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Haitian revolutionary, was born a slave in Cap Français (or Guarico, in Spanish), on the northern coast of Saint Domingue, in modern Haiti. Spanish documents give his parents' names as Carlos and Diana, and Biassou and his mother were the slaves of the Holy Fathers of Charity in Cap Français, where Biassou's mother worked in the Hospital of the Holy Fathers of Charity, probably as a laundress or cook. Biassou's father's owner and occupation are unknown.

In 1791 Biassou joined Boukman Dutty, a slave driver and coachman considered by the slaves to be a religious leader, and Jean‐François, also a slave from the Northern Plains of Saint Domingue, in leading the largest slave revolt in the Western Hemisphere on–the richest sugar colony of its day, French Saint Domingue. Boukman was killed in November of 1791 only three months into the revolt and Biassou and Jean François assumed command ...

slave mutineer, was born Sengbe (also spelled Singbe and Sengbeh) Pieh in the village of Mani, in the Mende territory of Sierra Leone, Africa, the son of a rice farmer. His mother died when he was young, and at about the age of twenty-five he lived with his father, his wife, and his three children. One day while working alone in his rice field, he was seized by four members of the Vai tribe, often employed by Europeans to capture slaves for the market. He was taken to Lomboko, an island at the mouth of the Gallinas River on the coast of Sierra Leone, where he was purchased by Pedro Blanco, a Spanish slave trader, for sale in Cuba. He remained in Lomboko for three months in chains before Blanco filled the ship that was to transport him to Havana.

Slavery was still legal in Cuba but the trans ...

Although Sengbe—pronounced Sin’gway, and later Anglicized as Joseph Cinque—lived for approximately sixty-six years, he is best known for his role in a drama that lasted a little more than three years. Scholars believe that Cinque, who belonged to the Mende ethnic group, was a married man and father before his abduction. Cinque was born in Sierra Leone and at about the age of twenty-six, he was kidnapped by slave raiders and sold to Portuguese slave traders who took him to Havana, Cuba. There, he and other Africans were resold and put on the Amistad Shortly after leaving Havana harbor Cinque led a group of slaves who freed themselves and attacked the ship s crew killing all but two crewmembers The rebels kept these two alive and ordered them to sail back to Africa The crewmembers however tricked them and sailed north About two months later the ship landed ...

or Cuffee slave insurrectionist was the reported leader of the first major slave rebellion in the American colonies His name means son born on a Friday in the Akan language of Gold Coast Africans The Akan known in the era of the slave trade as Coromantees were reputed to resist enslavement with great bravery and ferocity In the early eighteenth century slavery had become an integral part of the economy of New York City with an active slave market and a regular influx of slave labor from Africa As the slave population grew treatment of slaves became increasingly brutal as British colonists attempted to make slave labor as productive in the North as it was in the South Unlike slaves on southern plantations however slaves in New York City lived in densely populated areas and had many more opportunities to meet with one another and plan organized resistance On the ...

leader of the largest slave revolt in U.S. history, has largely evaded the scrutiny of historians. Most studies have suggested that he was a free man of color born in Saint-Domingue who was part of the large 1809 immigration to Louisiana from that colony. An as yet unpublished work by the scholar Gwendolyn Midlo Hall suggests however that Deslondes (sometimes spelled Deslandes) was a Louisiana-born slave.

Whatever his origins, it is clear that in 1811, Charles Deslondes was the leader of the revolt known as the German Coast Uprising or the Deslondes Uprising, which occurred along the eastern bank of the Mississippi River in Louisiana. On the evening of 8 January 1811 at the age of thirty one Deslondes led a band of rebels downriver on River Road They began in modern day Norco and continued through the parishes of St Charles and St John the Baptist ...

The enslaved revolutionary known only as Gabriel was born near Richmond, Virginia, at Brookfield, the Henrico County plantation of Thomas Prosser. By Virginia standards, Brookfield was a large plantation, with a population of approximately fifty enslaved laborers. The identity of Gabriel's parents is lost to history, but he had two older brothers, Martin and Solomon. Most likely, Gabriel's father was a blacksmith, the occupation chosen for Gabriel and Solomon; in Virginia the offspring of skilled bondpersons frequently inherited their parents' professions.

Status as a craft artisan provided the young blacksmith with considerable standing in the slave community, as did his ability to read and write. In the 1780s it was not yet illegal to teach Virginia slaves to be literate, and effective artisans needed the rudiments of literacy. According to tradition, his teacher was his plantation mistress, Ann Prosser As Gabriel grew to be an unusually tall young ...

slave and revolutionary, was born near Richmond, Virginia, at Brookfield, the Henrico County plantation of Thomas Prosser. The identity of Gabriel's parents is lost to history, but it is known that he had two older brothers, Martin and Solomon. Most likely, Gabriel's father was a blacksmith, the craft chosen for Gabriel and Solomon; in Virginia, the offspring of skilled bondpersons frequently inherited their parent's profession.

Status as an apprentice artisan provided the young craftsman with considerable standing in the slave community as did his ability to read and write a skill perhaps taught to him by the plantation mistress Ann Prosser As Gabriel developed into an unusually tall young man even older slaves looked to him for leadership By the mid 1790s as he approached the age of twenty Gabriel stood six feet two or three inches high and the muscles in his arms and chest betrayed nearly ...

leader of the 1739 Stono slave rebellion, was born in central Africa, most likely in the Kingdom of Kongo, now part of Angola, and brought as a slave to the British colony of South Carolina in the 1730s. A majority of the African slaves sold by the British Royal African Company to South Carolina in the early eighteenth century originated in Kongo, an independent kingdom that had converted to Christianity more than two hundred years earlier. If typical of Kongolese slaves brought to South Carolina, Jemmy would have worshipped a combination of Roman Catholicism and older African faiths and may well have had knowledge of Portuguese, or some Creolized variant of that language, which was the lingua franca of the slave trade and of the Kongo elite Jemmy s ability as a military leader and the fighting skills of his fellow rebels had probably been acquired through service in ...

conjurer and slave rebel, was born in East Africa during the final quarter of the eighteenth century. He was a native of the country of “M'Choolay Morcema” (possibly modern Mozambique), from which he was captured, taken to Zanzibar, and sold to Zephaniah Kingsley in 1805. At the time of his enslavement, he possessed a bag of conjuring implements and had been a “priest” in his homeland. Jack may have initially gone to Kingsley's plantation in East Florida but was purchased by the wealthy Charleston shipbuilder, Paul Pritchard, in April 1806 and worked on the docks as a joiner and caulker.

Jack s position as an urban and skilled slave allowed him a number of relative luxuries in a city and society that were dominated by slavery Jack who was single lived by himself off of his master s property and received permission to hire out his time ...

slave, participant, and co-conspirator in an attempted slave revolt in 1800. There is a scant historical record of the life of Nancy Prosser. She is best known for her role in the 1800 aborted slave revolt led by her husband, Gabriel, and his two brothers, Solomon and Martin. Nancy, who went by the nickname Nanny, was born a slave in Henrico County, Virginia. She married Gabriel sometime around 1799. There is no record of any children born of the union. Gabriel was the slave of Thomas Henry Prosser the couple has often been called Prosser but there is no evidence that they used their owner s surname After the two were married it is not certain if Nancy lived with Gabriel on the Prosser plantation Brookfield located approximately six miles from Richmond Whether the two lived together or not they probably influenced ...

Tacky's rebellion began in northeastern Jamaica and soon engulfed much of the island The rebellion lasted for six months before British colonial forces were finally able to suppress it with help from the maroons escaped slaves who formed their own settlements who were required by treaty to aid the ...

The leader of the bloodiest and most celebrated slave rebellion in U.S. history, Nat Turner was born the slave of Benjamin Turner on 1 October 1800 in Southampton County, Virginia. In The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831), a portion of which was reputedly taken down from Turner's dictation, the slave rebel portrays himself as a precocious child who was recognized by blacks and whites alike as “intended for some great purpose.” He learned to read and write early on and displayed a strong interest in religion. When not employed in field labor, Turner says he dabbled in experiments in making paper and gunpowder.

In 1821, Turner ran away from his master but returned voluntarily after about a month. In the next year he was sold to Thomas Moore, a Southampton farmer. In 1825 Turner received what he called his first heavenly vision in which he was ...

Nat Turner was born on Benjamin Turner's plantation in Southampton County, Virginia, five days before the execution of African American revolutionary Gabriel Prosser, who planned a slave revolt in Richmond, Virginia. Turner's father, a Benjamin Turner slave whose name is unknown, successfully escaped and is believed to have spent his life with other escaped slaves in the Great Dismal Swamp, which lies in southern Virginia and in North Carolina.

Turner's mother, a slave named Nancy who had been kidnapped from Africa in 1793, believed that her son was destined for great things in his life, and she instilled a sense of this in him. As a boy, Turner learned to read and write, adding weight to his mother's convictions. Turner also accepted Christianity in his youth, became a preacher, and identified religion with freedom. He claimed to receive religious visions throughout his life.

Turner sought ...

Born into slavery in Southampton County, Virginia, Nat Turner led the bloodiest slave insurrection in American history. Turner's first owner was Benjamin Turner, who by most accounts was a relatively benign master. Following Benjamin Turner's death and, later, that of his son, Nat Turner was sold to Thomas Moore. The details of much of Nat Turner's life prior to the rebellion are uncertain. What is known is that unlike most slaves, Turner was literate; he was also a faith-filled man, whose spirituality was the moving force behind the rebellion. After his arrest for both inciting rebellion and committing murder, Turner told his story to Thomas Gray, his lawyer, which was published in 1831 as The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Virginia Turner said that even in his youth people had predicted he would be a prophet as the Lord had ...

abolitionist and rebel, was born on the Virginia plantation of Benjamin Turner, the child of an enslaved woman named Nancy; the name of his father, also a slave, has not been recorded. Little is known about either parent. Family tradition holds that Nancy landed in Norfolk in 1795, the slave of a refugee fleeing the revolt in Saint Domingue (Haiti). Evidence indicates that after being purchased by Turner, Nancy was used as a domestic servant. Later in life, Nat Turner insisted that his father ran away when Nat was still a boy.

Early on blacks and whites alike came to regard Nat as unusually gifted Upon being given a book the boy quickly learned how to read a source of wonder to all in the neighborhood As a devout Methodist Benjamin Turner was not only aware of Nat s literacy he even encouraged him to read ...

The man later known as Denmark Vesey was born about 1767, probably on the Caribbean sugar island of Saint Thomas. In 1822Captain Joseph Vesey, who was Denmark's second and fourth owner, recalled that when he first purchased the boy at the port of Charlotte Amalie in 1781, he appeared to be “about 14 years” old. Although the port functioned more as a transit slave station then an entrepôt to the island's sugar plantations, during the eighteenth century no more than 10 percent of all Africans carried to the Americas were children. Most likely the boy, whose original name and ancestry is lost to history, had simply reached an age and height that would fetch a goodly sum in the coastal barracoons.

Joseph Vesey, a Carolina-based slaver, purchased the boy in September or October of 1781 as part of a cargo of 390 bondpeople During ...

mariner, carpenter, abolitionist, was born either in Africa or the Caribbean and probably grew up as a slave on the Danish colony of St. Thomas, which is now a part of the U.S. Virgin Islands. When Denmark was about fourteen years old, the slave trader Captain Joseph Vesey purchased him to sell on the slave market in Saint Domingue (Haiti). The identity of Denmark Vesey's parents and his name at birth are unknown, but Joseph Vesey gave him the name “Telemaque.” He became “Denmark Vesey” in 1800, after he purchased his freedom from lottery winnings. Vesey's family life is difficult to reconstruct. He had at least three wives and several children, including three boys—Sandy, Polydore, and Robert—and a girl, Charlotte. His first and second wives, Beck and Polly, and their children lived as slaves. His third wife, Susan was a free woman of color ...

was born into slavery in central Virginia, and his parentage and precise date of birth are unknown. Washington was the instigator of a slave revolt onboard the U.S. brig Creole in 1841. Very little is known about Washington's life before and after the Creole revolt. Married at the age of twenty, he escaped from slavery in 1839 and reached Canada in 1840 after traveling through either Ohio or New York State. He returned to Virginia to free his wife in 1841 and was helped on his return journey by abolitionists in Rochester. But when he reached Virginia he was recaptured, sold to a slave broker named Thomas McCargo, and placed on the Creole with 134 other slaves.

The ship left the port of Richmond, Virginia, on 25 October 1841 bound for New Orleans Louisiana where the slaves would be sold at auction Also on board were thirteen ...

Madison Washington escaped from slavery twice. His actions resulted in widespread admiration from abolitionists—including Frederick Douglass, who hailed Washington as a hero—and spawned novellas, pamphlets, and other antislavery literature that contributed to the widening attack on the institution in the early 1840s.

Washington first escaped slavery when he ran away to Canada. Unable to live freely without his enslaved wife, he returned to the South in a bid to rescue her, which ended tragically when she was killed in the attempt and Washington was enslaved once more. Washington is, however, principally remembered for his second escape from slavery. With a cargo of 135 slaves, the American slave brig Creole sailed from Hampton Roads, Virginia, bound for New Orleans in October 1841 with the re enslaved Washington on board In November a group of nineteen slaves led by Washington seized the boat killing one white crewman and forced a ...