leading up to the Civil War, beginning even on slave ships, resistance to slavery took many forms, including widespread riot and rebellion. Events after 1830 would build on the solid base of continuing militant resistance evident in innumerable black communities, enslaved and free.

See also Abolitionism; American Colonization Society; American Revolution; Artisans; Attucks, Crispus; Black Brigade; Black Codes and Slave Codes, Colonial; Black Loyalists; Crime and Punishment; Denmark Vesey Conspiracy; Education; Gradual Emancipation; Free African Americans to 1828; Fugitive Slaves; Gabriel; Gabriel Conspiracy; Haitian Revolution; Indentured Servitude; Literacy in the Colonial Period; Lynching and Mob Violence; Maroons; Masculinity; Military; Murray, John (Lord Dunmore); Native Americans and African Americans; Neau, Elias; New York City; New York Conspiracy of 1741; New York Slave Revolt of 1712; Religion; Resistance; Slave Rebellions and Insurrections; Slave Trade; Society of Friends (Quakers) and African Americans; Toussaint Louverture; Urbanization; Vesey, Denmark; and Violence against African Americans.

Carl E. Prince

Riots and Rebellions from the Antebellum Period to 1895

Beginning in the 1830s waves of rioting swept the nation. Altogether there were at least 115 incidents of mob violence during the 1830s alone. Mob violence had a variety of sources, but racial and ethnic tension lay at the heart of most disturbances. A rapid rate of urban growth was another major contributor to social turbulence; the sharp upsurge in foreign immigration, for example, heightened religious and ethnic tensions. Violence also resulted from hostile reactions to the antislavery movement. White mobs attacked black homes and churches, burned white abolitionists' businesses, and disrupted antislavery meetings. The birth of a new two-party political system was yet one more element contributing to the growing climate of violence in the decades before the Civil War. Mob violence frequently broke out on election days as rival parties, competing for political control, tried to steal ballot boxes and keep opposing voters from reaching the polls. Additionally, tensions over religious diversity led to riots and other violence against Catholics and Mormons.

Slave Insurrections and Racial Riots

The basis of the proslavery argument was the belief that slaves were docile, content, faithful, and loyal. In fact, there is no evidence that the majority of slaves were contented. While seeming to adapt to slavery, most slaves remained at least quietly defiant. For example, some stole food, broke tools, or tainted their masters' food. Recognizing that open resistance would be useless, many plantation slaves expressed their opposition to slavery by making their masters' lives miserable through a variety of indirect protests, including sabotage, murder, arson, and running away. The most militant slaves, however, resorted to rebellion. More than two hundred instances of attempted insurrection prior to the Civil War have been recorded.

In 1822 the former slave Denmark Vesey bought his freedom after winning a lottery. He then devised a conspiracy to take over Charleston, South Carolina, and eventually launch a statewide slave rebellion. Using his connections as a leader in the church, Vesey drew support from skilled black artisans, carpenters, mechanics, and field slaves. Before the revolt could occur, however, a domestic slave leaked information about the plan to his master, who then told white authorities. One hundred thirty-one blacks were arrested, thirty-seven of whom were hanged. Although the conspiracy was betrayed and Vesey executed, the white racial regime in South Carolina was deeply shaken.

Cincinnati, Ohio, alternated between tolerating antislavery forces and violently opposing a growing black presence in the city. The uproar over slavery convulsed southwestern Ohio, an area that had strong social and economic ties to the South. With only a river separating it from slaveholding states, many runaway slaves crossed into Cincinnati searching for freedom. By 1810 nearly eighty blacks lived in the Bucktown section of Cincinnati, where they constructed a church that was reportedly a station of the Underground Railroad. Fourteen years later African Americans constituted 10 percent of the city's population. In 1829 whites tried to force blacks to leave the city, attacking black neighborhoods. As a result of a three-day race riot more than one thousand blacks fled to Canada, although within two years most had returned to the city.

Although economically tied to the South, Cincinnati also had a strong antislavery movement and eventually became a stop on the Underground Railroad and a hub of antislavery activity. Nevertheless, the attempt to silence opposition to slavery was largely driven by two fears: the fear of offending the slave owners across the river, whose money was a major contributor to the city's prosperity, and the fear that abolitionists would make Cincinnati a less popular place for future settlement. Hoping to prevent these fears from materializing, whites rioted against abolitionist centers by burning buildings in which blacks and whites mingled.

The most famous and bloody slave revolt took place in Southampton County, Virginia. On 22 August 1831, Nat Turner, a trusted slave preacher, led a small group of slaves into the home of his master, Joseph Travis, and killed the entire Travis household. By the next day Turner's force had increased to between sixty and eighty slaves and had killed more than fifty whites. The local militia counterattacked, killing more than one hundred blacks. Twenty more slaves, including Turner, were later executed. Turner's revolt sparked a panic that spread throughout the South. Although the rebellion was put down and its leader and many of his followers were executed, it succeeded in actually taking place, unlike earlier plots. For two days Turner and his followers had effectively controlled parts of the Virginia countryside, recruiting new allies as they went from plantation to plantation executing whites and freeing slaves. The number of white fatalities was higher than in any previous slave rebellion. Southern whites took their revenge in a month-long reign of vigilantism against blacks, many of whom had no part in the revolt. Nevertheless, the insurrection left its mark. Southern whites lived in a state of fear and were certain that northerners and southern slaves were in a deep conspiracy against them.

Antislavery and Proslavery Violence

The response to slave riots was immediate and fierce. In the South, especially, anger and panic turned into violence. Slave owners denounced antislavery campaigns and pointed to hundreds of alleged slave conspiracies as the work of northern abolitionists. Southern communities offered large rewards for abolition leaders, dead or alive, and appointed vigilance committees to patrol free black neighborhoods, presumed to be hotbeds of insurrection; to patrol coastal boats for runaways; and to search post offices for abolitionist materials. In Charleston, for example, a mob broke into the post office, ransacked the mail, stole abolitionist literature, and burned it. In Washington, D.C., a mob, several hundred strong, destroyed the businesses of free blacks rumored to have supported the abolitionist campaign and then rampaged through the black community. Antiblack and antiabolitionist riots also tore through St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia. From Massachusetts to New York to Ohio, abolitionist meetings were interrupted by proslavery mobs. In Boston in 1835, for example, a crowd captured the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and dragged him through the streets by a rope.

Despite sometimes violent opposition, the effort to free the slaves was one of the most successful movements of the nineteenth century. Out of the antislavery movement came various organizations and exceptional leaders, such as Garrison, Frederick Douglass, and Wendell Phillips. Support for the cause was not unique to the North; in fact, it was strong throughout the country and in Britain. Despite its popularity, however, the nation struggled with the question of slavery, which seemed to touch almost every aspect of life. Even those who opposed slavery differed over how to respond to the institution. A few abolitionists opposed slavery but feared the presence of blacks in northern cities. Some even advocated the emancipation of blacks and colonization in Liberia. Militant abolitionists, however, saw slavery as an evil and demanded its total repudiation.

Most antislavery advocates hoped that a moderate program of education and persuasion would encourage the South to emancipate slaves voluntarily. Douglass, for example, was for a time a leading spokesman for the Garrisonian wing of the abolitionist movement, which rejected all violent efforts to overthrow slavery, including rebellion by slaves themselves, and promoted the more peaceful method of moral suasion. By the late 1840s, however, Douglass began to question several aspects of Garrison's approach, and by the late 1850s he had moved toward openly supporting slave rebellion and violence to dismantle slavery.

When opposition to the antislavery movement turned violent, abolitionists attributed that violence to the institution of slavery and not to their own efforts. Much of this violence spread across northern states as proslavery advocates sought to destroy printing presses that supported the abolitionist movement. This was certainly the case for James Gillespie Birney of Cincinnati. In 1836, after Birney had received a series of warnings to cease publication, a band of white men, including some of the most powerful and wealthy residents of the city, broke into his office to destroy his press. In Alton, Illinois, rioters destroyed the press of the abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy four times in 1837, killing him during the last attack.

In the decades before the Civil War, multiple mobs totaling several hundred white men went on a rampage, destroying antislavery presses and other abolitionist centers and attacking communities of free blacks. Following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, federal agents began seizing blacks in northern cities. Anyone involved in helping runaway slaves was forced into civil disobedience in defiance of the law.

Resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law

As part of the Compromise of 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law in September 1850 to impose strict penalties on all persons aiding fugitive slaves in their escape to freedom and to place the full weight of the federal government behind the apprehension of all runaway slaves. The law immediately drew strong opposition from northerners. Many citizens were outraged at the Fugitive Slave Law during the first few years it was in effect, but public demonstrations against it were generally small and few. By the end of 1851, as abolitionist fervor began to slow down, most northern states decided they could live comfortably with the law. Still, the antislavery forces continued to resist the Fugitive Slave Law by organizing vigilance committees to protect fugitive slaves and in some cases to forcefully rescue slaves from their owners. In Boston, in 1851, for example, a group of black abolitionists burst into a hearing room, snatched a captured fugitive slave, and transported him to freedom in Canada. Several rescue attempts were unsuccessful; for example, Thomas Sims and Anthony Burns were returned to slavery after reaching Boston.

Shadrach Minkins Rescue, Boston, 1851.

On 15 February 1851 armed black abolitionists created a disturbance, broke into a Boston courthouse, and rescued Shadrach Minkins, a fugitive slave. Born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1800, Minkins, influenced by the Nat Turner revolt, escaped in 1850 and fled north to Boston, where he was found a year later working as a waiter in a Boston coffeehouse. Minkins became the first runaway to be detained in the New England area under the new Fugitive Slave Law. After the daring courthouse rescue, Minkins escaped to Canada and, with other black expatriates in Montreal, created that city's first black community. Minkins's rescue became one of the most dramatic episodes of rebellion before the Civil War. He died in 1875, a free man.

Thomas Sims Incident, Boston, 1851.

On 3 April 1851 the seventeen-year-old fugitive slave Thomas Sims was arrested in Boston. He was found guilty of escaping to the North. Although abolitionists attempted to free him, they were turned back by troops. The federal government provided sufficient firepower to ensure that no band of abolitionists could free him. Roughly 300 armed federal deputies and soldiers led Sims and his captor from the courthouse to the navy yard, where 250 more federal troops waited to put them on a ship heading for the South. Black abolitionists devised a rescue plan, but so many guards were assigned to Sims that the security of the prisoner appeared impenetrable. Some members of the rescue group proposed storming the courthouse, but the majority rejected the proposal. Others suggested an attack on the ship that was to carry Sims back to Georgia, but that, too, was rejected. Ultimately, the abolitionists determined that nothing could be done. The vigilance committee, already upset with their failed rescue attempt, were further outraged when they received word that Sims, on arriving in Georgia, was publicly whipped.

Christiana Riot, Pennsylvania, 1851.

The Christiana riot was one of the first recorded incidents of open resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law. On 11 September 1851 a group of blacks routed a Maryland slave owner named Edward Gorsuch, his son, and law enforcement officers at a farm in Christiana, Pennsylvania. Gorsuch, accompanied by the federal marshal Henry Kline and his deputies, had made his way to the village of Christiana with the expectation of capturing his runaway slaves: George, Nelson, Noah, and Josh. The posse arrived at the farm of William Parker, a leader of the local freedom society who was known to harbor fugitive slaves. When Parker met Gorsuch and Kline at the front door, Kline announced who they were and what they wanted. At some point in the discussion, a minor physical confrontation occurred, and Parker's wife, Eliza, sensing that something was wrong, blew a horn to notify other blacks in the area that they were in trouble and needed help.

As blacks descended on the Parker farm, Gorsuch's group began to retreat. However, Gorsuch refused to leave without his slaves. Parker urged Gorsuch to leave and warned him of the possibility of bloodshed if he stayed. Gorsuch then got into a verbal argument with another fugitive slave hiding at the Parker house, Samuel Thompson. As Gorsuch approached Thompson, Thompson hit him with a pistol, knocking him to the ground. Thompson continued to beat and club Gorsuch and then, along with other blacks, shot him several times. When Gorsuch's son tried to help his father, he, too, was shot repeatedly in the arm and side. By that time almost all the members of the Gorsuch posse had fled the scene. When the smoke cleared, Gorsuch had been killed and two other men wounded. In the aftermath, thirty-eight blacks were arrested and charged with treason under the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Law; however, most were eventually acquitted.

Jerry Rescue, Syracuse, 1851.

On 1 October 1851 more than five hundred black and white citizens of Syracuse, New York, formed a vigilance committee led by the city's mayor, Alfred H. Hovey. As part of their mission to thwart enforcement of the recently adopted Fugitive Slave Law, the committee's members pledged not to let any person be taken from Syracuse and returned to slavery. The case of William “Jerry” Henry is one example of the vigilance committee's determination. In 1851 Henry, who was accused of escaping from slavery, was held in the local police station. Word of the arrest quickly reached the vigilance committee.

With a battering ram and despite shots fired from a window by a deputy marshal, a group of committee members broke open the door and freed Henry. Realizing that the group was too large and determined to be resisted, authorities relinquished Henry to the vigilance committee. With the help of the committee, Henry hid in the city for several days at the home of a local butcher known for his antislavery sentiments. Henry was later taken to Oswego and eventually across Lake Ontario into Canada. Indictments were issued against the rescuers, who were taken to Auburn for arraignment. They were bailed out by William H. Seward, the current U.S. senator and former governor of New York. Trials lasted two years and resulted in only one conviction. The success of the Jerry Rescue was one of several challenges to the Fugitive Slave Law in major cities across the North. It mobilized the people of Syracuse and made the city a major haven for freedom seekers.

Anthony Burns Incident, Boston, 1854.

Anthony Burns, a fugitive slave, was returned to the South from Boston on 24 May 1854. Born a slave in Virginia, Burns was twenty when he escaped to Boston, where he lived and worked as a free man. He was eventually arrested and held without bail at the instigation of his former owner, Charles Suttle, who came to Boston invoking the Fugitive Slave Law. With the power of the federal government behind him, Suttle had every intention of taking his slave home. Burns had powerful allies, however: thousands of abolitionists who formed the Boston Vigilance Committee, a group of legal professionals sworn to use any means within their power to defend the rights of fugitive slaves. Immediately, the vigilance committee, led by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, raided the courthouse with guns, battering rams, and axes, killing a deputy.

The federal government ordered U.S. troops to Boston to join the local police and state militia in holding Burns. The vigilance committee then offered to buy Burns out of slavery. Although Suttle was willing to sell, the U.S. attorney would not approve it. The government, he argued, had decided to make this case a model for returning slaves under the Fugitive Slave Law. Unable to do much, an estimated fifty thousand citizens lined the streets of Boston to watch Burns walk in shackles toward the waiting ship. Stores were closed, buildings were draped in black, and an American flag was hung upside down in protest of the government's decision to return Burns to slavery. The following year the men who had attacked the courthouse were brought to trial, but all were acquitted on technicalities. A local black church soon raised thirteen hundred dollars to purchase Burns's freedom, and less than a year after his arrest the former slave was back in Boston.

Oberlin-Wellington Rescue, Ohio, 1858.

A seventeen-year-old runaway slave from Kentucky named John Price was arrested by a federal marshal on 13 September 1858 in Oberlin, Ohio. Knowing that many Oberlin residents were committed to abolitionism, the marshal attempted to avoid conflict by immediately taking Price to nearby Wellington. As soon as Oberlin residents heard of the marshal's actions, a group of them rushed to Wellington, where they soon joined forces with like-minded residents of the Wellington community and attempted to free Price. The marshal, Price, and his deputies took refuge in a local hotel. After negotiations failed, the mob stormed the hotel and eventually found Price in the attic. The abolitionist group returned Price to Oberlin, where they hid him for a couple of days before taking him to freedom in Canada.

A federal grand jury indicted thirty-seven members of the rescue group, but only two went to trial: Simeon Bushnell and Charles Henry Langston. They were found guilty in federal court in April 1859. Bushnell received a sentence of sixty days in jail and Langston twenty days. The remaining thirty-five people in jail were released in July 1859. Bushnell and Langston filed a writ of habeas corpus with the Ohio Supreme Court, claiming that the federal court did not have the authority to arrest and try them because the Fugitive Slave Law was unconstitutional, but the Ohio Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the slave law. The Ohio abolitionist community was incensed. More than ten thousand people participated in a Cleveland rally to oppose the federal and state courts' decisions.

Repeal

In 1850 just over one thousand slaves escaped into freed states, and, in the three months after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, nearly three thousand blacks living in the North fled to Canada. Within the first fifteen months after the passage of the law, eighty-four fugitives were returned to their slave owners, and only five were given their freedom. The Fugitive Slave Law was not repealed until 1864, a year and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, and only half a year from the end of the Civil War. Northern states found the Fugitive Slave Law harder to nullify because it cut state courts out of the process. Still, abolitionists and their vigilance committees mounted vigorous resistance to the bounty hunters by force of arms.

Harpers Ferry Raid

John Brown, a devoted Calvinist who believed he had a personal responsibility to overthrow slavery, announced that the time had come to fight fire with fire and strike terror in the hearts of the proponents of slavery. Already famous for his guerilla-style warfare against proslavery advocates in Kansas after he and his followers had killed nearly two hundred people, Brown was driven to destroying slavery altogether. He devised what seemed a fairly straightforward plan: he and his men would establish a base in the Blue Ridge Mountains from which they would assist runaway slaves and launch attacks on slaveholders. Although he was ready to launch his war in 1858, he decided to postpone it because one of his followers threatened to reveal the plan. After a one-year delay, Brown was finally ready to follow through with his strategy. He rented a farm in Maryland, across the Potomac River from Harpers Ferry, Virginia, where he assembled his ammunition and waited for his army to arrive.

The delay ultimately hurt his plan because many of the men he recruited had moved away or decided the plan would not work. Brown then changed his plan of attack; his intentions had been to seize the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry rather than stage guerrilla warfare from the mountains. His new plan was to capture the federal arsenal and arm slaves from the surrounding countryside. His long-range goal was to drive southward into Tennessee and Alabama, raiding federal arsenals, inciting slave insurrections, and eventually igniting a sectional crisis that would destroy slavery.

On 16 October 1859 Brown set out for Harpers Ferry with twenty-one men: five blacks and sixteen whites, including two of his sons. The men crossed the Potomac River and walked all night through the rain to reach the town at 4:00 A.M. After cutting all telegraph wires, they began their assaults, first taking the federal armory and arsenal and then capturing Hall's Rifle Works, a supplier of weapons to the government. Brown and his men rounded up sixty citizens of Harpers Ferry and held them hostage, hoping that their slaves would join the fight. No slaves came forth. With a view to overturning the institution of slavery by force, Brown wanted to spark a rebellion of freed slaves and to lead an army of emancipated blacks.

As news of the raid spread, many townspeople and local militia companies cut off Brown's escape routes and trapped his men in an engine house. Twice Brown sent men (including one of his sons) carrying flags of truce to negotiate, but on both occasions drunken mobs gunned them down. News of the insurrection also reached President James Buchanan, who dispatched marines and soldiers under the leadership of Colonel Robert E. Lee. By the time they arrived, eight of Brown's men had been killed; the troops moved in and quickly ended the insurrection.

Ten of Brown's men were killed, including two blacks and both of his sons; seven were captured, including Brown; and five escaped. A seriously wounded Brown and several other captives were taken to Charles Town, Virginia, where they were tried; convicted of murder, slave insurrection, and treason against the state; and sentenced to death by hanging.

Conscription, Antiwar Sentiment, and the Draft Riots

Popular unrest in the cities often took distinctive forms. The drafting of white men to fight a war for black emancipation, for example, provoked anger among northerners, especially those who lacked the income to buy their way out of the service. To whites, conscription looked like the destruction of white liberty for the sake of black freedom. Perhaps no group was more resentful of conscription than the Irish immigrant population of northern city slums.

With their prejudice against blacks fueled by their unfamiliarity with the race and their competition with blacks for low-paying jobs, impoverished white working-class men in New York City objected to fighting on behalf of African Americans. Sensing a plot to force them into the Union army, white men vented their rage in July 1863 by rioting through the streets of Manhattan.

The rampaging started when members of a volunteer fire company assaulted a building in which a draft lottery was talking place. For four days the streets were not safe, particularly for blacks, many of whom were beaten to death or hanged by white mobs. Rioters also attacked the homes of leading Republicans and assaulted wealthy men and women on the streets, but mostly they attacked blacks. White mobs lynched over a dozen blacks, setting fire also to the Colored Orphan Asylum. Black families were chased down and killed; helpless blacks were lynched, and even a Mohawk Indian was beaten to death because the mob believed he was black. Only the intervention of federal troops ended the draft riots, but by the time troops arrived to suppress the disorder, more than one hundred people had died.

Reconstruction-Era Disturbances

In late July 1866 former Confederate soldiers in New Orleans, with the support of the local police, killed thirty-four black citizens and wounded more than one hundred others. This race riot, later dubbed the New Orleans Riot, was similar to many others that occurred throughout the South. The New Orleans Riot was sparked by a meeting convened by Radical Republicans. Angered by the enactment of highly restrictive black codes in Louisiana and by the legislature's refusal to give black men the right to vote, the Radical Republicans decided to reconvene the constitutional convention of 1864; two hundred supporters, primarily black veterans of the Civil War, joined them. Former Confederates, along with New Orleans police, fearing that the state would fall out of southern white control, attacked the gathering. Black and white delegates of the convention were targets of gunfire. Some were even shot after raising white flags of surrender as they tried to flee the building where the convention was being held. Local police officers, rather than assisting those under attack, participated in the killings. Federal troops were called in to establish order, but by the time they arrived it was too late to stem the violence. More than one hundred people were injured in the fighting, and roughly thirty-four blacks and three white Radical Republicans were killed.

One of the most significant events of the Reconstruction era happened in Grant Parish, an area in Louisiana established in 1869 by Radical Republicans during the postwar occupation of the state. The Colfax Massacre of Easter Sunday 1873 was the bloodiest instance of racial violence to take place during Reconstruction.

Conflicts between Republicans and Democrats were frequent in Louisiana. Disputes over the 1872 election produced dual governments at all levels of politics throughout the state as white residents, refusing to cooperate with the federal government, formed their own shadow government and their own army—the White League, a paramilitary group intent on securing white rule. Similar to the Ku Klux Klan, the White League intimidated and attacked Republicans and blacks all over the state, eventually clashing with Louisiana's almost all-black state militia. The resulting death toll was staggering. Only three members of the White League died, but some one hundred black men were killed in the encounter. Of that number, nearly half were murdered in cold blood after they had already laid down their arms and surrendered.

Following this incident, new laws aimed at limiting the power of the federal government in local affairs were enacted. This essentially paved the way for white Democrats to return to the concept of “home rule”—that is, constructing laws and enforcing them as they pleased. In response to riots throughout the South, President Ulysses S. Grant ordered federal troops to restore order, but most of that relief was temporary. Following the Colfax Massacre the federal government convicted only three whites of murder, and the U.S. Supreme Court later ruled that those three men had been convicted unconstitutionally and freed them. The battle over Reconstruction and the rights of blacks would continue.

See also Abolitionism; Antislavery Movement; Birney, James Gillespie; Black Abolitionists; Brown, John; Buchanan, James; Canada; Christiana Incident; Civil War; Civil War, Participation and Recruitment of Black Troops in; Colfax Massacre; Colonization; Compromise of 1850; Democratic Party; Douglass, Frederick; Emancipation Proclamation; Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; Garrison, William Lloyd; Garrisonian Abolitionists; Grant, Ulysses S.; Harpers Ferry Raid; Higginson, Thomas Wentworth; Immigrants; Jerry Rescue; Langston, Charles Henry; Laws and Legislation; Liberia; Lynching and Mob Violence; Moral Suasion; New York City; Nonresistance; Phillips, Wendell; Poverty; Proslavery Thought; Racism; Reconstruction; Republican Party; Resistance; Seward, William Henry; Slave Resistance; Stereotypes of African Americans; Supreme Court; Turner, Nat; Underground Railroad; Union Army, African Americans in; Urbanization; Violence against African Americans; and Work.

Jesse J. Esparza

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