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  • African American Studies x
  • Slave Revolt Leader x
  • 1400–1774: The Age of Exploration and the Colonial Era x
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Article

Biassou, Jorge  

Jane G. Landers

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

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 ...

Article

Cinqué  

Dennis Wepman

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

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 ...

Article

Deslandes (Deslondes), Charles  

Rhae Lynn Barnes

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

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 ...

Article

Pritchard, “Gullah” Jack  

Nathaniel Millett

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

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 ...

Article

Prosser, Nancy  

Cassandra Veney

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

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 ...

Article

Tacky  

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

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 ...

Article

Turner, Nat  

Douglas R. Egerton

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

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 ...

Article

Vesey, Denmark  

Douglas R. Egerton

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

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 ...

Article

Vesey, Denmark  

Tiwanna M. Simpson

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

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 ...

Article

Washington, Madison  

Zoe Trodd

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

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 ...