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 North and South, Walker wrote that it would take a “God of justice and armies” to bring about the destruction of the slave system. While two years earlier Freedom’s Journal, a short-lived black newspaper, advocated the immediate emancipation of all slaves, the Appeal called, in the most militant language yet, for an armed insurrection toward that end.33 More importantly still, Walker was making an appeal to unite free, fugitive, and enslaved African Americans into a joint movement. It was the opening shot by a new generation of black leaders who, within a decade, would enter the political arena via independent politics in the battle to end slavery.
Walker used to great effect the nation’s commercial networks, as well as those that slaves and free blacks had been developing since the Revolutionary War, to disseminate the pamphlet into the Deep South. Black seamen from Boston took copies sewn into the insides of their coats on trips to Charleston; from there African Americans passed along copies as far south as Savannah and New Orleans. Southern politicians desperately tried to have the Appeal suppressed, while white vigilantes attacked free African Americans in Wilmington, North Carolina, who had copies of the pamphlet, and four black men were arrested in New Orleans for carrying copies. Fearing the spread of Walker’s views, Southern legislatures enacted laws prohibiting the dissemination of antislavery literature and the teaching of reading or writing to slaves and free black men and women. Southern plantation owners offered a bounty of three thousand dollars to anyone who would kill Walker. Within a year, the black abolitionist was found dead at the doorstep of his home.34
In 1831, as if in response to Walker’s pamphlet, one of the largest slave revolts prior to the Civil War erupted in Southampton County, Virginia, propelling militant abolitionism. Nat Turner, born in the same week of Prosser’s planned conspiracy, was a slave-prophet who for months had been secretly preaching and organizing African Americans throughout southern Virginia. The insurrection was planned for the Fourth of July, 1831, but had to be delayed due to his falling ill. Six weeks later, he led a bloody rebellion involving up to seventy slaves. Fifty-seven white men, women, and children were killed in the attacks. With swift and massive white militia forces brought in, Turner and his armed band were captured or killed.35
Turner himself evaded capture until October 30. In all, Virginia would execute fifty-five African Americans and banish others. In addition, some two hundred black men and women, including dozens who had had nothing to do with the rebellion, were killed by white mobs. Turner was tried in Southampton County Court and sentenced to execution. On November 11, he was not only hanged but subsequently skinned. So fearful were white Virginians of another slave rebellion on par with, or greater than, Turner’s that the state legislature’s house came close to passing an act of gradual abolition. In a razor-thin vote, representatives decided against abolishing slavery, opting instead to implement even more repressive policies against the black population, both free and enslaved.36
While most slave rebellions were contained, they could not be prevented from continuing to erupt in the United States or elsewhere in the hemisphere. Soon, slaves in Jamaica would rebel, on a scale dozens of times larger than the revolt in Virginia. The “Christmas Uprising” of 1831–32, led by Samuel Sharpe, which involved as many as sixty thousand slaves, would drive members of Parliament to emancipate slaves in the British Empire. The Slavery Abolition Act, which became effective in 1834, while it included a debilitating “apprentice” period for newly emancipated slaves, was, in turn, used to galvanize the abolitionist movement in the United States. Abolitionists across the Atlantic invited their American counterparts into their homes, schools, and churches in sympathy with their cause, and over the next generation a dozen black abolitionist leaders took the month-long sea journey to England, helping to generate international support for the movement at home.37
Back in the United States, many of the same transportation and communication networks that helped to spread the abolitionist message reinforced Northern and Southern commercial ties. Railroads, waterways, and roadways linked the two regions as interdependent economic entities resting on the ongoing exploitation of black labor. As James Brewer Stewart notes, “The cotton revolution that swept the Mississippi-Alabama-Georgia frontier stimulated textile manufacturing and shipping in the Northeast. In the Northwest, yet another economic boom took shape as businessmen and farmers in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois developed lucrative relationships with the eastern seaboard, and the populations of Northern cities grew apace, led by a rapidly expanding, wage-earning working class.”38 Among the wage-earning workers in the Northeast, and to a lesser extent in the West (modern Midwest), were free African Americans. In the 1820s, despite being legally free, this group did not have the same legal rights and privileges as their white counterparts.
According to the U.S. Census, by 1830 there were nearly three hundred and twenty thousand free African Americans in the nation compared to over two million slaves. While hundreds of free African Americans voted in local elections in the North during the early to mid-nineteenth century, their rights were increasingly called into question by legislators and then curtailed. The State Department refused to grant passports to free African Americans, issuing certificates instead. The department claimed the issuance of passports was tantamount to recognition
