Slavery and Fear

by

Jason T. Sharples

• LAST REVIEWED: 10 March 2023
• LAST MODIFIED: 29 November 2018
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199730414-0308

Introduction

The extreme violence of Atlantic slavery made it a system of fear. From slaving vessels off the coast of Africa to interior regions of the American continents, masters deliberately terrorized enslaved people through whipping, family separation, and rape in attempts to control them. That use of terror inadvertently sowed the seeds of masters’ own fear of their slaves. Out of self-preservation, enslaved people used subtle forms of resistance that could not easily be ascribed to them but about which masters were glancingly aware. Masters worried that in time, if poison, witchcraft, or arson did not consume them, enslaved people would answer overt violence with overt violence through insurrection. Masters erected legal and policing apparatuses whose wellspring was their own fear and that permitted them within the confines of their homes to terrorize enslaved individuals with impunity. In this system of fear, masters’ dread of insurrection often led them to use even greater brutality, such as torture, dismemberment, and burning at the stake, to assert control after rebellions or even to preemptively quash uprisings that were rumored to be coming. With all of this violence, those masters, slaves, and onlookers who paused to consider its religious implications found themselves variously anxious about their eternal souls, fearful of God’s vengeance on society, or all too willing to inflict spiritual terror on others. In the end, slavery’s system of fear influenced two of the greatest political transformations of the early modern Atlantic world: the Age of Revolutions and the abolition of slavery. This bibliography pulls together selected examples of scholarship that addresses this system of fear in slavery. The Portuguese, French, and Spanish Americas are all represented here, but the sheer depth of Anglo-American slavery’s historiography means that it has explored this theme more directly. Nevertheless, readers who are looking for fear would surely find it between the lines of almost any scholarship on slavery. This bibliography begins with a sampling of conceptual work on the history of emotions in general—a relatively new field—and some exemplary treatments of fear in studies of slavery, race, and power.

The History of Emotions and Conceptual Approaches

There is a fundamental tension in how historians conceive of fear and other emotions in the past. Since the 1980s, scholars have viewed emotions alternately as psychological experiences and as culturally constructed performances. The psychological approach to the past predated psychology itself: many historians, including the ancients, have long used the concept of fear to explain individuals’ decisions and societies’ irrational phenomena. After postmodernism and the linguistic turn, scholars have become more circumspect about assuming a consistent and transhistorical human experience of emotions that is easily legible to us today. In the field of emotions history, as the overview Rosenwein and Cristiani 2018 explains, the concept of “emotionology” posited historical changes in societies’ mores of acceptable and unacceptable emotions. Reddy 2001 attempts to reconcile a person’s baseline psychological experience with how he or she communicated it within systems of acceptable emotional expression. Eustace 2008 applies Reddy’s approach to studying emotional expression to 18th-century Anglo-America with a sharper emphasis on projecting and contesting power and social status. Rosenwein 2016 expands the view of any given historical emotional system to include non-elites in “emotional communities” accessible through clusters of affective terms such as those carved on gravestones. Meanwhile, scholars who deal with fear and terror find perhaps more meaningful inspiration in the study of the body, as an excellent chapter on “Bodies” explains in Rosenwein and Cristiani 2018. Hartman 1997 views bodily torture and trauma as the fundamental experience of slavery, generative of many aspects of African American culture. Fear’s relationship to power—another key concern of slavery studies—has become a subject of scholarly interest since 11 September 2001. Robin 2006 highlights the many ways that the powerful have used fear to exert more influence, and Schechter 2018 demonstrates that many intellectuals prior to the French Revolution believed that this use of terror to instill order was a good thing for society. Dealing with racial ideology rather than individual exercises of power, Silver 2008 views a sustained period of violence and fear as an important cause of Anglo-American hatred of Native Americans. Henneton 2016 brings some additional clarity to discussions of fear by insisting on always identifying who feared whom, for taking what actions, and at risk of losing what. This precision illuminates historical specificities of fear.

• Eustace, Nicole. Passion Is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

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  This work by the leading historian of emotions in early America provides a clear methodology for applying Reddy 2001 to 18th-century America. It examines how those in power promulgated emotional expectations to establish their own social statuses, and it reveals how people could subtly modulate their emotions to subvert the powerful.

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• Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

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  This study of the antebellum and post-slavery US South emphasizes continuities in the oppression and torture of black people. Hartman argues that pain and terror so pervaded enslaved and freed people’s experiences that it constructed even what we have regarded as hidden acts of resistance and self-fashioning, such as dancing. Even the desire to use clandestine forms of resistance was determined by the terroristic regime.

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• Henneton, Lauric. “Introduction: Adjusting to Fear in Early America.” In Fear and the Shaping of Early American Societies. Edited by Lauric Henneton and L. H. Roper, 1–37. Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston: Brill, 2016.

  DOI: 10.1163/9789004314740_002Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Provides a more precise vocabulary for the study of fear, including by positing fear as a whole category of emotions. Views fear as similar to anxiety in being future-oriented, yet more attached to precise expectations of loss. Prompts scholars to ask who feared whom for potentially doing what, because different segments of societies (e.g., masters and slaves) viewed situations differently. Responses to fear could be either reactive or proactive; either short-term or structural; and either defensive or offensive.

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• Reddy, William M. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

  DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511512001Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  A landmark work in the history of emotions but does not address slavery. Posits “emotives” as expressions of feeling that, in their utterance, altered the emotional states of speakers and audiences. “Emotional regimes” are the political systems that permit or disallow particular emotions among certain people in particular situations. The French Revolution is the case study.

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• Robin, Corey. Fear: The History of a Political Idea. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

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  Lucid explanation of how fear, terror, and anxiety have worked in political settings, from early modern Europe to contemporary America, both at the societal level and between two unequal individuals. Observes that the powerful tend more often to instill fear in the powerless, but that such inequalities do breed elites’ anxieties of attempted uprisings and reversals.

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• Rosenwein, Barbara H. Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

  DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781316156780Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  A cornerstone of emotions history but does not address slavery. An application of Rosenwein’s earlier theorized concept of “emotional communities,” or groups of interrelated people who shared emotional vocabularies and values. This approach values whole systems of emotions, and even adjacent communities, rather than power politics or hegemonic regimes. The study proceeds from late medieval to early modern Europe.

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• Rosenwein, Barbara H., and Riccardo Cristiani. What Is the History of Emotions? Cambridge, UK, and Medford, MA: Polity, 2018.

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  A concise and thorough overview. Slavery scholars will take special interest in chapter 3, “Bodies” (pp. 62–102), because pain was fundamental to slavery. Some emotions historians have begun drawing connections between the human body—particularly pain—and the history of feelings. They update Elaine Scarry’s theory of the inexpressibility of pain by connecting emotional interpretation and racialized emotional regimes to the experience of pain. This chapter provides an overview of this still-nascent scholarship.

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• Schechter, Ronald. A Genealogy of Terror in Eighteenth-Century France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.

  DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226499604.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  A study of political theory and assumptions about human nature that undergirded early modern regimes of slavery. An intellectual history that demonstrates how early modern Europeans perceived terror to be salutary and uncruel in many respects, at least prior to the French Revolution. One theme relevant to the study of slavery is fear’s relationship to religious belief and the exercise of kingly and legal power. See especially the introduction and chapter 3.

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• Silver, Peter. Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America. New York: Norton, 2008.

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  A study of race. Although not dealing with slavery, this is an excellent application of taking fear seriously as a historical force in the creation of racial categories and political movements. The subject of this case study is experience, representation, and memory of violence by Indians against white Pennsylvanians in the Seven Years’ War.

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Slave Trades

The sale and forced migration of human beings—whether across the Atlantic Ocean or through the “internal” slave trades of American territories—comprised one of the most violent and traumatic aspects of chattel slavery. The separate Oxford Bibliographies article in Atlantic History “The Atlantic Slave Trade” summarizes the extensive scholarly literature, its debt to Africanist scholars, and its early emphasis on quantitative and political history. One of these works, Miller 1988, provides an Africanist’s ethnohistorical approach to explain continental Africans’ perspectives on the traumatic political changes wrought by the Atlantic slave trade. More recently, other historians have foregrounded the personal experiences of captives. Caretta 2005 is a biographical study of a man whose autobiographical account of the Middle Passage dealt extensively with its psychological effects. Both Smallwood 2007 and Rediker 2007 show how the logic of the market inspired slavers to terrorize captives, and Rediker extends his discussion to crew members’ experiences of violence and fear at the hands of captains. Richardson 2001 (cited under General Dread of Insurrection) would add that slavers’ fearful anticipation of rebellion ballooned their operating costs to the point of preventing their enslavement of others. Mustakeem 2016 focuses on enslaved people’s bodies, which leads to thoughtful discussions of violence and its psychological effects, following one of the trends in the history of emotions. O’Malley 2016 complements work on the Atlantic slave trade through a largely quantitative study of second voyages in the “intercolonial” trade from Anglo-American transshipment points throughout the Americas. He finds that rates of mortality and family separation were higher, with possible implications for the psychological experiences of African captives in forced migration. Studies of internal slave trades, such as in Johnson 2005, speak to enslaved people’s fear of family separation once living in the Americas, particularly after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. As Dunn 2014 shows in a comparative history of enslaved families, this danger was especially acute in highly creolized regions of widely extensive families, which slaveholders tended to regard as unprofitable “surplus” populations particularly fit for sale. Pargas 2015 identifies the next logical question in these separations: forced migrants’ anxiety about integrating into new communities. Additional work is available in the separate Oxford Bibliographies article in Atlantic History “Domestic Slave Trades in the Americas.”

• Caretta, Vincent. Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2005.

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  Biography of a freed man of African descent in England who became an eloquent antislavery advocate and the author of a very successful autobiography. Although Caretta presents evidence that Equiano may have falsely claimed African birth, he observes that Equiano spoke the essential truth in describing his experience of the Atlantic slave trade. Equiano’s autobiography emphasized his disorientation and “terror” (Equiano’s term) on the slave ship, witnessing disease, dehumanization, and torture. Comments on psychological effects and suicide.

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• Dunn, Richard S. A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.

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  This detailed comparison of two plantations in Jamaica and Virginia unearths enslaved people’s complicated family structures, including sometimes across plantation lines. Dunn demonstrates the violence that slave sales and relocation wrought on these families, particularly in Virginia, and the fear that the prospect of losing loved ones must have engendered.

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• Johnson, Walter, ed. The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005.

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  Several of these essays on the United States, Brazil, and Cuba address enslaved people’s experiences of fear and trauma in being sold through internal markets. Topics from enslaved people’s perspectives include fear of being sold; the terror of the material conditions of the market; the prevalence of rape in slave markets; smuggling kidnapped free people; biographies of traumatized captives in Brazil. From masters’ perspective, fear of slave rebellion in the United States after the Haitian Revolution facilitated closing the Atlantic trade and fueling the internal trade.

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• Miller, Joseph Calder. Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988.

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  A classic and comprehensive study of the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil. This work, written by an Africanist, addresses how the slave trade dislocated West Central Africans and politically reconfigured the region. Excellent discussion of how the political cultures of Africans interacted with the Atlantic trade. See especially Parts 1 and 2. The rest of the work is a global economic history of the Luso-Brazilian slave trade.

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• Mustakeem, Sowande’ M. Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016.

  DOI: 10.5406/illinois/9780252040559.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Identifies the slaving voyage as the quintessential site of enslavement because it used violence and pain to transform people into commodities. Documents enslavers’ dread of uprisings and racialized fears of “hyperaggressive” adult black men. As a result, enslavers used terrorizing techniques that included confinement, rape, and family separation. Mustakeem argues that this dehumanization led to enslaved people’s grief, sorrow, despair, lethargy, and trauma. See especially chapters 4 and 5.

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• O’Malley, Gregory E. Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

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  Within the Anglo-American transatlantic slave trade, 15 percent (300,000 people) continued on to further destinations in the Americas via secondary slave ships. These people experienced higher mortality rates (after accounting for shorter voyage lengths), greater social isolation, and more likely permanent separation from loved ones. They were forced into very tight spaces between trade goods, but surveillance and restraints may have been reduced.

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• Pargas, Damian Alan. “Slave Crucibles: Interstate Migrants and Social Assimilation in the Antebellum South.” Slavery & Abolition 36.1 (2015): 26–39.

  DOI: 10.1080/0144039X.2014.885204Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Addresses the emotional consequences for enslaved people in the internal slave trade in the 19th-century United States. Forced migrants experienced fear and anxiety when ripped from existing communities and compelled to integrate into new ones that were foreign in terms of culture, language, and work regimes. Nevertheless, Pargas suggests that newcomers were at least connected to each other in the new locale through the shared trauma of forced relocation. Available online by subscription.

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• Rediker, Marcus. The Slave Ship: A Human History. New York: Viking, 2007.

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  Foregrounds the perspectives of enslaved captives and evokes their disorientation when arriving on a vessel, their fear of what Europeans would do to them (expected cannibalism), and the terror they experienced in captains’ inventively sadistic public punishments, which included feeding captives’ bodies to sharks. Also addresses crews’ fear of death and experience of terrorizing violence at the hands of captains.

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• Smallwood, Stephanie E. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.

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  Addresses enslaved people’s terror in facing the unknown without the social resources of former communities, and how captives dealt with that fear by communicating with each other (sometimes fitfully) as part of a new, admittedly forced, structure of belonging. Discusses captives’ religious fear of improper burial at sea preventing the deceased from joining the ancestral community. The cruel logic of the market dictated the cost/benefit analysis of cramped quarters, subsistence diets, and lengthier but deadlier time lingering in the hold.

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Law and Race

Many scholars trace the emergence of race in the early modern Atlantic world to roots in other fears. Jordan 1968 and Fredrickson 2002 locate race’s origins in religious difference. For Virginia, Morgan 1975 emphasized the importance of elites’ fear of class challenges, an interpretation glossed by Brown 1996 as status anxiety and made more robust through gender analysis. For Mexico, Martínez 2004 concurs that concerns about challenges to gendered ordering were at the heart of racial fears. See also the separate Oxford Bibliographies article in Atlantic History “Race and Racism.” The violent practice of racial slavery, in turn, stoked masters’ and white people’s fears of possible retribution by enslaved Africans and African Americans. White people’s fears of personal violence animated the racialization of New England according to Sweet 2007, a topic partially addressed in the separate Oxford Bibliographies article in Atlantic History “Law and Slavery” under “Slave Crime.” At larger scales, masters harbored concerns about collective uprisings and consequently crafted bodies of law to regulate slavery in ways that would minimize that possibility. Masters in Saint-Domingue feared insurrection because they so terrorized enslaved people, according to Ghachem 2012, leading to greater interest in ameliorating slavery. In the anglophone colonies, Jordan 1968 and Hadden 2001 show, masters attempted to enforce strict policing of enslaved people’s movements, gatherings, and possessions. Sharples 2012 adds that masters also managed their fear with incarceration, judicial torture, and information gathering, all of which in turn terrorized enslaved people. The broadly comparative study Gross and de la Fuente 2013 shows that English, Spanish, and French slave regimes in Virginia, Cuba, and Louisiana each developed law to avert the danger of potential cross-racial alliances. This study’s conclusion about slavery’s legal regimes echoes that of Morgan 1975 about the racialization of slavery in Virginia. More detailed studies can be found in the separate Oxford Bibliographies article in Atlantic History “Slave Codes.”

• Brown, Kathleen. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

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  Explains the gender and race regime of colonial Virginia as elite men’s calculated response to their fear of the erosion of their social positions. They used the idiom of gender to express their power relations with women and with male and female Africans. This produced naturalized ideas of race and confirmed gender as the twin pillars of ideological power in Virginia.

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• Fredrickson, George. Racism: A Short History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.

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  Christian European fear and hatred of Jewish people resulted in antisemitism, which served as a template for racial attitudes of white supremacy in the Iberian and Anglo Atlantic world. Accusations of blood libel, attempted poisonings, witchcraft, and connections with the devil all stoked fear and hatred; belief in the inescapable inheritability of Jewishness provided an early notion of essentialized racial identity. See chapters 1 and 2.

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• Ghachem, Malick W. The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

  DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139050173Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  The Code Noir addressed the fears of white colonists in Saint-Domingue. European thinkers and Caribbean masters acknowledged, at least theoretically, that terrorizing enslaved people generated a threat to be feared. They anticipated social disorder and mass rebellion in the colonies, so they established and debated a legal regime that theoretically constrained masters’ abuse of enslaved people and that viewed manumission as a safety valve, albeit a dangerous one. See especially chapters 1–4.

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• Gross, Ariela, and Alejandro de la Fuente. “Slaves, Free Blacks, and Race in the Legal Regimes of Cuba, Louisiana, and Virginia: A Comparison.” North Carolina Law Review 5 (2013): 1699–1756.

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  Fear of cross-racial alliances among whites, blacks, and Indians animated regulations in each of the colonial legal regimes—Anglo, Spanish, and French—that the authors compare in this article.

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• Hadden, Sally E. Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.

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  Inspired by fears of insurrection, early colonial governments shifted responsibility of policing enslaved people from individual masters (with property interests) to the public institution of the slave patrol (with more interest in white community safety). Hadden shows that these patrols could terrorize enslaved people through physical violence, but that enslaved people invented countermeasures to avoid detection and harassment.

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• Jordan, Winthrop D. White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968.

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  Foundational work on the mutual development of race and slavery in North America. Initial color-, religion-, and culture-based fears influenced English attitudes toward the eligibility of Africans for enslavement. Later, individual acts of slave resistance generated outsized fear of collective insurrection, including supposedly the rape of white women. White people took their fears out on all black people in legal statutes. See especially chapter 3 for insurrectionary fear, chapter 4 for sexual fear, and chapter 10 for fears of uprising in the Revolutionary era.

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• Martínez, María Elena. “The Black Blood of New Spain: Limpieza de Sangre, Racial Violence, and Gendered Power in Early Colonial Mexico.” William and Mary Quarterly 61.3 (2004): 479–520.

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  Demonstrates that a conspiracy scare in Mexico City (1612) articulated fears of inversion of the sexual order and of the Spanish concept of “purity of blood.” These fears were rooted in the social realities of the historical moment, including demographic shifts, African community formation and public protest, slave flight and rebellion in marronage, and intolerance of religious difference. Available online by subscription.

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• Morgan, Edmund. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: Norton, 1975.

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  In 17th-century Virginia, uses elite white planters’ fear of servile insurrection—combining enslaved Africans with poor whites—to explain their embrace of racial slavery. Codifying race and slavery, which afforded lower-class white men an elevated racial status, gave them incentive not to oppose elite white rule. Morgan views Bacon’s Rebellion as the moment elite Virginians recognized the danger of a cross-racial class alliance.

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• Sharples, Jason. “Hearing Whispers, Casting Shadows: Jailhouse Conversation and the Production of Knowledge.” In Buried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America. Edited by Michele Lise Tarter and Richard J. Bell, 35–59. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012.

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  When masters feared an imminent slave uprising in Antigua, they preemptively arrested enslaved people to interrogate them for information about the threat. Judges used torture and public executions to terrorize suspects into informing. The close quarters of the makeshift jail enabled enslaved people to compare and recraft stories that would satisfy judges, thereby reclaiming some power over their individual fates. The resulting information played to masters’ fears and worsened the insurrectionary scare.

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• Sweet, John Wood. Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

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  Sweet’s explains the crystallization of red, white, and black racial categories in the colonial and early national US North. White people’s fear of violence by nonwhite people figures into his story, particularly in exaggerated newspaper reports. See especially chapter 2.

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Daily Violence and Rape

On a daily basis, masters deliberately used terror to attempt to control enslaved people. Painter 2002 and Bontemps 2001 call on historians to acknowledge the psychological impact of slavery on the enslaved. The question had been foreclosed after Elkins 1959 made the controversial and erroneous claim about enslaved people, despite the noble intention of humanizing them, that they were infantilized, docile, and dependent. After a generation of scholarship that emphasized enslaved people’s resistance and agency, Painter and Bontemps believed that historians incompletely understood enslaved people if they ignored their psychology or depicted them flatly as heroes and martyrs. Baptist 2014 and Burnard 2015 consequently paint a bleak picture of the trauma of slavery and the efficacy of terror and torture to compel labor and essential obedience from enslaved people, simply out of self-preservation. Fuentes 2016 identifies terrorizing symbols and sites hiding in plain view throughout the landscape of enslaved people’s daily travels, such as crossroads and market squares where corporal punishment occurred. Enslaved people feared sexual violence from masters and other white people. White 1999 and King 2014 demonstrate that enslaved women were in perpetual danger of rape from all quarters. This fundamental fact led masters sometimes to fear that black men would turn the tables against white women in a reversal of sexual power, as in the insurrectionary scares described by Martínez 2004 (cited under Law and Race) as well as by Jordan 1993 and Sharples 2015 (both cited under Conspiracy Scares and Averted Insurrections). Legal non-personhood rendered enslaved women vulnerable at least as much as master-slave power relations did, according to King 2014, because victims could not seek redress even against attackers who were not their masters, such as enslaved men. Nowhere was safe: Araujo 2015 shows that domestic spaces were just as dangerous as urban streets for enslaved women in Brazil.

• Araujo, Ana Lucia. “Black Purgatory: Enslaved Women’s Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Rio Grande Do Sul, Brazil.” Slavery & Abolition 36.4 (2015): 568–585.

  DOI: 10.1080/0144039X.2014.1001159Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Uses the cases of two enslaved women who attacked their masters to argue that households were dangerous for enslaved women. Some pushed back violently. Physical and sexual violence was a matter of course. Homes were places of fear, not relative shelter, for enslaved women compared to the street. Available online by subscription.

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• Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2014.

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  Explains enslaved people’s increasing skill and efficiency in picking cotton in the antebellum United States as the product of enslavers’ “innovation in violence” and the technology of pain. Explains how systematic “torture” combined with measurements and record-keeping to encourage enslaved people to “self-torture” in work to avoid worse fates at the hands of overseers. See especially chapter 4.

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• Bontemps, Alex. The Punished Self: Surviving Slavery in the Colonial South. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001.

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  Argues that psychological violence against enslaved people was at least as important as physical violence in their experience of enslavement. Suggests psychological interpretations of enslaved people’s silences in the archival record.

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• Burnard, Trevor. Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

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  Uses the diary of one man in the 18th century to illuminate master-slave relations and masters’ intellectual and social lives. Thistlewood participated in the Enlightenment and at the same time terrorized and enslaved people sexually and with unusually sadistic tortures, a juxtaposition made less mysterious by Schechter 2018 (cited under History of Emotions and Conceptual Approaches). See especially chapter 5 for the terror experienced by enslaved people and the fear of vengeance experienced by Thistlewood, and chapter 7 for a provocative interpretation of sexual relationships.

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• Burnard, Trevor. Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650–1820. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

  DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226286242.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Analysis of the stability of white colonists’ 18th-century British plantation world, and especially Jamaica. One argument is that white people did not fear black people so much as hold them in contempt. Emphasizes the dehumanization that enslaved black people experienced at the hands of white planters, and suggests that their management of trauma characterized enslaved life.

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• Elkins, Stanley. Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959.

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  A well-intentioned but controversial and severely flawed attempt to account for the full human toll of enslavement. Elkins argued that slavery psychologically infantilized enslaved people and rendered them docile. He used an ill-conceived comparison to Nazi concentration camps, which had far fewer opportunities for psychological self-preservation than 19th-century US slavery did. This book incited subsequent historians to strongly emphasize enslaved people’s resistance and agency in shaping their own lives.

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• Fuentes, Marisa J. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

  DOI: 10.9783/9780812293005Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  This study of 18th-century Bridgetown, Barbados, explores the interrelation between physical and epistemic violence. Explains struggles between enslaved people and colonial officials over punished bodies as animated by the experience of fear and the attempt to terrorize. Argues that urban slavery was at least as terrorizing as plantation slavery, with an innovative reading of the urban landscape as full of sites of hidden terror. Presents enslaved people’s bodily scars as repositories of trauma.

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• King, Wilma. “‘Prematurely Knowing of Evil Things’: The Sexual Abuse of African American Girls and Young Women in Slavery and Freedom.” Journal of African American History 99.3 (2014): 173–196.

  DOI: 10.5323/jafriamerhist.99.3.0173Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Presents evidence that enslaved women were threatened with rape not only by masters but also by other white men and by enslaved men. Observes that enslaved women’s vulnerability stemmed from legal non-personhood, which denied them formal protection from rape in the law. Instead, women informally helped each other stave off these dangers. Available online by subscription.

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• Painter, Nell Irvin. “Soul Murder & Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting.” In Southern History across the Color Line. By Nell Irvin Painter, 15–39. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

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  Uses psychologists’ concept of “soul murder”—anger and self-loathing resulting from physical and sexual abuse—to reopen the question of the true costs of slavery found in Elkins 1959. Focuses on enslaved women’s fear and trauma of rape. Also emphasizes the terror experienced by children who faced masters’ abuse and parents’ violent discipline, the latter intended to teach obedience for self-preservation. Painter exceeds Elkins by acknowledging evidence of resistance and by identifying two resources—family and fictive kin, and religious faith—that provided some shelter.

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• White, Deborah Gray. Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. Rev. ed. New York: Norton, 1999.

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  Pioneering book in the field of African American women’s history in the 19th-century United States. Explains how enslaved women experienced different hardships, challenges, traumas, and opportunities than enslaved men did. Fear pervaded women’s experiences on a daily basis because power structures of gender, racism, and the law of slavery combined to place them in particular danger of sexual assault and forced childbearing. Originally published in 1985, but the revised edition is preferred.

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African Religion and Poisoning

One tangle of fear-based relationships was rooted in masters’ and slaves’ belief in invisible powers. Diasporic African religious practice and medical healing usually involved turning to specialists who used a combination of pharmacological and spiritual tools. Practitioners used their powers overwhelmingly for healing, but they could also harm people, which Europeans viewed as poisoning or witchcraft. On the whole, scholars have found that white people in the Americas alternately feared and valued African spiritual/medical practice. In Brazil, the Inquisition systematically documented transgressions by masters and other white people who had turned to African practitioners as a valid source of assistance. This provides ample material for Souza 2003 and Sweet 2011 to reconstruct those people’s complicated respectful-yet-fearful relationship to diasporic African spiritual practices, as well as the power struggles that ensued. Parrish 2006 finds a similar dynamic: Europeans feared African poisoning precisely because they compelled Africans to engage deeply with the natural world, as well as because they sometimes relied on them for healing. In the French Caribbean, Savage 2007 demonstrates how unexplained setbacks could enflame masters’ fear of poisoning into a social panic, as if previous centuries’ witch-hunting in Europe had re-emerged in the New World in racialized form. In the British West Indies, with the practice of Obeah, Paton 2015 emphasizes elite white people’s skepticism about its efficacy, finding that their real fear was that enslaved people’s belief in its power would lead them to take harmful cures or, worse, would give them courage to rise up against masters. In an excellent work on enslaved people’s struggle to “survive” slavery, Browne 2017 establishes that they indeed both respected and feared Obeah practitioners. Consequently, according to Paton 2015, they criminalized the practice of Obeah. Handler and Bilby 2012 traces a similar story but places additional responsibility on Christian missionaries. With Obeah’s criminalization by masters, enslaved people could exercise power in the infrapolitics of their communities by accusing rivals of practicing the forbidden art. Religious belief also gave shape to masters’ and slaves’ fears around death. In Dutch Suriname, Davis 2011 shows in a study of the identification of feared poisoners, European tools of terror that were geared toward religious belief did not necessarily have the same purchase with African religious attitudes toward death. For Jamaica, Brown 2010 shows how the living constructed their societies in relation to the deceased and in response to their own expectation of death, all of which provided ways for masters and slaves to exercise spiritual power that played on religion-based fears.

• Brown, Vincent. The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

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  In this study of power struggles around death and religion in Jamaica, Brown analyzes how masters and slaves constructed their societies around the deceased and awareness of their own impending deaths. People feared jeopardizing their afterlives. Colonists feared some spiritual resources with which slaves navigated the death of loved ones: African funerals as sites for self-organization, missionary activity as a vector for abolitionist infiltration, and black churches as incubators of a talented class of leaders.

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• Browne, Randy M. Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.

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  Relies on detailed records from an office in Berbice that heard enslaved people’s complaints. Chapter 5 is a case study of Obeah’s role in power relations among enslaved people. Concludes that they both feared the spiritual powers of practitioners and resorted to them. The rest of the book presents overwhelming evidence that enslaved individuals struggled against one another for scarce resources under the crush of planters’ power. Thus, more than resistance, they prioritized survival.

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• Bryson, Sasha Turner. “The Art of Power: Poison and Obeah Accusations and the Struggle for Dominance and Survival in Jamaica’s Slave Society.” Caribbean Studies 41.2 (2013): 61–90.

  DOI: 10.1353/crb.2013.0030Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Colonists’ fear of the effects of Obeah on slave society furnished opportunities for enslaved people to exercise power. Demonstrates that enslaved people could use accusations of Obeah, and colonists’ fear of the insubordination effects of Obeah belief, to manipulate planters into intervening in slave community politics and disputes. Available online by subscription.

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• Davis, Natalie Zemon. “Judges, Masters, Diviners: Slaves’ Experience of Criminal Justice in Colonial Suriname.” Law and History Review 29.4 (2011): 925–984.

  DOI: 10.1017/S0738248011000502Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Exploration of criminal justice in Africa and in African-diasporic enslaved communities in Dutch Suriname, with emphasis on fear of anonymous poisoners. Explains how African spiritual practitioners identified poisoners through physical ordeals, and compares that practice to Dutch courts’ use of torture to extract confessions. Observes that European fears, such as death, did not consistently elicit Africans’ confessions because African religious beliefs did not always hold death to be a feared outcome. Available online by subscription.

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• Handler, Jerome S., and Kenneth M. Bilby. Enacting Power: The Criminalization of Obeah in the Anglophone Caribbean, 1760–2011. Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2012.

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  Traces the statutes that criminalized Obeah. Blames these laws and the writing of missionaries for the misconception of Obeah as primarily evil as sorcery or witchcraft, rather than its proper characterization as a medical practice that the enslaved regarded as a socially positive force for good. Invites scholars to incorporate more ethnographic work to counterbalance this bias in the written archive. Brief and lucid.

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• Parrish, Susan Scott. American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

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  European colonists feared enslaved people’s potential use of poison precisely because they forced them into a more direct relationship with the natural world. Compounding the perceived danger, European colonists turned to enslaved Africans and African Americans for healing and even antidotes. Parrish credits enslaved people as contributors to the Enlightenment.

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• Paton, Diana. The Cultural Politics of Obeah. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

  DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139198417Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Explains Obeah’s variety of political uses and especially its criminalization in Caribbean society over three centuries. During slavery, planters objected to Obeah less because these men of the Enlightenment feared its spiritual potency than because they worried that enslaved people believed in it and consequently would challenge the system of slavery. Obeah practitioners were therefore prosecuted when they seemed on the verge of inspiring insurrection or when they appeared to physically harm enslaved people when treating them.

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• Savage, John. “‘Black Magic’ and White Terror: Slave Poisoning and Colonial Society in Early 19th-Century Martinique.” Journal of Social History 40.3 (2007): 635–662.

  DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2007.0068Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  In 19th-century French Martinique, colonial planters viewed anonymous acts of Obeah poisoning as a significant threat to the “survival of the island” (p. 636). They increasingly accused enslaved people of poisoning livestock, fellow slaves, and white masters. Colonists’ fear spoke to anxieties about trustworthiness and domestic reliance on strangers, but their concerns faced skepticism from metropolitan authorities. Available online by subscription.

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• Souza, Laura de Mello e. The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross: Witchcraft, Slavery, and Popular Religion in Colonial Brazil. Translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.

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  Witchcraft belief in Brazil resulted from syncretism among Indigenous, Portuguese, Basque, and African people. White people and masters, particularly non-elites, often feared and respected enslaved practitioners. See especially chapter 4. Translated from the Portuguese, originally published as O diabo e a terra de Santa Cruz: Feitiçaria e religiosidade popular no Brasil colonial (São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia Das Letras, 1986).

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• Sweet, James H. Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

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  This Afro-Brazilian microhistory adds to explanations of European colonial fear of African spiritual specialists. Argues that the political and religious authorities in Dahomey, Brazil, and Portugal found Álvares’s healing practices dangerous as an alternate source of authority that challenged imperialism and slavery. Sweet argues, contrary to others’ emphasis on Africans’ deft adoption and manipulation of European cultural and political forms, that Álvares’s real power among rulers was fear of his indigenous African spiritual knowledge.

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General Dread of Insurrection

Slaveholders intuited that enslaved people could rise up against them without warning, particularly when they had superior numbers. Many scholars of slavery see this general dread of insurrection as generative of other ideological, legal, and economic structures in slavery-based societies. Wood 1974 and Parent 2003 view colonial South Carolina and Virginia as operating under a cloud of anticipated insurrection while establishing the fundamentals of their societies. Taylor 2013 continues a similar analysis of Virginia for the decade or so leading up to the War of 1812. All three of these works identify bodies of law that resulted from this atmosphere of dread, thus putting them in conversation with the legal histories of Jordan 1968, Hadden 2001, and Ghachem 2012 (all cited under Law and Race); the present works’ emphasis is on the diffuse political culture of fear. Other scholarship addresses how transregional connections influenced local fear of insurrection. Fisher 2014 shows that planters in the English West Indies feared enslaved Indians from New England, producing exclusionary laws, while Herschthal 2016, a study of Louisiana, emphasizes the importance of geopolitical rivalry with the Spanish in deepening American masters’ dread of insurrection. Perhaps attempting to address the perceived “failure” of almost all slave rebellions (see Burnard 2015, cited under Daily Violence and Rape), some scholars show that the fear they engendered slowed the growth of slavery. Herschthal 2016 credits fear of Spanish-enabled slave rebellion for temporarily slowing down US expansion in the Old Southwest. Richardson 2001 finds a similar salutary effect on the Atlantic slave trade, with slavers’ fears of shipboard revolts driving costs to levels that measurably suppressed the number of people trafficked. With so much interpretive weight on how masters viewed past slave rebellions and especially the prospect of more to come, Burnard 2015 has cautioned scholars to interrogate the premise that repeatedly quashing insurrections produced fear rather than, as the author sees it, confidence. Pestana, et al. 2015 responds directly to this hypothesis, defending the importance of slave insurrections and the dread they inspired. If one wishes to measure fear, one metric offered by Brown and Morgan 2006 is to examine masters’ willingness in different situations to arm slaves in service of the colonial regime. Fear of rebellion, it seems clear, shifted with historical contingencies that scholars need to continue identifying.

• Brown, Christopher Leslie, and Philip D. Morgan, eds. Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.

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  In this anthology, leading scholars present overviews of enlisting slaves and giving them weapons in the early modern Americas. Several of these colonial societies armed slaves in times of need despite the possible danger that they would turn on their masters. Masters in Brazil and Anglo-America vacillated on whether it was wise to arm slaves, while French and Spanish American regimes tended to view the practice with less alarm.

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• Fisher, Linford D. “‘Dangerous Designes’: The 1676 Barbados Act to Prohibit New England Indian Slave Importation.” William and Mary Quarterly 71.1 (2014): 99–124.

  DOI: 10.5309/willmaryquar.71.1.0099Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  In late-17th-century Barbados and Jamaica, masters worried that enslaved Native Americans arriving from New England, having been captured in Metacom’s War (or King Philip’s War, 1675–1676), would rebel if permitted on the islands. Both colonies passed laws banning them. This fear of Indian slaves can be explained partly by a recent conspiracy scare that implicated dozens of Africans (1675). Available online by subscription.

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• Harpham, John Samuel. “‘Tumult and Silence’ in the Study of the American Slave Revolts.” Slavery & Abolition 36.2 (2015): 257–274.

  DOI: 10.1080/0144039X.2014.916515Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Excellent literature review of 20th-century scholarship on slave rebellions and conspiracy scares. Observes that 21st-century scholarship, primarily through microhistory, has emphasized narrativity and has cautioned readers against stable interpretations rather than mining the incidents as social history. Available online by subscription.

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• Herschthal, Eric. “Slaves, Spaniards, and Subversion in Early Louisiana: The Persistent Fears of Black Revolt and Spanish Collusion in Territorial Louisiana, 1803–1812.” Journal of the Early Republic 36.2 (2016): 283–311.

  DOI: 10.1353/jer.2016.0036Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  In the Louisiana territory bordering New Spain, US officials feared the consequences of a large presence of enslaved people and free people of color. They believed that Africans and African Americans would coordinate with the Spanish to wrest the region away. These fears limited US appetites for increasing the numbers of enslaved people in the territory—a corequisite of westward expansion—so long as the Spanish remained a power in the region. Available online by subscription.

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• Parent, Anthony S. Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660–1740. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

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  Enslaved people in turn-of-the-18th-century Virginia resisted the new system of racial slavery, Parent argues, thereby instilling fear that caused elite planters to establish draconian laws and policing mechanisms (see chapters 4 and 5). Elsewhere, Parent shows that these elite Virginia planters manipulated land claims and deliberately created a system of racial slavery to establish and solidify economic control, deepening our understanding of the “unthinking decision” first identified in Jordan 1968.

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• Pestana, Carla Gardina, Pieter Emmer, James Robertson, and Trevor Burnard. “Forum: Trevor Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1630–1820.” Journal of Early American History 5.3 (2015): 271–310.

  DOI: 10.1163/18770703-00503001Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  This thoughtful roundtable elucidates some points in Burnard 2015. Robertson maintains that quashed slave revolts and conspiracies of the mid-18th century—contrary to Burnard’s argument—in fact heightened planters’ fear of racial revolution, particularly because they did not share in our hindsight of the Haitian Revolution. Burnard reasserts that “contempt,” more than paralyzing fear, characterized whites’ attitudes toward blacks, pointing to Tacky’s Rebellion (1760) as a lesson for planters that extreme terrorizing punishment appeared to restore order. Available online by subscription.

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• Richardson, David. “Shipboard Revolts, African Authority, and the Atlantic Slave Trade.” William and Mary Quarterly 58.1 (2001): 69–92.

  DOI: 10.2307/2674419Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Captive Africans on slaving ships rebelled with such regularity that enslavers regarded their cargoes with fear. Taking an economic approach, this article calculates the additional cost in outfitting slaving voyages due to the expectation of shipboard revolts. These costs increased prices enough to effectively prevent the removal of greater numbers of captives from Africa. Available online by subscription.

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• Taylor, Alan. The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832. New York: Norton, 2013.

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  Interweaves white Virginians’ fear of insurrection with hardening racial and legal lines in slavery, particularly 1792–1812. Gives special causal responsibility to Gabriel’s Conspiracy (1800) and includes several lesser-known conspiracy scares of 1808–1812. The rest of the book focuses on enslaved and freed people’s participation in the War of 1812.

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• Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New York: Knopf, 1974.

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  Argues that African demographic dominance in colonial South Carolina, in combination with news of Caribbean revolts, encouraged white colonists to harbor fears about white people’s security. They addressed this concern by attempting to control slave movements and gatherings with policing, surveillance, and punishments. Indeed, enslaved people performed individual acts of resistance, such as arson and poison, and led the Stono Rebellion of 1739. This resulted in further draconian and newly racialized laws.

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Rebellions and Their Aftermaths

Scholars have identified precise consequences from specific slave rebellions, generated by the fearful expectation that those revolts would portend greater revolutionary change. Several of these studies show that small revolts sparked fear of plans for larger insurrections, which were investigated but never materialized, and that these fears inspired and justified draconian counterinsurgency measures. For Cuba, Childs 2006 and Reid-Vazquez 2011 explain how rebellions in 1812 and 1843–1844 fueled authorities’ fears that greater insurrectionary conspiracies were afoot, leading to investigations and crackdowns. Brown 2012 anatomizes one such rebellion and counterinsurgency in Jamaica (1760–1761) through an interactive map, providing a better sense of contingency in the unfolding violence and the uncertainty and fear that it engendered. Adding to our understanding of such crackdowns, Brown 2006 teases out how the power of masters’ mutilation of slaves in corporal punishment in Jamaica went beyond mere bodily pain by mobilizing a “spiritual” form of terror in the context of diasporic African religion. For Brazil, Reis 1993 explains how a rebellion in 1835 similarly sparked further investigation and generated apparent evidence of a deeper conspiracy, and Brown 2000 argues that these events and similar ones played a significant role in Brazilian state formation. While Breen 2016 makes similar observations of the consequences of a rebellion in Virginia (1831), this work is more notable for its attention to the fears of black and white participants in the heat of rebellion and their unsettling awareness that they had incomplete information about the event. Also focusing on anxiety around uncertain information, Klooster 2014 documents how rumors among enslaved people sparked and fueled many slave rebellions across several territories in the Atlantic world, in a dynamic anticipating that in Eller 2017 (cited under Antislavery and Abolition). Finally, two studies consider the Anglo-American ideological ramifications of Africans’ resistance. Steel 1993 locates the origins of Jamaican stereotypes about “violent” Africans in the effective Maroon resistance to English conquest, on which more is available in the separate Oxford Bibliographies entry in Atlantic History “Maroons and Marronage,” and Basker 2000 extends the idea across the anglophone Atlantic by establishing that the reading public had broad awareness of racial insurrections in the 18th century. For more works on several of the rebellions referred to here, see the separate Oxford Bibliographies article in Atlantic History “Slave Rebellions.”

• Basker, James G. “‘The Next Insurrection’: Johnson, Race, and Rebellion.” The Age of Johnson 11 (2000): 37–51.

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  Slave rebellions entered the consciousness of Anglo-American readers through periodicals. This article documents the stunning frequency of news of conspiracy scares and actual rebellions in the Gentleman’s Magazine in the middle of the 18th century. The published accounts shaped how anglophone readers regarded the dangers of violent racial slavery, and they also cumulatively established expectations that another rising would be imminent.

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• Breen, Patrick H. The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

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  Gives empathetic attention to the feelings of uncertainty, insecurity, and fear experienced by both the rebels and the masters in the heat of a major rebellion in antebellum Virginia. Addresses masters’ use of torture to gain information, fear of a larger conspiracy, and whites’ impulse to terrorize black people after the rebellion. Breen argues that, once triumphant, whites tried to minimize the importance of the rebellion. See especially chapters 4 and 5.

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• Brown, Alexandra K. “‘A Black Mark on Our Legislation’: Slavery, Punishment, and the Politics of Death in Nineteenth-Century Brazil.” Luso-Brazilian Review 37.2 (2000): 95–121.

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  Uses the Brazilian master class’s fear of insurrection to explain the project of state formation from the moment of independence. Views the rebellion in Bahia (1835) and the desire to use the death penalty against rebels as an accelerant in this expansion of state policing power. Available online by subscription.

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• Brown, Vincent. “Spiritual Terror and Sacred Authority: Supernatural Power in Jamaican Slave Society.” In New Studies in the History of American Slavery. Edited by Edward E. Baptist and Stephanie M. H. Camp, 179–210. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006.

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  Masters attempted to compel obedience by punishing rebels and other transgressors in ways that spoke to their religious beliefs. They used bodily mutilation to demonstrate that the deceased did not proceed to a better life. Brown identifies Tacky’s Rebellion (1760) as a crucial moment for this spiritual battle in Jamaica, particularly because of the influence of Obeah. This essay also appears in similar form in chapter 4 of Brown 2010 (cited under African Religion and Poisoning).

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• Brown, Vincent. “Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760–1761: A Cartographic Narrative.” 2012.

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  This interactive digital map exhaustively plots and animates the battles and movements of rebels and counterinsurgency forces. Conveys the scope, pacing, and proximity of violence, and rebels’ wise maneuvers, thus capturing the contingency and fear of the historical moment for all residents of Jamaica, free and enslaved. Connects each plotted event to quotations from underlying primary source documentation. Includes political and topographical map layers to demonstrate the importance of terrain. Includes short interpretive essays.

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• Childs, Matt D. The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

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  After suppressing a series of revolts around Cuba (1812), authorities discovered a terrifying book in the possession of a free person of color, Jose Antonio Aponte. It contained images of Haitian leaders, George Washington, and African kings, alongside maps of Havana and depictions of black and white soldiers fighting. Explains the formation and investigation of this planned rebellion with attention to the climate of fear and influence of Haiti.

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• Klooster, Wim. “Slave Revolts, Royal Justice, and a Ubiquitous Rumor in the Age of Revolutions.” William and Mary Quarterly 71.3 (2014): 401–424.

  DOI: 10.5309/willmaryquar.71.3.0401Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Enslaved people often rebelled when they believed that local masters were thwarting an imperial decree meant to emancipate them. These rumors animated revolts from the 17th through 19th centuries, but they became more prevalent during the Age of Revolutions. Klooster argues that no new republican ideology of the age was responsible—for there were monarchical movements—but that the period’s political turmoil and intercolonial exchange provided a fertile environment for these fearful rumors. Available online by subscription.

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• Reid-Vazquez, Michele. The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011.

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  Cuban authorities interpreted rebellions in 1843–1844 as a vast island-wide conspiracy led by free people of color. This event was called La Escalera for the manner of torture used. The investigation involved great terror in the spectacles of punishment and—as this book emphasizes—the long-term crackdown on the liberties and privileges of free people of color.

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• Reis, João José. Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

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  In this classic account of the rebellion in Salvador, Bahia, chapters 11 and 12 examine the great fear that swept through among white people in the region in the aftermath of the uprising. Consequently, authorities arrested dozens of additional Africans for interrogation and punishment. The book’s earlier chapters reconstruct the religious and ethnic networks of enslaved people that enabled them to plan the initial uprising.

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• Steel, M. J. “A Philosophy of Fear: The World View of the Jamaican Plantocracy in a Comparative Perspective.” Journal of Caribbean History 27.1 (1993): 1–20.

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  English fear of Africans in Jamaica began from “the first weeks” of conquering the island in 1655, when Maroons resisted and terrorized settlers by desecrating their bodies, appearing to confirm longstanding prejudices about people from the African continent (p. 8). Later, in racialized proslavery ideology, planters argued that only by continuing slavery could they control the otherwise “dangerous” masses of people of African descent. The Quashee stereotype emanated from this insecurity for white people in Jamaica.

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Conspiracy Scares and Averted Insurrections

“Conspiracy scares” were investigations into rumors of imminent insurrection that failed to materialize, as first defined in Wyatt-Brown 1982, distinct from “rebellions,” in which slaves actually rose up, as clarified in Sharples 2015. A self-reinforcing system of fear created conspiracy scares. Slaves’ longstanding threat to rise up made masters fearful and susceptible to overreading signs in particular historical circumstances, similar to the system of fear, terror, and dread described in Brown 2011 (cited under Age of Revolutions). In turn, masters used torture to generate knowledge, however faulty, about the supposed threat. On the basis of these coerced confessions, they deliberately terrorized the broader slave population, as Nicholls 2012 shows with an example from Virginia in 1800. Conspiracy scares occurred overwhelmingly in the Anglo-American Atlantic, with some exceptions such as Martínez 2004 (cited under Law and Race). For many conspiracy scares, scholars disagree about whether each was an overreaction to a false alarm or represented an authentic instance of imminent insurrection. This is particularly true of the Denmark Vesey Affair (1822) in Gross 2001. In another, less-heated example of interpretive disagreement, most scholars follow Gaspar 1985 in crediting the Antigua conspiracy scare of 1736, which Gaspar uncovered in excellent archival work, even though Sharples 2012 (cited under Law and Race) raises concerns that many forms of coercion encouraged suspects to confess to a common tale that took shape in the crammed jailhouse. In a case from Mississippi, Jordan 1993 meditates on the efficacy of torture to compel the truth. For New York’s conspiracy scare of 1741, Hoffer 2003 addresses the same essential issue of coercion by viewing this as legal history and emphasizing the courthouse’s role in constructing knowledge about the alleged crime. Lepore 2005 considers New York’s investigation as group authorship, drawing on many local sources, and coordinated by a lead investigator with a vendetta. For additional work on New York’s 1741 scare, see the separate Oxford Bibliographies article in Atlantic History “New York City.” Thus the crux of interpretive disagreement is often a scholar’s assessment of masters’ coercive power, slaves’ likely mode of resistance, and the written record’s panoply of possible informational sources. One way to loosen this knot is to measure a conspiracy investigation’s “findings” against generic literary conventions to test reliability. Sharples 2015 demonstrates a Barbados conspiracy scare’s debt to a combination of broad assumptions from Africa, ancient Rome, and early modern England; and Pope 2017 situates a Native American slave conspiracy scare in Massachusetts within prior assumptions framed by newspaper accounts of African slave insurrections and conspiracy scares. Only rarely is a clear did-they-or-didn’t-they answer obvious: a conman definitively lied about an Alabama scare (1835) in Rothman 2012, allowing readers to consider why the residents of several states believed the con.

• Gaspar, David Barry. Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua, with Implications for Colonial British America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.

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  Unearths masters’ attempted social control and slaves’ resistance in 18th-century Antigua. Spotlights the insurrectionary scare of 1736 while giving detailed information about the preceding decades’ dialectic progression of laws, individual resistance, policing, marronage, anti-maroon expeditions, and rebellions. Depicts this as a slow-burning war. A conspiracy (or at least a conspiracy scare and investigation) was the culmination of this back and forth.

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• Gross, Robert A., ed. “Forum: The Making of a Slave Conspiracy.” William and Mary Quarterly 58.4 (2001): 913–976.

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  Heated exchange over the reality of Denmark Vesey’s alleged insurrectionary plans in Charleston, South Carolina (1822). Michael Johnson identified errors in a recent publication and, upon further research, decided that the white court concocted the charges. On fear, see especially the following: Philip Morgan’s contextualization with similar conspiracy scares, James Sidbury’s proposal of better questions for these sources, and Robert Paquette’s Cuban comparison. Article continues in William and Mary Quarterly 59.1 (2002): 135–202. Available by subscription online as Part 1 and Part 2.

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• Hoffer, Peter Charles. The Great New York Conspiracy of 1741: Slavery, Crime, and Colonial Law. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003.

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  A legal history of New York’s conspiracy scare of 1741. Explains how white officials transformed popular fear into concrete and devastating judicial actions through the combination of court procedure, notions of evidence, and ideas about race.

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• Jordan, Winthrop D. Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993.

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  One of the first book-length studies of a conspiracy scare to address the slipperiness of the facts of the matter. Imaginatively reads the silences of the written record for white fear and black terror. Places the torture of enslaved bodies at the center of the investigative process.

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• Lepore, Jill. New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan. New York: Knopf, 2005.

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  Applies a digital humanities approach to New York’s conspiracy scare of 1741. Emphasizes how judges constructed the source material as a self-serving narrative. Strongest when recovering features of social organization among the black population, but also addresses white factional politics of the moment.

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• Nicholls, Michael L. Whispers of Rebellion: Narrating Gabriel’s Conspiracy. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012.

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  Case study of an insurrectionary scare in Richmond, Virginia (1800). White masters’ fear permeates this account of their response to the perceived threat. Nicholls presents Gabriel’s Conspiracy as a bona fide planned rebellion and illuminates the importance of local networks. One could read Nicholls’s treatment against the grain to understand this as a “fear event” with a different kind of politics, just as locally rooted. See especially chapters 5 and 6 for spreading fear during and after the trials, including political ramifications.

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• Pope, Justin. “Inventing an Indian Slave Conspiracy on Nantucket, 1738.” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 15.3 (2017): 505–538.

  DOI: 10.1353/eam.2017.0019Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  A rumor of an imminent rebellion planned by Indians in debt peonage gained traction because of existing expectations about insurrection. The rumor drew on common beliefs about how enslaved Africans would rebel, and colonial printers framed the false story as a slave conspiracy and as an Indian atrocity. Available online by subscription.

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• Rothman, Joshua. Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012.

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  Connects fear of slave insurrection to economic anxieties and confidence artistry in Alabama (1835) to argue for an underlying instability in the explosive growth of boom-town slave capitalism. Excellent example of how scholars can better understand slavery-related fears, beyond master-slave relations, by contextualizing them with developments that may seem unrelated.

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• Sharples, Jason. “Discovering Slave Conspiracies: New Fears of Rebellion and Old Paradigms of Plotting in Seventeenth-Century Barbados.” American Historical Review 120.3 (2015): 811–843.

  DOI: 10.1093/ahr/120.3.811Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  English colonists developed fears—particular visions—of African insurrection by thinking of other forms of political violence outside of American racial slavery. African informants furnished ideas from West African warfare. European investigators referred to the Irish Rebellions of 1641, classical histories of ancient Rome, and especially anti-popery’s fears of Catholic insurrection. Available online by subscription.

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• Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. “Policing Slave Society: Insurrectionary Scares.” In Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South. 402–434. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

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  Views the many conspiracy scares of the antebellum United States as opportunities for white men to ritually master their fear and reaffirm their membership in a hierarchical white community.

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Age of Revolutions

The Age of Revolutions was characterized by such political instability and ideological ferment that enslaved people sensed opportunities to press their cases and articulate their definitions of liberty. Masters recognized the political moment and realized that they had created a system of exploitation based on terror, according to Brown 2011, and justifiably feared the possibilities of bloodshed and role reversal. In the American Revolution, fear of slave insurrection mobilized many participants. Holton 1999 and Harris 2009 offer case studies for how Revolutionaries used slave unrest to accuse the British Ministry of attempting to destabilize Virginia and South Carolina in the summer of 1775. On a wider canvas, Parkinson 2016 emphasizes the importance of newspapers in uniting Revolutionaries around the perceived common threat of instigated insurrection. Paradoxically, according to O’Shaughnessy 2000, the colonies of the West Indies remained loyal because they perceived the threat of slave rebellion as best answered by a close relationship to the British Empire. The Haitian Revolution—itself initiated by a slave uprising in the colony of Saint-Domingue—stoked fear throughout the Caribbean in ways that shaped those territories’ political developments, according to pathbreaking work in Geggus 2002. Ferrer 2014 shows that Cuba tailored its slave system with Saint-Domingue’s cautionary example in mind. The Haitian Revolution also shaped US politics and slavery, as White 2010 explores primarily through Saint-Domingue refugees and Dun 2016 traces largely through newspaper coverage. Both works emphasize that Americans used the Haitian Revolution to think through their own social structure, coming to conclusions that the US system of slavery was stable (White 2010) but that free African Americans were dangerous (Dun 2016). Gabrial 2013, contrary to White 2010, sees the specter of an insurrection similar to Saint-Domingue looming over antebellum US newspaper essays. More on the Haitian Revolution itself is available in the separate Oxford Bibliographies article in Atlantic History “The Haitian Revolution.”

• Brown, Vincent. “A Vapor of Dread: Observations on Racial Terror and Vengeance in the Age of Revolution.” In Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn. Edited by Richard Rabinowitz, Laurent Dubois, and Thomas Bender, 178–198. New York: D. Giles, 2011.

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  Short interpretive essay that portrays Caribbean slavery as an ecosystem of fear. Slaves experienced regular terror from masters, and masters experienced the fear of unpredictable slave insurrection. Argues that masters’ fear was amplified by their vulnerability to economic, environmental, and demographic threats. Observes the justifiably increased fears of masters, and the initiative of slaves, after the Jamaica Rebellion (1760) and after the Haitian Revolution.

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• Dun, James Alexander. Dangerous Neighbors: Making the Haitian Revolution in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

  DOI: 10.9783/9780812292978Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  As the Haitian Revolution unfolded, printers in Philadelphia used information about it and the French Revolution to reflect on the political predicaments and opportunities facing the young United States. Americans were initially fascinated with the other revolution, but eventually viewed it with fear and as a lesson on the supposed danger of free African Americans.

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• Ferrer, Ada. Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

  DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139333672Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Rigorous and detailed explanation of how the Haitian Revolution influenced Cuba’s simultaneous escalation of slavery. Cubans learned from the Haitian Revolution about what specifically to fear in a slavery-based society, and they attempted to neutralize those perceived dangers: unrestricted slave communication, free people of color, maroons, and the specter of foreign agents.

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• Gabrial, Brian. “From Haiti to Nat Turner: Racial Panic Discourse during the Nineteenth Century Partisan Press Era.” American Journalism 30 (2013): 336–364.

  DOI: 10.1080/08821127.2013.816897Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Analyzes the newspaper accounts of US conspiracy scares and rebellions in the decades after the Haitian Revolution. Applies moral panic theory to argue that elites manipulated representations of insurrectionary activity to maintain a grip on power. Finds that the specter of Haiti animated those representations. Available online by subscription.

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• Geggus, David P. The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002.

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  The example of the Haitian Revolution reawakened longstanding fears of insurrection among slaveholders elsewhere in the Caribbean. Several of the essays in this volume demonstrate direct geopolitical, ideological, or personal connections between Haiti and slave unrest or conspiracy scares in other Greater Caribbean slave societies, including South Carolina, Cuba, Jamaica, Guadeloupe, and Venezuela. Several essays explain the political consequences of fear in localities.

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• Harris, J. William. The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah: A Free Black Man’s Encounter with Liberty. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.

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  Explains how Revolutionaries scapegoated Thomas Jeremiah, the wealthiest free black man in British North America, as a leader of an alleged planned rebellion. This conspiracy scare linked fears of slave insurrection, fears of Indian raids, and fears of British Ministerial machinations. Paints a compelling picture of the Revolutionary movement in Charleston and its reliance on fear to mobilize support.

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• Holton, Woody. Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

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  Argues that enslaved people’s actions (as well as those of Indians, debtors, and smallholders) forced Virginia’s elites into the American Revolution. Chapter 5 presents several purported plans for slave insurrection around the colony in April 1775. Whether or not these were real plans, as Holton sees them, in conjunction with Governor Dunmore’s threats to incite rebellion these fear events certainly primed white planters to seek independence.

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• O’Shaughnessy, Andrew Jackson. An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

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  Explains the British Caribbean’s reluctance to join the American Revolution as the product of fear of slave insurrection, among other considerations. The demographic dominance of the enslaved people led white planters to depend heavily on the British army and navy for policing and restoring order, unlike the mainland North American colonies, which had robust militia systems. Anglo-Caribbean planters viewed the empire’s military presence as too desirable to risk losing.

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• Parkinson, Robert G. The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

  DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469626635.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Argues that during the War of Independence, American Revolutionaries sought to unite their ranks through fear. They printed reams of newspaper stories about the British Ministry’s desire to incite insurrection by slaves against white colonists (as well as to sponsor Indian atrocities against them). Parkinson argues that the independence movement would have failed without uniting white Patriots through fear by vilifying nonwhite members of society.

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• White, Ashli. Encountering Revolution: Haiti, and the Making of the Early Republic. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

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  Explains how refugees from Saint-Domingue to the United States forced Americans to examine their definitions of citizenship and to inspect their own practices of slavery. Surprisingly, Americans came to the conclusion that the Haitian Revolution did not portend insurrection or instability in the US system. See especially chapter 4.

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Antislavery and Abolition

The movement to abolish the Atlantic slave trade gained strength through some people’s religious dread of wrath and damnation, others’ fear of the violence of rebellion, and still others’ anxiety about national identity. The best work on British abolitionism, Brown 2006, argues that a significant segment of the public worried that without abolishing the slave trade the nation would lose its place as the beacon of liberty in the world. While evangelicals figure into Brown 2006 as political actors, Coffey 2012 insists on taking their fear of divine wrath more seriously as a motive for ending the slave trade. A chapter in Brown 2010 (cited under African Religion and Poisoning), in a slightly different emphasis than Coffey, notes that the certainty of eventual death focused evangelicals’ minds on the fear of eternal damnation for the sin of slavery. Fear of rebellion also contributed to calculating the desirability of abolishing the Atlantic slave trade and improving living conditions through Amelioration: Matthews 2006 foregrounds significant 19th-century rebellions, and Fergus 2009 extends the analysis back to late-18th-century revolts. Interestingly, Graden 2006 finds a similar dynamic around the closing of the Atlantic slave trade in Brazil. In the United States, fear of the consolidated political power of southern states, in the classic study Davis 1970, popularized antislavery sentiment in the North as a counterbalance. While scholars of US abolition tend not to address religious fear directly, other historians demonstrate that proslavery apologists did appeal to racial fears. Rugemer 2008 indicates that defenders of US slavery pointed to perceived failures and racial threats in the British West Indies experiment with emancipation. On the eve of the Civil War, secessionists conjured specters of slave insurrection abetted by the northern states, according to Paulus 2017, and they widely pointed to the concrete example of a Texas conspiracy scare documented authoritatively by Reynolds 2007. Fears changed but did not evaporate with the eventual end of slavery, and white people still terrorized black people, with appalling government sanction. Such violent racial regimes gave credence to the surprisingly widespread black fears of re-enslavement presented in Eller 2017. Many additional works on the end of slavery can be found in the separate Oxford Bibliographies articles in Atlantic History “Abolition of Slavery” and “Emancipation.”

• Brown, Christopher Leslie. Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.

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  British abolitionism is explained through evangelicals’ (and the national public’s) fear of violating values that were core to their self-image. After the major setback of the American Revolution, which was waged in terms of liberty versus slavery, Britons sought to reclaim position as an empire of liberty and morality.

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• Coffey, John. “‘Tremble, Britannia!’: Fear, Providence and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1758–1807.” English Historical Review 127.527 (2012): 844–881.

  DOI: 10.1093/ehr/ces149Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Forcefully argues for the neglected importance of fear of God in British abolitionist discourse before 1807. Abolitionists from several denominations and in several formats used language of divine wrath and atonement. Critiques the secularism of many prominent histories of antislavery. Available online by subscription.

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• Davis, David Brion. The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970.

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  This classic essay traces how fear and rumor established a northern US theory of a southern Slave Power in control of the federal government. Connects this conspiracy theory to other fears of internal enemies. Relies on Richard Hofstadter’s concept of the “paranoid style.”

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• Eller, Anne. “Rumors of Slavery: Defending Emancipation in a Hostile Caribbean.” American Historical Review 122.3 (2017): 653–679.

  DOI: 10.1093/ahr/122.3.653Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  After emancipation in the Caribbean, freed people feared re-enslavement. Eller presents several examples and focuses on one such rumor in Santo Domingo (1863) that inspired collective political mobilization and insurgency against Spanish rule. She finds that rumors of re-enslavement, like rumors of imminent insurrection, articulated the crux of social conditions; propertied elites indeed attempted to control freed people through racial means and disturbing continuities in laws and social relations from the slavery period. Available online by subscription.

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• Fergus, Claudius. “‘Dread of Insurrection’: Abolitionism, Security, and Labor in Britain’s West Indian Colonies, 1760–1823.” William and Mary Quarterly 66.4 (2009): 757–780.

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  Argues that fear of insurrection contributed to the British amelioration/creolization movement and the abolition of the slave trade. Rebellions in the second half of the 18th century suggested that African-born slaves tended to rebel more than American-born slaves. Therefore, both pro- and antislavery voices promoted reforms that would reduce dependence on the Atlantic slave trade: one pro-natalist, the other abolitionist. Available online by subscription.

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• Graden, Dale Torston. From Slavery to Freedom in Brazil: Bahia, 1835–1900. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006.

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  Argues that pressure mounted in Brazil against the Atlantic slave trade due to fear of slave rebellion. Documents an accumulation of revolts and conspiracy scares that made the Atlantic slave trade seem dangerous to masters. The rest of the book considers the free womb law and the abolition of slavery.

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• Matthews, Gelien. Caribbean Slave Revolts and the British Abolitionist Movement. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.

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  Slaveholders claimed to fear that abolitionism would inspire slaves to rebel, and even abolitionists were uneasy at the thought. This book examines how abolitionists received and deployed information about British Caribbean rebellions in 1815, 1823, and 1831 to promote the end of slavery.

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• Paulus, Carl Lawrence. The Slaveholding Crisis: Fear of Insurrection and the Coming of the Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017.

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  Highlights secessionists’ use of fear of slave insurrection to mobilize southerners. Secessionists argued that without westward expansion of slavery the southern states risked a dangerous racial demographic imbalance. They conjured the specter of a second Haitian Revolution and blamed the federal government for abdicating its responsibility to stave off such a rebellion.

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• Reynolds, Donald E. Texas Terror: The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860 and the Secession of the Lower South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007.

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  Fires in Dallas (1860) sparked fears that enslaved people, led by abolitionist agents, were attempting to rise up against slaveholders. Northerners were rounded up. This book shows how news of this fear event propelled secessionist activity and inflected its arguments throughout the South on the eve of the Civil War.

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• Rugemer, Edward Bartlett. The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008.

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  Examines how US pro- and antislavery activists used contested views of the progress of British abolitionism and emancipation in the Caribbean. Appealing to fear, defenders of slavery used the region’s slave rebellions, spectral predictions of sexual violence, and perceived failures in British emancipation to argue for keeping black people in subjugation.

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