GenoveseRebellion

From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World. By, Eugene D. Genovese, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1979).

The eminent scholar of American slavery, Eugene Genovese, built on his book Roll Jordan Roll with the accompanying work From Rebellion to Revolution. In the subsequent volume, Genovese expands his Marxist study of slavery to examine why organized attempts of rebellion were so rare among the enslaved peoples of the Americas. What Genovese finds is a direct correlation between the rise of Enlightenment political thought and attempts by slaves to assert equal legal or natural rights.

Genovese begins his investigation by exploring slave revolts in the early to mid eighteenth century. When slaves revolted their attempts were primarily a desire to get away from the white population and establish free maroon communities. The runaway slaves would only conduct large-scale raids on white settlements in order to gather supplies or resources for the maroon villages built in parts of the countryside with restricted access. If a settlement grew large enough, it may even attempt to push the whites off more hospitable land holdings, but the maroons did not intend to incorporate itself into white society.

These revolts stand in sharp contrast to events the occurred on Saint Domingue at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. There slaves asserted their right to full and equal participation in the master society based on the political rhetoric of the period. The slaves harnessed the ideas of the French National Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and used them as justification. The French government declared all men equal under the law and said that slaves were indeed men, therefore the slaves should be allowed full political enfranchisement as free individuals as far as the rebel slaves were concerned.

Similar arguments occurred in the United States from the time of its rebellion from Great Britain, until the ratification of the 13^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Genovese finds numerous examples of an awareness concerning the national political discourse in the rhetoric of slave revolt leaders in the United Sates. Slaves in the U.S. were not attempting to break away from white society and set up independent communities in the Appalachian Mountains, they were trying to demand enfranchisement. Genovese sees this as an assertion of labor demanding rights and protections from a proto-capitalistic bourgeoisie South. The slave revolt leaders built their movements on the words of Thomas Jefferson and organized their revolts at Fourth of July barbeques.

Genovese finds that a number of factors inhibited successful slave revolts in the Old South though. He argues that conditions like owner absenteeism, economic distress, large slave-holding units, splits within the ruling class, blacks heavily outnumbering whites, African-born slaves outnumbering creoles, and the permitting the establishment of an autonomous black leadership all were contributing factors of slave revolts. The South managed to avoid many of the problems however and as a result was able to keep a tighter hold on its slave population than many Caribbean or South American locations were.

From Rebellion to Revolution makes a convincing argument regarding the change in the nature of slave revolts from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Genovese’s research is sound and he managed to weave the events of two continents together almost seamlessly. That said, the highly theoretical portions of his work that deal with Marxist historical interpretation are extremely loquacious and convoluted at times. For that reason From Rebellion to Revolution would only be appropriate for use in its entirety at the graduate level where the students are familiar with Marxist theory. An instructor could effectively use portions of the book though at the undergraduate level.

Joe Stoltz

From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World. By Eugene D. Genovese. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1979.

Avowed Marxist historian Eugene D. Genovese authored Roll, Jordan, Roll, a well-known text exploring African American slave revolts and their theological roots, and later wrote The Southern Tradition: the Achievements and Limitations of an American Conservatism. Roll, Jordan, Roll’s succeeding work, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World examines the rebellions as a whole from a Marxist perspective. Genovese, a historian who received his doctorate at Columbia University, argues that slave revolts were essentially a restorationist reaction against the pre-capitalist seigneurial system as well as capitalism and its trappings. The slaves revolted, he argues, against both their oppression and the bourgeois theory which revealed the hypocrisy of some of its major proponents who espoused the rights of human beings and personal worth’s determination by its mere existence, rather than existence for an aristocratic, labor-producing, or even a noble purpose, yet owned slaves.

Rather than rebelling against the concept of slavery as an abstract concept, slaves generally rebelled against oppressive situations caused by food shortages or unbearable conditions. Genovese believes that slaves relied on elements of their own imported and adapted culture to revolt. One must study the revolts in the context of global history, particularly the economic connections between Europe, Africa and the Americas to understand slave revolts and their unique cultural heritage. In order for slaves to revolt, they must first encounter conditions in a time and place favorable to revolt and a place that made a revolt and the ensuing guerilla warfare possible. Ultimately, however, Genovese argues, “the “cause” of slave revolts was slavery” (xxiv).

The author introduces intriguing theories as to the higher number of slave revolts in the Caribbean than in the United States South. Slaveholders in the Caribbean generally grew sugar and lived away from their plantations, allowing overseers, who functioned without the financial incentive to pursue good health for the plantations’ slaves, to determine the slaves’ treatment. The slaves and the slaveholders remained distinct from their masters ethnically, culturally, and even linguistically throughout the Caribbean. In the South, slaveholders generally lived on their plantations near their slaves and eventually came to share many elements of cultural, religious, and even familial similarities. The close proximity of slaves to masters in the South allowed an evolving sense of reciprocal rights which, Genovese argues, discouraged slave revolts in favor of utilizing pre-established ties to negotiate a change of circumstance. Slave revolts generally occurred in areas with a higher rate of master absenteeism, a plantation with hundreds of slaves as opposed to twenty, experiencing economic distress, drawn into conflicts among the ruling classes, where blacks outnumbered whites, African-born slaves outnumbered Creole slaves, and where a social structure allowed a number of autonomous black leaders.

From Rebellion to Revolution’s most interesting section examines the relationship between maroons or slaves “who fled the plantations, grouped themselves in runaway communities, and waged guerilla warfare” (51). In some situations, maroons pledged their loyalty to the European country dominating the region in which the maroons lived. Maroons more often assisted runaway slaves than caught them, but sometimes maroons swore to impede slave revolts and hunted down escaped slaves, either killing them or returning them to their masters. In addition to fears of a maroon-slave coalition, white slaveholders feared a maroon-American Indian alliance. The Seminole Wars in Florida attest to the dangers an Indian-maroon alliance might cause slaveholders.

Genovese attempts to contextualize the slave revolts within their global environment. He believes that the French Revolution enabled the Haitian Revolution because the ideology of equality and divine rights perpetuated notions of freedom. Genovese finds a model slave revolt leader in L’Ouverture Toussaint, the former slave who led the Haitian revolt. The author compares Toussaint to revolt leaders Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, and Denmark Vessey. Each leader could read and write and enjoyed some degree of autonomy within their enslaved community. Genovese summarizes his perspective on the global importance of slave revolts by stating that “slave revolts merged with larger struggles for national liberation and sociopolitical reform and benefited the bourgeoisie while encouraging the masses to challenge racism, exploitation, and oppression” (119).

Genovese presents basic information and dates that support his theory of slave revolts in areas without close physical and cultural ties. Despite his text’s often dense Marxist rhetoric, From Rebellion to Revolution offers some valuable nuggets of simple insights concerning slave revolt leaders, slaveholders’ attempts to quell or avoid rebellions, and the peculiar institution itself. Published in 1979, From Rebellion to Revolution serves as a ground-breaking work by demanding that historians place regional histories within the paradigm of global history; Europe influenced the Caribbean and slavery in the Americas impacted Europe.

From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World. By Eugene D. Genovese. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1979.

Many American historians attempt to describe a specific event in history as part of the larger story of the United States. Eugene Genovese, educated at Columbia University, attempted a more ambitious approach to American slavery by describing it as a part of world history. In his book, From Rebellion to Revolution, Genovese “addresses two main problems: (1) the conditions in time and place favorable to slave revolt and guerilla warfare, which help explain the infrequency and low intensity of revolts in the Old South relative to those elsewhere; and (2) the place of slave revolts and guerilla warfare, including the southern, in the international political movements that were making the modern world during the aptly called Age of Revolution (p. xxii).” In simpler terms, the author is attempting to compare slavery in the Old South to slavery throughout the world during relatively the same period.

According to Genovese, slaves in the Old South did not revolt as often as in the Caribbean and South America for several reasons. The main reason they did not revolt is that the action appeared to be suicide for themselves and their families. More important, conditions for a large slave revolt did not exist in the United States as often as in other parts of the world. A few of the conditions included famine, economic depression, a slave majority, slaves directly from Africa, and absentee owners. Some of these conditions occurred in the South before the War for Independence, and Stono’s Rebellion was a product of it. In the Old South, there were three examples of slaves rebellions being results of these conditions. Prosser’s revolt occurred during the Quasi War with France; Denmark Vesey’s revolt occurred during the Missouri Debate; and Turner’s revolt occurred during a tense constitutional convention. Since the white population squashed these revolts quickly, it proved to the slaves that rebellion would be suicide.

Another aspect that promoted slave revolts in the world was the Maroon community. There were no large Maroon communities in the Old South because the government intentionally harassed them so they could not consolidate. The largest of these communities existed in Florida and Louisiana because the Indian population incorporated them. This was a rare case. Usually each group distrusted the other because of the strange ways of the other. In addition, to discourage African American and Indian relationships, whites pitted one group against the other and encouraged the Indians to take blacks as their slaves. In other words, the large Maroon population that plagued other slaveholding nations did not exist in the United States.

Slave revolts in other parts of the world influenced the slave population in the Old South. The most notable was Toussaint’s rebellion in Haiti. Toussaint’s rebellion changed how slaves viewed their emancipation. Instead of attempting to recreate an African society, they wanted to become part of the society that owned them. Genovese calls this the Europeanization of slaves, because they recognized the importance of European technology. Slaves in the Old South, afraid to revolt, waited for their turn for emancipation. In the mean time, they witnessed the effects that the slave revolts in the South had on white society and themselves. Revolts reduced abolitionists in the South, made Southerners push harder for political protection of slavery, and produced repercussions for slaves with restrictions on literacy, preaching, and manumission to name a few. To conclude the book, Genovese compared the slave revolts to Marx’s theory of pleasant revolts. In peasant revolts, like the later slave revolts, never created a state of their own but relied on and fell sway to advanced social classes.

Overall, this well organized and balanced book proved to be an excellent work of scholarship. The main criticism, which the author mentioned himself, involved the lack of footnotes and endnotes in the book. Genovese stated that he presented no new material, just a new interpretation of well-known facts. To compensate for the lack of footnotes, the author provides an excellent bibliographic essay, which included all the books he used in his research. I would recommend this book for an upper level course on African American history or the Old South.