This Day in Southern History (‘Gabriel’s Insurrection’ Foiled at Last Minute)

Aug. 30, 1800—At 2 in the afternoon, Virginia Gov. James Monroe (pictured)—just returned to Richmond because of a yellow fever quarantine emergency—received a visit from slaveowner Mosby Shepherd, confirming rumors circulating at least since spring: that a massive slave uprising was in the offing just outside Richmond in the town of Henrico.

This time, though, specific details provided by two of Shepherd’s slaves endowed the reports with a grim new certainty: that the rebellious slaves would kill their masters that night, move on to Richmond and set fire to the state capital, capitalizing on the ensuing confusion to seize ammunition from the penitentiary.

Immediately, Monroe—in his first executive position in the young United States, and two months from a tumultuous national election—moved to quash the insurrection, taking the unprecedented step of stationing militia in Henrico, Richmond and the penitentiary. A torrential downpour that night scotched the revolt before it could be launched.

Capitalizing on this respite, the militia broke into slave quarters in the area, producing a round of confessions or finger-pointing from the terrified inhabitants. Within two days, approximately 70 were arrested and charged.

The ringleader was quickly identified: a 24-year-old blacksmith named Gabriel, the property of plantation owner Thomas Henry Prosser. The incident has been sometimes been referred to as “Gabriel Prosser’s Revolt”—a misnomer, as Gabriel never took his master’s surname during his lifetime.

But, though the name was misleading, the fears that the uprising brought to the surface were real enough. The Virginia gentry did not have to look far for the possibility of violence at the hands of slaves: Ambrose Madison, the paternal grandfather of Congressman James Madison, was allegedly poisoned by two of his slaves and a neighboring one.

An insurrection—quicker than a slow-acting poison, perpetrated by slaves who often outnumbered whites on plantations—was even more terrifying. And it was more worrisome still when led by someone like Gabriel—a commanding physical presence (over six feet tall, well above the average size for that era) who, because of his literacy, also possessed a heightened ability to receive intelligence and communicate with followers.

The year 1800 was already shaping up to be one of unusual tension, with the United States and France trying to back away from a full-scale war; with the Democratic-Republican Party, headed by Monroe’s mentor Thomas Jefferson, attempting to win the Presidency that fall from the Federalists; and with the continuing repercussions of the successful Haitian revolt against their former French masters, led by Toussaint Louverture. But Gabriel’s Insurrection gave more tangible form to this unease.

The man at the center of it had been seething for over a year over the unequal treatment of slaves within the Virginia legal system, especially as it affected him. 

The charge facing Gabriel in 1799—“maiming” (an overseer, in a scuffle arising from another slave’s theft of a pig)—would not have been unusual in the society of his master. Indeed, “eye-gouging, ear-biting, and even more devastating forms of physical combat were common among equals in late eighteenth-century Virginia,” according to a 1982 article by historian Philip J. Schwarz. “It was the rare slave, however, who attacked whites openly and physically.”
 

Gabriel only escaped the death penalty through a quirk of the law called “benefit of clergy” (i.e., he would only be branded rather than executed if he could recite a Bible verse).

Whites had used that same legal system to bust his conspiracy, offering a full pardon to any slaves willing to testify against fellow conspirators.

Although a full pardon was one means of resolving the case, Gov. Monroe had to weigh to what extent any other form of mercy was possible among the multiple cases now filling the Virginia courts. He outlined the courses open to him in a letter to Jefferson:

“When to avert the hand of the Executioner, is a question of great importance. It is hardly to be presumed, [that] a rebel who avows it was his intention to assassinate his master etc. if pardoned will ever become a useful servant, and we have no power to transport him abroad—Nor is it less difficult to say whether mercy or severity is the better policy in this case, tho' where there is cause for doubt it is best to incline to the former council.”

Perhaps better than any whites, Monroe knew that extenuating circumstances existed for mercy. Though there was little doubt that Gabriel  led the conspiracy, the early investigation had already established that Presser had, even in a system favorable to a slaveholder, treated his slaves with “great barbarity.” Moreover, as a careful onetime lawyer, Monroe realized that confessions extracted under torture or its threat were not reliable guides to determining innocence.

In determining the varying fates of the accused, however, Monroe was not merely guided by public safety or questions of guilt and innocence, but also by his own self-interest. He would own as many as 250 slaves in his lifetime, making him one of the largest slaveowners in his county. He was a direct beneficiary of the system he was being tasked to protect.

In the end, with Monroe himself attempting to interrogate the captured leader, Gabriel refused to make a statement without a promise to mitigate his punishment. Gabriel would be one of 26 hanged for their complicity in the rebellion, with another dying in custody while awaiting execution. Among the remaining 38 originally arrested, some were transported out of state; some were found not guilty; and a few were pardoned.

As for Gabriel: 207 years after his hanging, then-Gov. Tim Kaine granted him a full pardon, commending his “courage and devotion to the fundamental Virginia values of freedom and equality.”

Those “values” perplexed Monroe, as it did fellow Virginia Presidents George Washington, Jefferson and James Madison, to his dying day. Although Washington arranged to manumit his slaves following the death of his wife Martha, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, fatally entrapped in the lavish, debt-inducing lifestyle of the plantation  aristocracy, freed no more than a handful of their own, despite their grave misgivings about “the peculiar institution.”

If anything, Gabriel’s Insurrection convinced Monroe that ultimately, slavery could not exist in the United States without raising tensions between North and South and posing a danger to the lives of slaveholders (a fear realized 31 years later in Nat Turner's Rebellion and in 1859 in another led by John Brown).

He came around to gradually moving slaves back to Africa as an ultimate solution to the practice, even endorsing the American Colonization Society. During his Presidency, Liberia was established on the African continent for this purpose, even naming its capital, Monrovia, after him.

Flashback, August 1619: Slavery, the American Genocide, Takes Root in Virginia

“Virginia has a long history to confront. Our nation’s experience with slavery began there, when some 20 captive Africans arrived on a warship in Jamestown in 1619. Black bondage existed in Virginia for close to a century longer than black freedom has. Slavery made colonial Virginia prosperous, creating a plantation society founded on tobacco production, social and economic stratification, and unfree labor. It also produced a class of white owners whose daily witness to the degradations of bondage instilled in them a fierce devotion to their own freedom. They were determined to be the masters not just of their households, their estates, and their laborers, but also of their society, their polity, and their destiny. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, George Mason—slaveholders all. That so many of the Founding Fathers, including the leaders of the Revolution and the authors of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, were slaveholders is both an irony and a paradox…. The nation conceived in liberty was also the nation conceived in slavery. The state of Virginia and the country it did so much to create were born out of a set of conflicting commitments that have destabilized the republic ever since.” —Drew Gilpin Faust, historian and former President of Harvard University, “Race, History, and Memories of a Virginia Girlhood,” The Atlantic, August 2019 issue

For an institution whose seeding, harvesting and uprooting has resulted in consequences down to the present day, little documentation exists about the creation of slavery. What we do know is that, four centuries ago this week, what Jamestown settler John Rolfe (husband of Pocahontas) called “20 and odd Negroes” disembarked at what is now Hampton, Va. The area’s name was different back then: Point Comfort, almost cruelly chosen for the conclusion of its trans-Atlantic odyssey. 

As described in this post on “The First Africans” on the Web site Historic Jamestowe, it all began with natives of present-day Angola being captured and marched 100 to 200 miles to the slave-trade port of Luanda, where the whole jostling, chained, confused group of 350 were shipped off to Vera Cruz, Mexico, aboard the San Juan Bautista. Approaching the Gulf of Mexico, the ship was attacked by two English privateers, the White Lion and the Treasurer, which carried off 50 to 60 Africans. 

The White Lion made it to Virginia with only a third of this human contraband. This hideous mortality rate was emblematic of the larger “Middle Passage”, from 1500 to 1866, saw 12.5 million Africans transported across the Atlantic, with 1.8 million of these dying enroute, their bodies tossed into the ocean. 

What began as a solitary crime in West Central Africa would end in a genocide that for 250 years would be excused by religion, nourished by commerce, and inscribed by law. The African slave trade and the American settlements that grew from it destroyed not just people but their religion, language, families and hope. Only a total war would eradicate it. But the carcass of slavery left the lingering stench of slavery.

Improved technology boosted both the efficacy of carrying so much human cargo (low clearance to preclude slaves from standing, nets to prevent them from escaping overboard) and their use in the New World (the cotton gin increased demand for both land and slave labor). Now, technology may aid in counting the true costs of slavery: digitization of bills of sale, manumission papers, emancipation notes, bonds, auction notices and other assorted items; spreadsheets to crunch the data in these materials; software to write the analysis; and the Internet to share the results.

In another sense, though technology may advance the study of slavery, it will take something more basic to understand what slavery has done to the American soul. It began through exploitation of captives, survived through the fears of their owners, and has seeped enough into America’s soul to poison through racism the descendants of masters, slaves, and all in contact with them—in other words, all of us.

(The image accompanying this post is of what may be the most famous TV depiction of slavery—LeVar Burton as Kunta Kinte, in the 1970s TV adaptation of Alex Haley’s Roots.)

Photo of the Day: Waterfront, Old Town, Alexandria VA

The “Old Town” section of Alexandria, Va. was founded in 1749. Among the highlights of this historic district is its waterfront, which I photographed on a visit six and a half years ago.

Photo of the Day: Waterfront at Twilight, Alexandria, VA

I took this image in November 2016, when I stayed overnight in Alexandria, VA, on my way to vacation elsewhere in the state.

Photo of the Day: Fall, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA

I took this photo in the fall of 2010, amid an overnight stay in a bed-and-breakfast in Blacksburg, VA. I only regret now that I didn’t have more time to spend in the area, or to see more of the major object of that brief visit, the lovely campus of Virginia Tech, seen here.

Flashback, January 1786: Jefferson, Madison Team on Religious Freedom Statute

Capping a decade-long effort, Thomas Jefferson (pictured) finally succeeded in getting Virginia to enact a statute of religious freedom that would later serve as a model for the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of conscience. But the measure only passed in January 1786 with the help of the younger man who steered it through the legislature, James Madison.

Jefferson regarded the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom as so key to his legacy that it was one of only three achievements he wished carved on his gravestone on the grounds of his Monticello estate.(The others were writing the Declaration of Independence and founding the University of Virginia--not serving as America's first Secretary of State, or its third President.)

If Jefferson was the architect of religious freedom in the new republic, then Madison was the contractor engaged in translating his blueprint into reality. The latter would play a similar role over the next two decades, assisting Jefferson in forming an opposition party to the economic plans of Alexander Hamilton, in secretly co-writing the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions against the Federalist-sponsored Alien and Sedition Acts, and in acting as Secretary of State through Jefferson’s two terms as President.

Their collaboration began in the 1770s, at a time when religious agitation was echoing the larger mercantile and political unrest convulsing Virginia. In 1774, “Dissenting” ministers—at that point, Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist sects—had been harassed, even beaten and jailed, in the colony. 

In what became Madison’s first important cause, petitions began to arrive at the legislature calling for the “Disestablishment” of the Anglican Church. Two years later, at Virginia’s revolutionary convention, Jefferson joined with Madison in trying to excise all “emoluments and privileges” from religion. But they could only succeed in replacing the phrase “fullest toleration in the exercise of religion” with “free exercise of religion.”

Jefferson particularly felt at a loss in debating the measure, because his weak voice could not advance his powerful words. (For the rest of his career, he tried, whenever possible, to avoid public speaking—even sending the State of the Union summary to Congress in written form, a practice continued by other Presidents until Woodrow Wilson broke with tradition more than a century later.) Thus was joined what he would call "the severest contest in which I have ever been engaged."

The impetus for the eventually successful legislation came in 1784, when Governor Patrick Henry called for taxing Virginians to support the promotion of Christianity. His proposal, which soon garnered widespread support (including from the likes of "Light-Horse Harry" Lee and George Washington), called for individuals to designate the denomination, or even the specific church, that their tax dollars would fund. Those who didn't want to support religion could even elect to put their tax dollars toward education in general.

Madison felt that, seemingly as liberal as this seemed, it was still too intrusive, because the same state authority that could direct funds to any Christian sect could later turn around and designate a particular Christian sect. He lost the original fight in the legislature against Henry, but in the hiatus that followed, rallied opposition to the plan with a powerfully argued “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments." With Henry’s proposal now allowed to quietly die in the legislature, Madison seized the moment to reintroduce Jefferson’s measure.

Even then, much like his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, some clauses were stripped away from the three-paragraph statute, including:

*“Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds”;

*[God] “manifested his supreme will that free it [the mind] shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint”;

*[God chose] “but to extend it [his plan] by its influence on reason alone”; and that

*“the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction.”

The deletions revolve around the notion that religious belief depends on reason, an idea that perhaps, to many, smacked too much of Jefferson’s deism. One passage that survived the cuts, in fact, would have been understood by the Protestant legislators as a not-so-subtle jab at Roman Catholicism: “the impious presumption of legislators...[who] have assumed dominion over the faith of others...hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world.”

Jefferson is not my favorite among the Revolutionary War generation. His hypocrisy as a slaveowner is only one of a number of ways in which his political and personal judgment was deficient. He also recognized far too late the damage done by France’s Reign of Terror; blustered about taking Canada with little more than a squadron of gunboats, leaving the United States unprepared when it did invade its northern neighbor in the War of 1812; secretly funded attacks on Hamilton and even George Washington, then denied he had done so; and planted the seeds of secession with his contention, in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, that states could nullify federal legislation.

As Jefferson did so often in his political writing, he fashioned a coherent, persuasive brief on the proper role of church and state, only to nearly undo it all with rhetoric that his allies had to water down. The Statute, in fact, contributed to the misperception that he was an atheist.

That did not accurately describe Jefferson’s religious feelings, but they were complicated enough that he realized they could be misconstrued, so he discussed his spiritual search with only a few intimates. Unlike Benjamin Franklin, another deist, he did not believe, more or less, that virtually all religions had good points and deserved his money. As a spiritual corollary to his notion that that government was best which governed least, he felt that that religion was best with the least number of priests. “There would never have been an infidel if there had never been a priest,” he wrote to Mrs. Samuel Smith. Four years before his death, he wrote another confidant, “I trust there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian.”

Jefferson could foresee an end to multiple religious sects, but not a day when America could let go of slavery, the “wolf [held] by the ears.” He was wrong on both counts. Yet he correctly saw the egalitarian value of educational institutions and libraries, and, early on, grasped the value and necessity of state non-interference with religion.

In one sense, Jefferson’s defense of religious freedom ultimately helped to preserve the foremost physical embodiment of his legacy. Each year, thousands make the pilgrimage to Monticello, his neoclassically inspired mansion in Virginia’s Piedmont region. What hardly anyone realizes is that it was a near-run thing whether the estate would sink into irretrievable ruin following his death in 1826—and that one of the only reasons it survived was because two of its subsequent owners could not forget the debt of gratitude they owed the author of the religious freedom statute for helping to create a space where they could live out their Jewish faith without fear of harassment or persecution.

Strapped for money, Jefferson could not maintain Monticello in the last few years before his death, leaving the grounds in what several observers saw as “slovenly” conditions. Charlottesville druggist James Barclay, upon buying the property from Jefferson’s daughter, allowed it to continue to deteriorate. It took Lt. (later Commodore) Uriah P. Levy, who bought Monticello from Barclay in 1834, and his nephew, Jefferson Monroe Levy, to stop the estate’s decay and restore it to at least something like its old grandeur.

Uriah Levy’s admiration for Jefferson was unconditional: “I consider Thomas Jefferson to be one of the greatest men in history, the author of the Declaration and an absolute democrat. He serves as an inspiration to millions of Americans. He did much to mold our Republic in a form in which a man's religion does not make him ineligible for political or governmental life."

Had Lt. Levy known of Jefferson’s private views, he might have experienced something like the surprise I had in Providence in mid-fall, when I discovered that that earlier champion of religious tolerance, Roger Williams, had been scathing in his views on Catholics. In Jefferson’s case, he regarded Jewish ideas of God and his attributes as “degrading and injurious,” and their ethics “often irreconcilable with the sound dictates of reason and morality” and “repulsive and anti-social as respecting other nations.”

At the same time, Jefferson was not anti-Semitic; he was merely submitting Judaism to the same skeptical focus he trained on all religions, and particularly any in which a mediating minister was involved. But he did think that any person was free to believe as exactly as they might wish, no matter how illogical or wrongheaded he personally might regard it. 

As he put it, in most succinct and memorable form, in Notes on the State of Virginia: “The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. ... Reason and free enquiry are the only effectual agents against error.”