ABSTRACT
Prior to 1780, slavery existed in all European settler societies in the Americas. For many years the historiography of American slavery was dominated by the study of those portions of Anglophone America that became the United States and by the study of Brazil, but during recent decades an explosion of scholarship has both broadened and deepened knowledge of slavery throughout the hemisphere. It has become clear that slavery was a remarkably flexible institution, taking different forms and playing different economic, social, and cultural roles in the gold and silver mines in South and Central America, the cities of Spanish and Luso America, the logging frontiers of Central America, the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, the ships plying the Atlantic, and the farms, towns, and plantations of North America. The wealth of local and regional studies that has revealed this variety has also uncovered a wide range of labor relations, living arrangements, family structures, and cultural responses. In all of these settings, however, historians have found evidence that the enslaved resisted their oppression. The omnipresence of resistance in the historiography of slavery raises questions. In the
hands of some historians, it can seem that any act committed by any slave that did not obviously reinforce slavery should be considered an example of resistance. When should attending a dance or a barbecue be considered an act of resistance, and when should it not? Limiting the definition of resistance is more difficult, however, than it might appear, because the wide array of contexts within which slavery developed means that broad, synthetic, and theoretical approaches to resistance threaten to homogenize the different meanings that similar acts carried in different settings. It is true, for instance, that slaves throughout the Americas ran away from those who claimed them as property. Under any theoretical umbrella, such behavior counts as resistance. But even in this seemingly clear-cut case, the similarity is deceiving. Were those African, African American, and Native American people who ran away to build and then defend the federated villages that comprised the famous seventeenth-century Brazilian quilombo of Palmares engaged in the same activity as an eighteenth-century African American slave who ran away from Landon Carter’s Virginia plantation, but who remained hiding in the immediate vicinity until he was recaptured? How does either of those acts relate to Frederick Douglass’ famous flight to freedom from Maryland to New York in 1838, or the attempt of Gabriel, the leader of an 1800 slave conspiracy in Richmond, Virginia, to stow away on board a boat sailing away from the state in an effort to escape those trying to capture him? (Schwartz, 1992: ch. 4; Isaac, 1982: 328-50; Sidbury, 1997: ch. 2, 3). No one doubts
that all of these runaways were resisting the slave regimes in which they lived, but grouping them together threatens to obscure more than it illuminates about what they did and what they believed themselves to be doing. To be sure, too much can be made of this problem. On one level, it is simply a specific
instance of the tension inherent in all historical synthesis – that between respecting what is specific and idiosyncratic about an individual or event while drawing out broader patterns. On a more important level, it can sound a useful cautionary note about the complications involved in tracing patterns linking the efforts and perceptions of millions of men and women caught up in an institution that lasted from the beginning of the sixteenth century until the end of the nineteenth century, spanned North and South America as well as the islands of the Caribbean, and supplied labor for enterprises that ranged from small family farms and artisanal workshops to large mines, huge plantations, and major industrial concerns. Resistance could not help but take different forms and have different meanings at different times and places. In surveying the struggles of many of the enslaved peoples throughout the Americas, this chapter discusses three broad aspects of slave resistance: the search for cultural autonomy, the efforts of the enslaved to run away from their owners, and the physically violent responses of some enslaved people to their condition. In moving from a survey of the cultures of the enslaved to an examination of slave violence, the discussion moves from the most ambiguous forms of resistance to those acts whose status as resistance historians have been least inclined to question. It closes with a discussion of the relationships among these different kinds of resistance.
