Influential Slave Rebellions

There were many slave rebellions before the Civil War, but two of them in particular stand out in historical significance.  These were the revolt led by Denmark Vesey in 1822 and another led by Nat Turner in 1831.  

Denmark Vesey was an African-American man who bought his freedom with money won from a city lottery.  After residing in South Carolina as a free man for several years, he began to plot a slave revolt, inspired by the Haitian slave revolt in 1791 and his time spent laboring there.  It was set to occur on July 14, 1822, but word of the revolt was leaked to authorities, and Vesey, along with 35 of the 131 men involved in the conspiracy, was hanged.  In response to the Vesey rebellion, the South Carolinian government drafted restrictions on the ability of African-Americans to move from state to state and others that allowed port officials to arrest all black sailors that entered Charleston.  This was ruled unconstitutional by the federal government, which contributed to the secession of South Carolina and the debate over states’ rights.

Nat Turner, an extremely pious man whose religious fervor and visions ultimately led him to start his rebellion, was a slave in Southampton County, Virginia. After seeing a solar eclipse earlier in the year, he gathered four of his trusted friends and began his rampage on August 21, 1831.  Going door to door, his group killed every white person they saw and freed every African-American they saw as well, who would then join the group.  By the time the rebellion was suppressed, the rebellion was over seventy people strong.  It was eventually defeated by the local militia.  In retaliation, many of the members of the rebellion were executed, and companies of the state militia massacred between another 100 to 200 African-Americans.

These two revolts paved the way for others such as John Brown’s at Harper’s Ferry, and the rebellions together were one of the main causes of the Civil War; the southerners realized that the slaves were becoming increasingly harder to control, and if they continued to be inflamed by the fiery words of the Northern abolitionists they would eventually have uprisings on a much a larger scale than had previously occurred.