mouths, in stories told from generation to generation, almost two centuries after their passing.
Emblematic of this stellar and bloody period of armed Black resistance, one of that number who will exemplify how deeply this radical example has permeated Black spiritual consciousness, is Gabriel Prosser.
Deeply inspired by the biblical tale of Samson, Gabriel came to believe he had been appointed by the Lord to become the deliverer of his people. A young man of impressive physical and mental gifts, he shared his inner convictions with other captives. He interpreted the verses of the Bible with them, explaining that the tales told referred to the living present—summer 1800—and predicted the deliverance of the people from a hellish bondage. He preached this verse to his fellow captives:
And when he came unto Lehi, the Philistines shouted against him; and the Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him, and the cords that were upon his arms became as flax that were burnt with fire, and his bands loosed from off his hands. And he found a new jawbone of an ass, and slew a thousand men therewith.… And he judged Israel in the days of the Philistines for twenty years.35
The cords and bands of this passage mean the bondage of slavery, Gabriel explained. And the Philistines? They were the slavemasters, of course. Gabriel and his fellow captives were to steal or make weapons—the jawbones of an ass—and they would judge the Philistines and erect a Black kingdom—there, near Richmond—and live life in liberty.36
His inspiring manner and his masterful interpretation of the Bible drew people to join him in this great task. Before long, he was joined by his wife, Nanny, and his brothers, Martin and Solomon. As the movement spread, 1,000 rebels joined his force.
Gabriel conducted reconnaissance in Richmond to acquaint himself with armament stores and the lay of the land. As weapons and bullets were forged, the night to strike was selected. All was in readiness.
On the afternoon of the rising, two slaves, Tom and Pharoah, broke news of the plot to their master, who promptly informed the governor (and later president), James Monroe. Monroe quickly mobilized 650 men and placed state militia commanders on alert.37
The early evening march on Richmond by Gabriel’s 1,000- strong force got mired, literally, as rains made the roads impassable. With travel so obstructed, they decided to disperse, not knowing that the rebellion had already been betrayed. An army of bondsmen and bondswomen, wielding farm implements, a few guns, and the inspiration of their “Black Samson,” melted into the steamy August night, to await a new signal, having come within six miles of Richmond.
The second signal would never come. Over the next few days, a number of rebels, including their charismatic leader, Gabriel Prosser, were caught in the net. None could be compelled to confess or provide information on the plan. Monroe met Prosser, and the governor would later note: “From what he said to me, he seemed to have made up his mind to die, and to have resolved to say but little on the subject of the conspiracy.”38
At least thirty-five rebels, including Gabriel, were hanged.
Like his compatriots in the Grand Conspiracy of Rebellion against bondage, Gabriel did not die to millions of his fellow captives. They still live on, in blessed memory, in spirituals, in legend, in tales in the night, and in the spirit of resistance of an oppressed people.
Armed Self-Defense
We must add to the great and well-known names of revered historical figures the long and impressive history of hundreds, indeed thousands, of largely anonymous Africans who fought, sometimes armed, against the forces of white nationalism and white supremacist terrorism.
The 1763 flight of the Maroons and the abandonment of Fort Mosa did not end the use of the site. Half a century later hundreds of Africans fought a pitched battle against the Americans from the well-armed garrison, now known by all as Negro Fort. Blacks (and their “Indian” relatives) had good reason to live in an armed, well-defended fort along the banks of Florida’s Apalachicola River, and it wasn’t for the same reason that whites, who lived further to the west, would later live in or near forts.
The white fort-dwellers feared attacks from “Indians” who opposed encroachments upon their tribal lands.
The Black fort-dwellers feared attacks from whites (or Native Americans hired by them) who wanted to place them back in slavery.
Andrew Jackson as a Major General of the US Army, not yet president, left no doubt such a fear was justified by his communique to a Spanish governmental official in Pensacola, Florida, dated April 23, 1816:
A Negro Fort erected during our late war with Britain … [here, Jackson refers to the War of 1812, not the Revolution] has been strengthened since the period and is now occupied by upwards of two hundred and fifty Negroes, many of whom have been enticed away from the service of their masters—citizens of the United States: all of whom are well clothed and disciplined.…39
Jackson, who would emerge in his military and political careers as the worst enemy the Native people ever encountered, threatened the Spanish commandant, telling him the fort would be “destroyed” if Spain failed to “control” its residents.40
Herbert Aptheker calculated Negro Fort’s inhabitants at roughly 300 people (Black men, women, and children), with “some thirty Indian allies.” He recounts a ten-day siege of the facility by US forces, which concluded when American cannon fire struck the fort’s armory stores and exploded, killing some 270 of its inhabitants.41
Many Americans are generally familiar with the long history of US-“Indian” warfare, but how many know that the hardest fought battles were the three US-Seminole Wars? Or that these Black, white, and red wars were regarded as essentially wars fought for Black liberation? So many Africans fought on the side of the Seminoles that US General Thomas Jesup would write: “This, you may be assured, is a negro, not an Indian war.”42
This war was fought to re-enslave Blacks who lived in “Indian” territories and because whites feared red-Black unity. It was also fueled by the ever-present white hunger for “Indian” lands.
White American contempt for Native land possession is evinced by their rapacious craving for it, wherever it existed, and their determination, by whatever means possible, to acquire it. As an attorney, John Quincy Adams, arguing in the US Supreme Court, put the case for white seizure of Native lands in stark terms:
What is the Indian title? It is mere occupancy for the purpose of hunting. It is like our tenures; they have no idea of a title to the soil itself. It is overrun by them, rather than inhabited. It is not a true legal possession.43
In the Court’s Fletcher v. Peck case, Adams’s view was made into the law of the land, essentially legalizing seizure and land-theft, because Native Americans had a different cultural, legal, and spiritual relationship to the land. They didn’t use paper and alphabetic formats to record their important events; they used skins or bark and pictographs to communicate ideas. They didn’t inhabit land, they “overran” it.
Adams’s argument of 1802 marked the legal justification for American lebensraum and expansion into “Indian” territories.
What really incensed whites, however, was the spectacle of Africans living in their own villages as nominally free people, or Africans living in maroonage as part of the Seminole tribes. To Africans who escaped from a bitter bondage in neighboring Georgia, or North Carolina, life among the “Indians” in Seminole villages in Florida must have seemed a whole lot like freedom. For, even if bought or captured by a Seminole, a captive had standing that more resembled the institution of captivity in Africa than in the Americas. One’s children were born free,
