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The question I’ll be answering is what role did slave resistance and rebellion in bringing about emancipation? I’ll also be looking at a few examples of significant uprisings and rebellions that took place during the slave trade and how they impacted the slave nations
The transatlantic slave trade took people to the other side of the world. For enslaved Africans taken by the Europeans, there was no hope of ever returning home. Men, women, and children were expected to work for their entire lives with no freedom or rights. The slave owners did everything they could to make sure that the enslaved Africans forgot their languages, cultures, and religious beliefs. Between 9 and 11 million enslaved Africans were bought by European traders from Africa, although slavery had existed for hundreds of years in Africa prior to the transatlantic slave trade, nothing on this scale had ever been seen before. Slavery within Africa was on a much smaller scale and of a different character.
The enslaved Africans did all that they could to resist their enslavement. From the moment of capture and the journey across the Atlantic Ocean to the plantations, enslaved Africans rebelled. Even with the knowledge that they would never get back to their countries or achieve freedom, they persisted in their resistance.
Resistance from the slaves took many different forms and shapes. Resistance began in Africa, with many examples of anti-slavery campaigning, some rebelled whilst on the ships traveling across the Atlantic. Other riots took place in the plantations, there are cases of slave owners actually being killed by groups of enraged slaves. All of these methods were highly dangerous for the slaves involved because if they were caught they faced certain death. More passive forms of resistance were also very common, running away was one option. For others, the resistance was based on the amount of good quality work done, minor theft, or disobedience.
The enslaved Africans could persistently damage machinery, work slowly, or openly rebel against their masters and their slave status. They could also rebel by keeping their African religious beliefs, names, language, music, and stories alive. For instance, African slaves in Haiti fused together their African religion with their owner’s Catholic religion and created their own kind of Christianity, called vodou. This implied that they could exercise their own combination of beliefs from various African religions, whilst seeming to their owners to be practicing Christianity, as they were instructed.
Nzinga Mbandi is an early example of a leader who challenged the European slave nations. Nzinga is first cited as a representative sent to secure peace between her people and the Portuguese, a treaty was settled but the Portuguese soon revoked it. Instead of capitulating, Nzinga led a resistance against the Portuguese, a slave port was captured, and Portuguese reinforcements were repulsed. A cunning politician Nzinga formed an alliance with the Dutch. This and her military tactics saw the Portuguese thwarted in several of their attempts to seize more of her territories. Nzinga’s lands lay in modern-day Angola. Her final years were ones of relative peace, a treaty having once again been agreed with a war-weary Portugal.
Many historians suggest that one in ten voyages across the middle passage saw a rebellion of some kind. One of the most famous examples of slave resistance during the middle passage is that on board the Amistad. This rebellion happened in 1838: after slavery was purportedly ended in the empire. Some 53 Africans were kidnapped and placed onto the ship; the imprisoned slaves managed to free themselves from their shackles. They killed the ship’s captain and the cook and demanded that the crew set course back to Africa. The crew did change course but not to Africa, the ship was consequently intercepted by the US coast guard and the slaves had to spend two years fighting for their freedom in court.
Physical resistance wasn’t the only method used on the ships, for some, the prospect of slavery was too much. They opted to make sure that they were not enslaved because of this on certain occasions the slaves would jump overboard and would not try to save themselves, but resolved to die and sink directly down. Researchers have found an astonishing 485 acts of violence against ships show that 93 of these were made by free Africans for the shore. This makes the voyage susceptible to attack from its launch through to docking.
Slave resistance on the plantations wasn’t just against Empire but also against French rule. On example of this The Saint Dominique rebellions against the French had repercussions across the colonies of the Caribbean, be that French or any other colonial power. Saint Dominique was a French colony, which was a huge part of French imperialism, producing roughly a third of the world’s sugar and over half of the world’s coffee. The problems for the French arose as a result of the French Revolution because in 1790 the French declared rights of men in Paris but refused to extend these to colored people in the colonies.
This led to a rebellion led by Vincent Oge, which was eventually put down, but the issue did not go away. Toussaint L’Ouverture led another revolt a much bigger and more effective one, which burnt down over a thousand plantations. L’Ouverture also had many African-born soldiers taking his side, much of the island was under slave control. By 1793 many French representatives decided to move towards ending slavery in their colonies, and became official French law in 1794, however, this overlapped with the French going to war. They invaded Saint Dominique during the war, and the former slaves resisted, and could not overpower them, even with support.
They eventually came to an agreement with L’Ouverture and his men. There would be no more fighting between the Saint Dominicans and trade would take place. For now, Saint Dominique was home to a population of freemen.
Resistance was coordinated by skilled workers who spoke of revolution in worldly and personal conditions but also communal and spiritual. The rebellions that occurred first performed variously depending on time and place, however, generally, they gathered dues, made extravagant toasts, and supplied wood swords, cockades, and titles. When the slaves talked about revolution they did so indecisively as an expression of how they felt about whites and the kinds of acculturational changes they had made in becoming skilled in white society. Slaves in some societies on the other hand displayed the alienating effects of a rapid and thorough assimilation. Yet these indications of alienation were rarely shown by slave women or by male field hands.
The Baptist War (1831-32) also was a massive contributing factor that brought about emancipation because it involved up to 60,000 of the 300,000 slaves in the colony of Jamaica, the uprising was led by a black Baptist deacon, Samuel Sharpe, and was waged largely by his followers. It was considered the largest slave rebellion in the Caribbean, the enslaved outnumbered the whites on the island, by far the largest Caribbean colony, twelve to one.
They revolted in 1831 partly because of an economic depression that affected some impoverished whites and made them allies of the rebels, tensions were high as well because the abolition of slavery was being debated in parliament and Jamaican planters, horrified by the prospect, made inflammatory speeches and wrote articles in the newspapers, attacking emancipation. Their attitudes and actions contributed to the agitation and discontent of the slave majority. Sporadic resistance continued for another two months after the war as the rebels resorted to guerrilla tactics while fighting in Jamaica’s mountainous landscape.
At the end of the fighting, fourteen free blacks who supported the rebellion and over two hundred rebels had been killed. More than three hundred enslaved men and women were executed, including Samuel Sharpe, who was hanged. The Baptist War, however, pushed Great Britain to adopt full emancipation throughout all of its colonies, including Jamaica and the West Indies in 1838. It wasn’t just men who resisted the enslavers, women more often worked in the household and could sometimes use their position to undermine their enslavers.
Women may have resisted a special burden: bearing children to provide enslavers with more hands. Some historians speculate that women may have used birth control or abortion to keep their children out of bondage. While this cannot be known for certain, many believe that many enslavers were convinced that women had ways of preventing pregnancy.
All of these uprisings and resistance from plantation workers influenced countless people to start up anti-slavery associations particularly in Britain, for example during the 1820-30s a strong network of women’s anti-slavery organizations developed, the Birmingham Society played a particularly active role in helping to promote and establish local groups in many parts of Britain. Influenced by the Birmingham Society, over 73 women were founded between 1825-33, which supplied a constant stream of information to rouse public opinion against slavery. In the anti-slavery movement, women found a basis from which they could pursue their own liberation.
They were able to use the terminology of the anti-slavery campaign as a way to articulate some of the inequalities they suffered, and the anti-slavery campaign in many ways set the scene for the women’s rights movement. By 1824 there were more than 200 branches of the Anti-Slavery Society in Britain, an indicator of increasing support for the fight against slavery. The campaign was one of many taking place, for this was a period of great economic and social change both in Britain and in colonies. It was increasingly evident that the plantation system in the Caribbean was in need of reform and transformation.
Factory owners were being forced to consider the rights and needs of workers with shifts in international borders and trade. planters were facing new forms of competition in a changing world market. ships now crossed the Atlantic fully loaded with raw materials such as cotton and sugar on the return journey only. Therefore, the abolition of slavery in Britain was fought in a society already in a state of economic, political, and social change.
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