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Journal of African American Studies

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01-06-2015 | ARTICLES

Slave Religion, Slave Hiring, and the Incipient Proletarianization of Enslaved Black Labor: Developing Du Bois’ Thesis on Black Participation in the Civil War as a Revolution

Author: Errol A. Henderson

Published in: Journal of African American Studies | Issue 2/2015

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Abstract

WEB Du Bois argued that black participation in the US Civil War was “the largest and most successful slave revolt,” but he did not link the causative agents of black participation in the war to those that motivated other major slave revolts in the antebellum USA. In this essay, I focus on how two factors contributed to such revolts: (1) slave religion, which provided an ideological justification for overthrowing the slave system and mobile slave preachers to articulate it, and (2) the system of hiring out slaves—especially slave artisans, which increased their disaffection with the slave system, while expanding networks across plantations and rural and urban slave and free black communities. I argue that these two factors provided ideological motivation and institutional coordination for the antebellum revolts and for the slave revolt of the Civil War, as well.

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For estimates of the number of black troops from northern and southern states, see Berlin et al. (1983).

For Colburn (1994: 6), “revolution is the sudden, violent, and drastic substitution of one group governing a territorial political entity for another group formerly excluded from government, and an ensuing assault on state and society for the purpose of radically transforming society.” Also, see Goldstone (2001).

Genovese (1981: 4–5) notes that “[b]y the end of the eighteenth century, the historical content of the slave revolts shifted decisively from attempts to secure freedom from slavery to attempts to overthrow slavery as a social system,” with “[t]he great black revolution in Saint-Domingue mark[ing] the turning point,” and “[t]he nineteenth century revolts in the Old South formed part of this epoch-making transformation in the relations of class and race in the Western Hemisphere.” Specifically, “the black demand for the abolition of slavery as a social system was something new and epoch-making” (p. xx).

McPherson (1991: 35) argues that the revolutionary quality of the Civil War was the result of the “enlistment of black soldiers to fight and kill their former masters,” which impelled Lincoln to change his initial limited war aims to “the revolutionary goal of a new Union without slavery” (p. 34).

He added: “Yet one would search current American histories almost in vain to find a clear statement or even faint recognition of these perfectly well-authenticated facts” (p. 717).

Du Bois (1995 [1933]: 543) lamented that Marx did not focus “first hand upon the history of the American Negro” and concluded that Marxism “must be modified in the [US] and especially so far as the Negro group is concerned.”

Starobin (1970: 89) highlights several revolts and conspiracies involving industrial slaves after Turner’s revolt, and while some may have been exaggerated by whites, actual cases such as the slave conspiracy in 1856 was “especially significant, since it involved industrial slaves almost exclusively.”

Sidbury (1997: 88) rejects the claims that the revolt was rooted in “artisanal republicanism.”

On whether Gabriel was hired out, contrast Egerton (1993: 24–5) and Sidbury (1997: 83).

Interestingly, after escaping from Richmond, Gabriel was helped by a white boat captain and betrayed by a hired-out slave artisan. Gabriel and more than 30 other conspirators were hanged. In the aftermath, the legislature restricted slave hiring and limited the residency and movement of free blacks.

Several authors—most prominently Johnson (2001)—have argued that the Vesey conspiracy was a fabrication of white politicians, but this claim has been challenged, most convincingly, by Spady (2011).

A similar argument is made by Raboteau (1980: 163) and, more recently, Harris (2001), among others.

Ironically, the key informant, George Wilson, was a blacksmith, a class leader in the AME church, and a founding member of the church (Pearson 1999; Robertson 1999).

Oates (1975:161) argues that “[t]hose who describe Nat as a skilled slave are wrong. In 1822, Nat was valued at $400—the price of a good field hand. During his trial for insurrection, he was valued at only $375. By contrast, a slave blacksmith also tried for the rebellion was valued at $675. Moreover, Nat mentions nothing in the Confessions about ever being a skilled slave; rather, he refers to himself as a field hand at work behind his plow” (p. 38).

Similar laws were enacted across the slave states, contributing to the vast illiteracy among slaves such that most slaves freed by the Civil War were illiterate.

On networks, skilled labor, slave hiring, and religion, see Schermerhorn (2011).

For a useful synthesis of discussions on enslaved artisan workers and networks of communication, see Buchanan (2004).

The more formal clandestine networks, such as Webb describes, culminated in the Underground Railroad, which by the 1850s “had developed into a diverse, flexible, and interlocking system with thousands of activists residing from the upper South to Canada” (Bordewich 2005: 5).

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Title: Slave Religion, Slave Hiring, and the Incipient Proletarianization of Enslaved Black Labor: Developing Du Bois’ Thesis on Black Participation in the Civil War as a Revolution
Author: Errol A. Henderson
Publication date: 01-06-2015
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Journal of African American Studies / Issue 2/2015
Print ISSN: 1559-1646
Electronic ISSN: 1936-4741
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-015-9299-8

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