Female Slaves in the Plantation South

¶ … Rebellion to Revolution

Slaves in Southern Plantations

In his 1979 book From Rebellion to Revolution, Genovese examines the change in the thrust of slave rebellions away from localized efforts focused on winning freedom to a movements couched in Marxist world view that were intended to overthrow slavery as a social system. Chapters 1 and 2 are reviewed below.

Slave Revolts in Hemispheric Perspective

In this chapter, Eugene Genovese examines the slave revolts that occurred in the New World against a backdrop of modern world history. The great feat that Genovese accomplishes here is to connect the ideology of the slave revolts to that of the major revolutions that occurred in the late eighteenth century. He accomplishes this by grounding his comparison in an examination of conditions in the western hemisphere that fostered revolution and in his discussion of the history of slave guerrilla warfare.

Genovese offers a portrait of slavery in the western hemisphere that reflects the historical perspective and articulates a certain character that are the products of the capitalist mode of that was globally dominant. The focus of slaves in the western hemisphere, accordingly, was on freedom, democracy, and equality -- all a foreshadowing of less bourgeois manifestations that would not take form until socialist alternatives began to take shape. Revolts in the western hemisphere were inextricably related to political opposition to the European colonialist and capitalist "bloody conquest of the world and attendant subjugation" of native people (Genovese, 1972, p. 2). In what Genovese refers to as an epoch-making shift, the black uprising of Saint-Domingue was the watershed revolt -- inspired by the French Revolution -- that turned the movement from one focused on freedom to one determined to bring down slavery as a social system. Although Genovese asserts that it was not a clean, fully conscious, decisive ideological shift, fraught with many contradictions, he largely leaves this discussion to other cultural historians. As slavery waned in America, market costs grew and, in concordance, so did profit potential. The juxtaposition of these two forces helped to shape the paternalistic relationships that fostered relative quiescence in the Old South. Following the bloody Nat Turner slave rebellion in 1831, a Virginia legislator remarked that, "Our slave population is not only a happy one, but it is a contented, peaceful and harmless one."

1. Why did Genovese focus his writings on slave rebellions and revolts in the western hemisphere?

2. What is paternalism as it occurred in the Old South?

3. What ideological shift was inspired by the Saint-Domingue revolt?

Chapter 2 -- Black Maroons in War and Peace

This chapter examines the relationship between the maroons or slaves "who fled the plantations, grouped themselves in runaway communities, and waged guerilla warfare" (p. 51). Maroons sometimes were loyal to the European country dominating the region in which they lived. Though these relations were tenuous, the maroons would work often work to impede slave revolts and hunt down and kill runaway slaves, or return them to their masters. However, maroons were more likely to assist runaway slaves than to catch them for the Europeans. Because the maroons were so effective at guerilla warfare, white slaveholders were afraid of a maroon-slave coalition and a maroon-Native American alliance.