Given the recent tendency to romanticize resistance, it may come as a surprise to learn that throughout history slave rebellions have been comparatively rare, especially in North America, where slaves constituted a minority of the total population. (In Central and South America they were often a majority.) One reason for such rarity was the skill with which masters controlled their workers and suppressed revolt.
Peter Charles Hoffer and Daniel Rasmussen separately tell the story of two of the largest slave revolts in North America—the Stono Rebellion of 1739 in South Carolina and the Louisiana Slave Revolt of 1811. Neither event plays as large a role in the popular imagination as Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831, but each proved a major test for the power of slavery's supporters to enforce their regime and repel the threats to it.
In "Cry Liberty," Mr. Hoffer, a historian at the University of Georgia, offers a novel reinterpretation of the Stono Rebellion and challenges writers to rethink how they portray the resistance it displayed. The rebellion began soon after midnight on Sept. 9, 1739, when a group of some 20 slaves broke into a store along the Stono River near Charles Town (now Charleston), S.C.
Two white men were in the store. The rebels killed them and displayed their heads on the store's front steps. Then they stole some guns and, after killing three more whites, turned south along the main road, beating drums, bearing a flag and crying for liberty. Presumably their destination was Spanish Florida, which had promised freedom to Carolinian slaves. By mid-morning they had recruited another 40 to 80 slaves and killed 18 more whites. They almost captured South Carolina's lieutenant governor.
By Peter Charles Hoffer
Oxford, 173 pages, $19.95
By Daniel Rasmussen
Harper, 276 pages, $26.99
Then whites sounded the alarm. A large Presbyterian church interrupted its Sunday service, and the men formed a militia. They found the rebels resting in a field and attacked, killing 14. "The mortal wound had come," Mr. Hoffer writes. When order was finally restored, 23 whites and roughly 100 slaves had been killed, and some 30 slaves were "rewarded for protecting their masters."
There is no evidence that the slaves had planned to rebel before breaking into the store. Yet previous accounts have assumed that rebellion was the slaves' aim from the outset. For Mr. Hoffer this reasoning "turns causation around" and ignores the role of chance. Might the saga have begun not as rebellion but as a plan to steal food? What if the tipping point was the discovery of the two whites in the store, prompting a sudden change of plan?
Addressing such questions, Mr. Hoffer structures his book as an elegant and intricate detective story. Along the way, he neatly captures the texture of South Carolina's Low Country in 1739. It was a time when the slave population had almost doubled in a decade, owing to the influx of slaves from Angola. Blacks outnumbered whites by a 2-to-1 ratio. Masters got rich from slave-grown rice. And "death was everywhere." Slaves "reckoned that old comrades and new friends would die before they could start families." In this environment, "something had to give." It did.
Mr. Rasmussen, a recent graduate from Harvard, has turned his senior thesis into "American Uprising," a book on America's largest, and little known, slave revolt. A crisp, confident writer, he tells the story with verve, though ultimately he overreaches by trying to connect his story to 200 years of American history, as if the Louisiana Slave Revolt of 1811 was somehow central to the Civil War, civil rights and national expansion.
On the night of Jan. 8, 1811, 40 miles upriver from New Orleans, some 25 slaves entered the home of Manuel Andry, the parish's largest slaveowner. After wounding Andry, who managed to escape, they killed his son. The slaves' leader, Charles Deslonde, worked as a driver on Andry's plantation and knew it well. He and some comrades donned Andry's military uniforms "to lend the revolt authority." Then they stole Andry's guns and horses and headed south. "On to New Orleans!" Deslonde yelled.
The rebel army quickly grew to between 100 and 500 slaves, according to eyewitnesses. But Gov. William Claiborne called out the militia and federal troops, and within days the rebellion was crushed. While only two whites died in the affair, some 100 slaves were killed and dismembered, their heads put on poles that dotted the roadside for 40 miles, a grim warning to other slaves.
Even had the rebels reached New Orleans, it is unclear what they would have done. No doubt they had been inspired by slaves from St. Domingue, who a few years earlier had fought off colonial armies, abolished slavery and established the black republic of Haiti. Perhaps the Louisiana rebels hoped to create an American Haiti. A few said that they wanted to "kill all the whites." But whites were not their only enemy; many slaves and free blacks aligned themselves with the planters.
In some ways the Louisiana rebels resembled those from South Carolina. A disproportionately large number were Angolan migrants, who beat drums and waved flags as they marched. To recruit adherents, both rebel groups threatened or killed slaves who refused to join them. Any chance of success hinged on the use of terror. Yet both books also dramatize why slave rebellions were almost always suicidal. The violence of the rebellion begat more violence. It is thus no wonder that so many slaves protected their masters and informed on fellow slaves; it was the easiest way to gain power and even freedom.
Mr. Stauffer teaches history and literature at Harvard and is the author of "Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln."