Rebellions In Colonial America

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Rebellions in Colonial America Rebellions in colonial North America proliferated during times when the white majority was divided against itself. In 1739, the deadliest revolt in Colonial America takes place in Stono, SC. at least 20 whites and more than 40 blacks are killed. In 1773, Massachusetts’ slaves petitioned legislature for freedom, Jan. 6. There is a record of 8 petitions during Revolutionary War period. Gabriel Prosser’s Rebellion, the most politicized of all the slave rebels, formulated his plans during the divisive election of 1800, when Federalists and Republicans threatened to take up arms against one another. The rebels in the Tidewater area of Virginia, despite the memory of the repression that followed Gabriel's death, began to organize again during the chaos of the War of 1812. Most of all, slaves, who well knew what they were up against and rarely contemplated suicidal ventures, plotted for their freedom only when safer avenues had been closed to them. For most of the seventeenth century, for example, when the high death rate in the southern colonies made inexpensive white indentured servants far more numerous than costly African slaves, enterprising bondpersons relied more on self-purchase than the sword. It was only after landless whites and hard-used white indentured workers under the command of Nathaniel Bacon burned Jamestown in 1676 that southern planters made a concerted effort to replace white servants with African slaves. The comprehensive Virginia Slave Code of 1705, the first of its kind in colonial North America, crushed the hope of industrious slaves that they might be upwardly mobile. In April 1712 twenty-five Coromantee Africans burned several buildings in New York City and killed nine whites. Several rebels committed suicide before they could be captured, but those taken alive were broken on the wheel and hanged in
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