Gabriel Prosser
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1712 New York Slave Revolt |
Gabriel (1776–October 10, 1800), today commonly, if incorrectly, known as Gabriel Prosser, was a slave born in Henrico County, Virginia who planned a slave rebellion in the Richmond area in the summer of 1800. Planters and the state militia suppressed the rebellion. Gabriel and other slaves who participated were hanged.
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[edit] Life
Born at Brookfield plantation as the slave of Thomas Prosser, Gabriel had two brothers, Solomon and Martin. Most likely, Gabriel's father was a blacksmith, the occupation chosen for Gabriel and for Solomon. By the mid-1790s, as Gabriel neared the age of twenty, he stood "six feet two or three inches high." A long and "bony face, well made," was marred by the loss of his two front teeth and "two or three scars on his head." Whites as well as blacks regarded the literate young man as "a fellow of great courage and intellect above his rank in life."[citation needed]
[edit] Gabriel's Rebellion
Gabriel planned the revolt during the spring and summer of 1800. On August 30, 1800, Gabriel hoped to lead the slaves into Richmond, but torrential rains postponed the rebellion. The slaves' masters had suspicion of the uprising. Before it could be carried out, two slaves notified their master Mosby Sheppard. He in turn warned Virginia's Governor James Monroe, who called out the state militia. Gabriel tried to escape downriver to Norfolk, but was spotted and betrayed by a fellow slave for the reward. That slave did not receive the full reward.
Gabriel was returned to Richmond for questioning, but he did not submit. Gabriel, his two brothers, and 24 of their followers were hanged.
[edit] Historiography
Historian Douglas Egerton offered a new perspective on Gabriel in his book Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800-1802. Although the book incorporated extensive primary research from surviving contemporary documents, some of his conclusions remained controversial among historians of the period.
Egerton observed, for example, that Gabriel was never known by the surname "Prosser." He noted that was an after-the-fact assumption from a period when slaves and ex-slaves sometimes adopted their owner's family names, or whites assumed they would do so. According to Egerton, in 1800 white authorities referred to Gabriel as "Prosser's Gabriel," but his common-use name was simply Gabriel.
Egerton found that Gabriel was a skilled blacksmith who mostly "hired out" his time in Richmond foundries, an increasingly common practice when the market for tobacco was depressed, soil depleted, and jobs were available in Virginia industries. Egerton concluded that Gabriel absorbed the viewpoint of his co-workers of European, African and mixed descent, who expected Thomas Jefferson's Republicans to liberate them from domination by the wealthy Federalist merchants of the city.
Gabriel appeared to have two white co-conspirators, at least one of whom was identified as a French national. Documentary evidence of their identity or involvement was sent straight to Governor Monroe but never produced in court. The internal dynamics of Jefferson's and Monroe's party in the 1800 elections were more complex than they appeared to both white and black partisans in Richmond. A significant part of the Republicans' base were themselves owners of large plantations. Any sign that white radicals, and particularly Frenchmen, had supported Gabriel's plan could have cost Jefferson the election.
Egerton also noted that Gabriel did not order his followers to kill all whites except Methodists, Quakers and Frenchmen; he rather instructed them to refrain from killing any of those three categories. He even planned, Egerton asserts, to take Monroe hostage, to negotiate an end to slavery and then to "drink and dine with the merchants of the city" when freedom had been agreed to.
Gabriel initially escaped on a ship owned by a former overseer, a recently converted Methodist who repeatedly ignored information as to his passenger's identity. Gabriel was turned in by a slave "hired out" to work on the ship, who hoped to obtain a sufficient reward to purchase his own freedom. However, the slave was paid only $50, not the $3000 he expected.
[edit] Impact
Gabriel's uprising was notable not because of its actual impact — the rebellion was quelled before it could begin — but because of the potential for mass chaos. No reliable numbers exist regarding slave and free black conspirators; most likely, the number of men actively involved numbered only several hundred.[citation needed]
Southern slaveholders were well aware of the Haitian Revolution and feared a slave rebellion in Virginia and other states. Gabriel had been able to plan the rebellion so well because of relatively lax rules of movement between plantations. After the rebellion, many slaveholders greatly restricted the slaves' rights of travel when not working. Fears of a slave revolt regularly swept major slaveholding communities.
Prior to this rebellion, Virginia law had allowed education of slaves, and training slaves in skilled trades. After the rebellion, and after a second conspiracy was organized in 1802 among enslaved boatmen along the Appomattox and Roanoke Rivers, the Virginia Assembly banned hiring out of slaves (1808) and required freed blacks to leave the state or face reenslavement (1806). The latter law was also a result of an increase in the population of free people of color. Numerous slaveholders in the first years after the Revolution freed their slaves by will or deed. The very existence of free blacks challenged the conditions of slave states.
[edit] Pardon
On August 30, 2007, Virginia Governor Tim Kaine informally pardoned Gabriel and his co-conspirators. Kaine said that Gabriel's motivation had been "his devotion to the ideals of the American revolution — it was worth risking death to secure liberty." Kaine noted that "Gabriel's cause — the end of slavery and the furtherance of equality of all people — has prevailed in the light of history," and added that "it is important to acknowledge that history favorably regards Gabriel's cause while consigning legions who sought to keep him and others in chains to be forgotten."[1]
[edit] Novel
- Arna Bontemps, Black Thunder. New York: Macmillan, 1936, a historical novel based on Gabriel's Rebellion
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
[edit] Sources
- Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. New York: International Publishers, 1983 (1943).
- Egerton, Douglas R. Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.
- Rodriguez, Junius P., ed. Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006.
- Sidbury, James. Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel's Virginia, 1730-1810. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
