Slave rebellion
A slave rebellion is an armed uprising by slaves, as a way of fighting for their freedom. Rebellions of slaves have occurred in nearly all societies that practice slavery or have practiced slavery in the past. A desire for freedom and the dream of successful rebellion is often the greatest object of song, art, and culture amongst the enslaved population. These events, however, are often violently opposed and suppressed by slaveholders.
Ancient Sparta had a special type of serf called helots who were often treated harshly, leading them to rebel. According to Herodotus, helots were seven times as numerous as Spartans. Every autumn, according to Plutarch, the Spartan ephors would pro forma declare war on the helot population so that any Spartan citizen could kill a helot without fear of blood or guilt in order to keep them in line. In the Roman Empire, though the heterogeneous nature of the slave population worked against a strong sense of solidarity, slave revolts did occur and were severely punished. The most famous slave rebellion in Europe was led by Spartacus in Roman Italy, the Third Servile War. This war resulted in the 6,000 surviving rebel slaves being crucified along the main roads leading into Rome. This was the third in a series of unrelated Servile Wars fought by slaves against the Romans.
In Russia, the slaves were usually classified as kholops. A kholop's master had unlimited power over his life. Slavery remained a major institution in Russia until 1723, when Peter the Great converted the household slaves into house serfs. Russian agricultural slaves were formally converted into serfs earlier in 1679. During the 16th and 17th centuries, runaway serfs and kholops known as Cossacks, formed autonomous communities in the southern steppes. There were numerous rebellions against slavery and serfdom, most often in conjunction with Cossack uprisings, such as the uprisings of Ivan Bolotnikov, Stenka Razin, Kondraty Bulavin, and Yemelyan Pugachev, often involving hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions. Between the end of the Pugachev rebellion and the beginning of the 19th century, there were hundreds of outbreaks across Russia.
One of the most successful slave rebellions in history was the Haitian Revolution, which saw self-emancipated slaves in the French colony of Saint-Domingue overthrow the colonial government and repulse invasion attempts by the French, Spanish and British to establish the independent state of Haiti. In the 9th century, the poet Ali bin Muhammad led imported East African slaves against the Abbasid Caliphate in Iraq during the Zanj Rebellion. Nanny of the Maroons was an 18th-century leader of the Jamaican Maroons who led them to victory in the First Maroon War. The Quilombo dos Palmares of Brazil flourished under Ganga Zumba. In the United States, the 1811 German Coast Uprising in the Territory of Orleans was the largest rebellion in the continental United States; Denmark Vesey and Madison Washington both launched slave rebellions in the U.S. as well.
Africa
In 1808 and 1825, there were slave rebellions in the Cape Colony, newly acquired by the British. Although the slave trade was officially abolished in the British Empire by the Slave Trade Act 1807, and slavery itself a generation later with the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, it took until 1850 to be halted in the territories which were to become South Africa.São Tomé and Príncipe
On 9 July 1595, Rei Amador, and his people, the Angolars, allied with other enslaved Africans of its plantations, marched into the interior woods and battled against the Portuguese. It is said that day, Rei Amador and his followers raised a flag in front of the settlers and proclaimed Rei Amador as king of São Tomé and Príncipe, making himself as "Rei Amador, liberator of all the black people".Between 1595 and 1596, part of the island of São Tomé was ruled by the Angolars, under the command of Rei Amador. On 4 January 1596, he was captured, sent to prison and was later executed by the Portuguese. Still today, they remember him fondly and consider him a national hero of the islands.
In the first decades of the 17th century, there were frequent slave revolts in the Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Príncipe, off the African shore, which damaged the sugar crop cultivation there.
Asia
The Zanj Rebellion against the slavery in the Abbasid Caliphate was the culmination of a series of small revolts. It took place near the city of Basra, in southern Iraq over fifteen years. It grew to involve over 500,100 slaves, who were imported from across the Muslim empire.When the Russian general Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufmann and his army approached the city of Khiva during the Khivan campaign of 1873, the Khan Muhammad Rahim Khan II of Khiva fled to hide among the Yomuts, and the slaves in Khiva rebelled, informed about the imminent downfall of the city, resulting in the Khivan slave uprising. When Kaufmann's Russian army entered Khiva on 28 March, he was approached by Khivans who begged him to put down the ongoing slave uprising, during which slaves avenged themselves on their former enslavers. When the Khan returned to his capital after the Russian conquest, the Russian General Kaufmann presented him with a demand to abolish the Khivan slave trade and slavery, which he did.
Europe
In the 3rd century BCE, Drimakos led a slave revolt on the slave entrepot of Chios, took to the hills and directed a band of runaways in operations against their ex-masters.The Servile Wars were a series of slave revolts within the Roman Republic.
- The First and Second Servile War occurred in Sicily.
- The Third Servile War occurred in mainland Italy. Spartacus, an escaped gladiator supposedly from Thrace, became the most prominent of the rebel leaders; Marcus Licinius Crassus suppressed the insurgents. Many modern rebels have since regarded Spartacus as a heroic figure.
A number of slave revolts occurred in the Mediterranean area during the early modern period:
- 1531: 16 slaves who were imprisoned at Fort St. Angelo in Hospitaller Malta revolted and briefly took control of the fort. The revolt was put down and the leaders were killed.
- 1596: a number of slaves in Birgu and Valletta on Malta mutinied, stole the keys to the gates of Valletta and escaped into the Maltese countryside.
- 1748: Hungarian, Georgian and Maltese slaves on board an Ottoman galley named Lupa revolted against Ottoman slavery and sailed the ship to Malta.
- 1749: Muslim slaves in Malta plotted to rebel and take over the island, but plans leaked out beforehand and the would-be rebels were arrested and many were executed.
- 1760: Christian slaves on board the Ottoman ship Corona Ottomana revolted and sailed the ship to Malta.
North America
Slave resistance in the antebellum South did not gain the attention of academic historians until the 1940s, when historian Herbert Aptheker started publishing the first serious scholarly work on the subject. Aptheker stressed how rebellions were rooted in the exploitative conditions of the Southern slave system. He traversed libraries and archives throughout the South, managing to uncover roughly 250 similar instances.
The 1811 German Coast Uprising, which took place in rural southeast Louisiana, at that time the Territory of Orleans, early in 1811, involved up to 500 insurgent slaves. It was suppressed by local militias and a detachment of the United States Army. In retaliation for the deaths of two white men and the destruction of property, the authorities killed at least 40 black men in a violent confrontation ; at least 29 more were executed. There was a third jurisdiction for a tribunal and what amounted to summary judgments against the accused, St. John the Baptist Parish. Fewer than 20 men are said to have escaped; some of those were later caught and killed, on their way to freedom.
Although only involving about seventy slaves and free blacks, Turner's 1831 rebellion is considered to be a significant event in American history. The rebellion caused the slave-holding South to go into a panic. Fifty-five men, women, and children were killed, and enslaved blacks were freed on multiple plantations in Southampton County, Virginia, as Turner and his fellow rebels attacked the white institution of plantation slavery. Turner and the other rebels were eventually stopped by state militias. The rebellion resulted in the hanging of about 56 slaves, including Nat Turner himself. Up to 200 other blacks were killed during the hysteria that followed, few of whom likely had anything to do with the uprising. White fear led to new legislation passed by Southern states prohibiting the movement, assembly, and education of slaves, and reducing the rights of free people of color. In 1831–32, the Virginia legislature considered a gradual emancipation law to prevent future rebellions. In a close vote, however, the state decided to keep slaves.
The abolitionist John Brown had already fought against pro-slavery forces in Bleeding Kansas for several years when he decided to lead a raid on a Federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. This raid was a joint attack by freed blacks and white men who had corresponded with slaves on plantations in order to create a general uprising among slaves. Brown carried hundreds of copies of the constitution for a new republic of former slaves in the Appalachians. But they were never distributed, and the slave uprisings that were to have helped Brown did not happen. Some believe that he knew the raid was doomed but went ahead anyway, because of the support for abolition it would generate. The U.S. military, led by Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee, easily overwhelmed Brown's forces. But directly following this, slave disobedience and the number of runaways increased markedly in Virginia.
The historian Steven Hahn proposes that the self-organized involvement of slaves in the Union Army during the American Civil War composed a slave rebellion that dwarfed all others. Similarly, tens of thousands of slaves joined British forces or escaped to British lines during the American Revolution, sometimes using the disruption of war to gain freedom. For instance, when the British evacuated from Charleston and Savannah, they took 10,000 freed slaves with them. They also evacuated slaves from New York, taking more than 3,000 for resettlement to Nova Scotia, where they were recorded as Black Loyalists and given land grants.