What Does it Mean to Rebel?

            When most people think about the word “rebellion,” they think about armed, group resistance against some kind of authority or government that is often perceived to be unjust. Therefore, the phrase “slave rebellion” connotes some kind of organized uprising against slave-owners, the authority in place. Nat Turner’s Rebellion, led by Nat Turner, was the largest and most famous of the slave rebellions, and in its aftermath came even more harsh slave rules as whites throughout the South became determined to prevent any such rebellion, ever again. Turner’s rebellion in 1831 caused the death of over 50 white people and over 200 blacks, who predictably suffered disproportionately as a result. “But in the hysterical climate that followed the rebellion, close to 200 black people, many of whom had nothing to do with the rebellion, were murdered by white mobs” (Nat Turner’s Rebellion). While some may think that this slave rebellion was not effective because it caused the execution of a significant number of innocent blacks, I think that Nat Turner was important in that he woke up the whites to the fact that they could not expect to be indefinitely safe while they practiced slavery.

Rebellion does not necessarily have to be violent. There were more “peaceful” acts of rebellion that Africans took that did not result in death. In class, we discussed how slaves would pick cotton early in the morning when the dew was still on the cotton, making it weigh more so that they met their quota for the day sooner. I had never thought about this, but this is a clever way for slaves to “rebel” in order to get out of doing manual labor without the masters knowing it. We also discussed about how slaves would threaten to run away, or even kill themselves if their owners would ever attempt to separate families. Since slaves were valuable economic property, slave-owners had to pay attention to, and sometimes cave into, these sorts of more passive-aggressive tactics.

It seems to me that slave rebellion was an entirely natural phenomenon. It showed the whites that blacks were human just like all white men, and that there were limits to the negation that slavery caused to their collective sense of self. Africans also used a kind of silent rebellion as a means of humanizing themselves. Phillis Wheatley did this with her poetry, which showed that she had the same or better mental ability as any white person. Free Africans are able to create petitions and flyers, which they posted around cities as a means of standing up against slavery. In 1829, David Walker published his pamphlet for black people entitled David Walker’s Appeal, in which he called for immediate abolition of slavery and equal rights for black people. He said that people had the right to rise up against slavery, and those who did not rise up were worse than infidels. Whites were alarmed that his Appeal, which was being secretly distributed to slaves, would cause mass uprisings among the slaves. His arguments were powerful and were an encouragement for people to protest against slavery.

While there are many different ways one can rebel, I am curious as to what way is the most successful. To me I think that petitioning or humanizing oneself by learning how to read and write like Wheatley did is the most effective, because you are proving that you can do anything as well, if not better than, a white man can. I think that violence generally should be a last resort because it usually creates a negative outcome, as when slaves revolted and killed whites, only to cause a backlash against innocent people.