History of Slave Rebelliousness and Rebellions

William Brown

Dr. Waters

March 2, 2017

Midterm Essay

History of Slave Rebelliousness and Rebellions

        The Slave Trade is easily one of the most researched topics in the world. African Americans were taken from their homeland and brought to the Americas to be free workers. The human exploitation of African American slaves is one of the United State’s largest eyesores when considering the United States is the “land of the free”. The labor that the slaves performed was tough, gritty, and exhausting. The slaves were worked sometimes until they could not stand anymore. These conditions could only go on for so long until some of the slaves had enough and decided to rebel. Unfortunately rebellious activity was violently disciplined. Despite this, slaves still found ways to revolt militarily and also in their daily routines.

        The enslaved African Americans were subject to work long and labor intense days in the hot southern climate. One of the biggest factors that perpetuated that existence of slavery is the psychological factor. For several generations, the only world that African Americans knew about was being captive as possession of free labor. Despite this however, some slaves sought to rebel against their masters. One of the largest slave rebellions, occurred in Virginia and resulted in the death of many slave masters until it took a militia to finally end the uprising. While these sort of rebellions left the biggest impact, these instances were few in between.There are instances when large rebellions took place, but these did not occur as much as some would want to believe. This can be accredited to the psychological impact, directly related to the fact that slave masters did everything in their power to prevent uprisings and demand obedience. For instance, a married slave with a family would never revolt against his master because he would fear being separated from his family or his family being separated from them. One of the most frightening things a slave could be threatened with is being sent to the Bahamas, where the work conditions along with stories passed among slaves, guaranteed certain death. Most slaves were not allowed to learn how to read or write, which deeply crippled any chance for a slave to be educated enough to lead an organized rebellion. Other laws were created to furthermore take away any rebellion efforts. African American slaves were also forbidden to have any firearms. At one point slave masters thought it would be a good idea to arm their African American slaves and create a sort of militia. When the slave masters saw the black men holding guns and dressed as a militia, their fear of a slave rebellion only grew more rampant and they quickly disarmed them and never let them have weapons again.