The Many-Headed Hydra by Peter Linebaugh

Author:Peter Linebaugh [ Linebaugh, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8070-5015-6
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2013-09-20T04:00:00+00:00

A Negro hung alive by the Ribs to a Gallows, c. 1773, by William Blake. Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition.

Slave resistance was closely related to the development of Afro-Christianity. In Saint Bartholomew Parish, South Carolina, an insurrectionary plot terrified the white population in the spring of 1776. Its leaders were black preachers, including two female prophets. A minister named George claimed that England’s “Young King . . . was about to alter the world, & set the Negroes Free.” Further south, in Savannah, Georgia, Preacher David was almost hanged after he expounded upon Exodus: “God would send Deliverance to the Negroes, from the Power of their Masters, as he freed the Children of Israel from Egyptian Bondage.” Meanwhile, a new generation of evangelical leaders emerged in the 1760s and 1770s, including George Liele and David George (Baptists) and Moses Wilkinson and Boston King (Methodists). Liele, a slave from Virginia who founded the first Baptist church in Georgia, was evacuated by the British to Kingston, Jamaica, where he established another church.29

As we have noted, revolutionary ideas circulated rapidly in the port cities. Runaway slaves and free people of color flocked to the ports in search of sanctuary and a money wage and took work as laborers and seamen. Slaves also toiled in the maritime sector, some with ships’ masters as owners, others hired out by the voyage. By the middle of the eighteenth century, slaves dominated Charleston’s maritime and riverine traffic, in which some 20 percent of the city’s adult male slaves labored. The independence of these “Boat negroes” had long worried the city’s rulers, especially when subversive activities were involved, as was alleged against Thomas Jeremiah, a river pilot, in 1775. Jeremiah was arrested for stockpiling guns as he waited for the imperial war that would “help the poor Negroes.” “Two or three White people,” probably sailors, were also held, then released for lack of evidence, and finally driven from the province. Black pilots were a “rebellious lot, particularly resistant to white control.”30

The political effects of slave resistance were contradictory, fueling fear and repression (police and patrols) on one side and new opposition to slavery on the other. This was especially true in the years leading up to the American Revolution, which marked a new stage in the development of an abolitionist movement. Benezet, America’s leading Quaker abolitionist, chronicled slave uprisings around the world and tirelessly disseminated news of them through correspondence, pamphlets, and books. His work, in tandem with resistance from below, led to new attacks on the slave trade in Massachusetts in 1767 and in Rhode Island, Delaware, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and the Continental Congress by 1774. The first formal antislavery organization in America was established in Philadelphia in 1775.31

Two of the revolution’s most popular pamphleteers were moved by the militancy of slaves in the 1770s to attack slavery as they expanded the arguments for human freedom. John Allen, a Baptist minister who had witnessed the riots, trials, hangings, and diaspora of London’s Spital-fields silk weavers through

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