Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia

Gerald W. Mullin argues that slaves resisted slavery in Virginia from the spread of plantation slavery in the 1690s to the conspiracy hatched by Gabriel Prosser in 1800. Mullins contends that all slaves fought to undermine slavery, whether they were a majority of the African-born slaves in the early-1700s or an elite of American-born artisan slaves in the late-1700s. Based on their cultural background and their work environment, however, slaves encountered different forms of slavery and responded with different forms of resistance. Mullin also mentions the religious and ideological influences on slave conspirators and their possible white sympathizers late in the eighteenth century.Stanley Elkins, in Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, argued that American slavery, unlike Latin American slavery, psychologically infantilized slaves so that resistance was uncommon. This book by Mullin, and Black Majority by Peter H. Wood, should be understood as rebuttals to Elkins. The 3rd revised edition of Slavery contains Elkins' brief rejoinder to both Wood and Mullin.For those interested in the possible influence of African heritage on African responses to slavery, see Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves; David Eltis, et al., Routes to Slavery; Robert Ferris Thompson, Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds; and Michael Angelo Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana, includes an enlightening chapter on Senegambia during the era of the slave trade. Those interested in North American slave revolts should also consider Wood's Black Majority on the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina. Seek also any books on Gabriel Prosser in Virginia, or books on the slave revolt in New York.