what were some passive ways that the slaves used to protest their enslavement

7.
Resistance

Slaveholders demanded total obedience and self-degradation from their human holding. Yet, equally nosotros are reminded by historian Colin A. Palmer, "unconditional submission was, understandably, not easily achieved. In fact, it was an ideal that nigh slaveowners never attained, because their often defiant chattel refused to grant it."ane How did enslaved people refuse to submit unconditionally? By refusing to cry out or plead for mercy when whipped (risking more than punishment by publicly defying the master). By fighting back to thwart a beating or killing oneself to end all beatings. By working slowly, disobeying an order, killing the primary's pet, rowing fugitives across the Ohio River to freedom.

Resistance was often indirect—praying in secret for freedom or Union victory, learning to read and write, communicating through code words and songs, telling the slaveholder what he wanted to hear and informing other slaves of one's deception. Some acts that nosotros call "resistance" were necessities in the slaves' perspective, such as stealing food when given inadequate rations or bringing food to a relative hiding in the woods. Running away was i form of resistance, of course, which we consider in the next section (#eight: Runaways).

Although acts of resistance might heighten an enslaved person'southward sense of autonomy, the consequences were dire. Facing a life of servitude, one had to decide the extent of resistance one would risk. For many, such equally Delia Garlic, resistance meant uncomplicated endurance: "Us jest prayed fer force to suffer it to de end. We didn't 'spect nothin' but to stay in bondage till we died."

1. Slaves' resistance. The kickoff text is a collection of thirty-iv brief excerpts from the narratives of former slaves compiled during the 1930s past the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Assistants (WPA). They present the range of resistance from practical jokes and coded warnings to murder and suicide. Notation each narrator's tone while recounting these events of decades earlier.
2. Nelly's "noble resistance." In this selection from his 1855 autobiography, My Chains and My Freedom, Frederick Douglass recounts the "noble resistance" of an enslaved adult female named Nelly who, while existence whipped for "impudence," never ceases to struggle and curse her tormenter. "He had bruised her flesh," Douglass says, "merely had left her invincible spirit undaunted."
3. Free blacks on slave rebellion. A final and often desperate course of resistance was the organized slave conspiracy. Over two hundred slave uprisings were planned in colonial America and the United States (many discovered before their implementation), every bit estimated by historian Herbert Aptheker,2 including the well-known conspiracies led past Gabriel Prosser (Virginia, 1800), Denmark Vesey (Due south Carolina, 1822), and Nat Turner (Virginia, 1831). (See Supplemental Sites beneath for primary documents related to these and other slave uprisings.)

   Here we consider the issue of violent rebellion as debated by gratuitous African Americans in the North. Should they encourage the enslaved to take up artillery against their owners? If fighting for liberty was the slave's but hope, was it then reasonable—or ethical—to urge group violence and insurrection? And, in whatever example, how could they communicate their decisions to the enslaved? The four texts are (ane) Henry Highland Garnet's "Call to Rebellion" address of 1843, (2) Willis Hodges's 1849 editorial "Slaves of the S, Now is Your Time!," (3) the 1850 "Alphabetic character to the American Slaves" of the Cazenovia [New York] Avoiding Slave Human action Convention, probably written by Frederick Douglass, and (4) the debate in the 1858 State Convention of Massachusetts Negroes on a proposal to urge southern slaves to "create an insurrection." Detect the growth in support, albeit reluctant, for violent resistance, specially later 1850. "The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850," writes historian Paul Finkelman, "inverse the minds of many of those committed to nonviolence and moved most African Americans toward the position proclaimed past Garnet in the early 1840s."three

Consider these readings with those in Master/Slave (#6) and in the Fugitives section of Theme Iii: COMMUNITY. (14 pages.) Give-and-take questions

1. In what ways did slaves resist the authority of their owners?
2. How did some resist the self-definition of "slave"?
3. What acts and attitudes of invisible subversiveness did slaves pursue? How did they create a separate world on the plantation?
4. When did slaves consider their acts of resistance as successes or failures? What criteria did they use to decide?
5. How do you evaluate these acts of resistance, and what criteria do you apply? Situational context? Ethical considerations? Concluding outcome?
6. Was the lack of direct resistance a personal failure of a slave?
7. What does Douglass mean, in his account of Nelly's "noble resistance," that a slave can become "in the stop a freeman, even though he sustain the formal relation [status] of a slave"?
8. What forms of nonviolent slave resistance were recommended by northern gratis African Americans?
9. In what situations did they argue that slaves were justified in stealing from their owners? killing their owners?
10. What arguments did they nowadays to support or oppose slaves' apply of violence? of armed rebellion?
11. How did they refer to the American Revolution to justify slave rebellion?
12. How would the former slaves, interviewed in the 1930s, reply to Garnet'southward criticism of slaves who "tamely submit"? to Remond'south accuse that unrebellious slaves were "one-half-way fellows"?
13. How would they respond to Willis Hodges's assertion that slaves "accept nothing to lose, and everything to gain" by striking (refusing to piece of work)?
14. For what audition did northern free blacks intend their calls for rebellion, since they knew few slaves would learn of their speeches and debates well-nigh slave rebellion?
15. What bear upon did they intend for their audition? How might the reactions have varied? (The 1850 "Letter to the American Slaves" was published and also read in Congress.)
16. Why did the proposals to encourage coup fail in the 1843 National Convention of Negro Men and the 1858 Land Convention of Massachusetts Negroes?
17. What disagreements about slave rebellion are apparent in the Letter of the alphabet to the American Slaves published past the 1850 Fugitive Slave Convention?
18. Compare the free blacks' debate virtually slave rebellion with the debate amid twentieth-century black activists about effective protest in The Making of African American Identity, Vol. Three, Theme Three: PROTEST.
19. List these deportment recommended by northern gratuitous blacks in an society y'all choose (nigh to least constructive, justifiable, etc.). State your criteria in advance.
    
• - "Inform them [slaveholders] that all yous desire is FREEDOM, and that nothing else volition suffice. Practise this, and forever after cease to toil for the heartless tyrant." [Garnet, 1843]
  
• - "You have the fullest liberty to plunder, burn down, and kill, equally you may take occasion to practice to promote your escape." [Fugitive Slave Law Convention, 1850]
  
• - "We do not tell you to murder the slaveholders only we exercise propose you to refuse longer to work without pay." [Hodges, 1849]
  
• - "[C]reate an insurrection. . . [R]ise with bowie-pocketknife and revolver and musket." [Country Convention of Massachusetts Negroes, 1858]
  
20. What acts and attitudes of resistance are represented in the runaway ads in #8: Runaways? in the former slave narratives in #6: Master/Slave?

Printing Slaves' resistance:  viii   (WPA narratives) Nelly's "noble resistance":  two   (Frederick Douglass narrative) Free blacks on slave rebellion:  4 (Iv documents) TOTAL 14 pages

Supplemental Sites Responses to Enslavement, in Slavery and the Making of America (WNET/PBS) Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 1855, full text in Documenting the American South (UNC-Chapel Hill Library) Henry Highland Garnet, "Phone call to Rebellion" address, 1843, full text in Africans in America (WGBH/PBS) Alphabetic character to the American Slaves, Cazenovia [New York] Fugitive Slave Human activity Convention, probably written by Frederick Douglass, 1850, excerpts in this Toolbox, in Theme Three: COMMUNITY WPA Slave narratives, 1930s, total text in digital images, Library of Congress - William M. Adams - Westward. B. Allen - Samuel Simeon Andrews - Mary Armstrong - Anna Baker - Fanny Berry - W. Fifty. Bost - Richard Carruthers - Cato Carter - Anne Clark - William Colbert - T. W. Cotton fiber - Sarah Douglas (select second entry) - Anderson Edwards - Clayborn Gantling - Delia Garlic - Arnold Gragston - Felix Haywood - Morris Hillyer - Hal Hutson - Carter J. Jackson - Josie Jordan - Mattie Logan - Mary Raines - Mary Reynolds - Harriet Robinson - Lou Smith - Millie Ann Smith - George Thompson - Millie Williams - Sophia Word - Home Page An Introduction to the WPA Slave Narratives, Norman A. Yetman (Library of Congress) "Should the Slave Narrative Drove Exist Used?," by Norman R. Yetman (Library of Congress) Guidelines for Interviewers in Federal Writers' Projection (WPA) on conducting and recording interviews with former slaves, 1937 (PDF) On slave uprisings, documents and scholars' commentary in Africans in America (WGBH/PBS) - Stono rebellion, Southward Carolina, 1739 (also see Related Entries) - Gabriel's conspiracy, unnamed conspirator's argument, 1800 - Gabriel's conspiracy, Solomon's confession, 1804 - Denmark Vesey, biographical sketch, 1822 - Confession of Vesey conspirator (Monday Gell), 1822 - David Walker'south Appeal, excerpts, 1820 - The Confessions of Nat Turner, past Thomas Gray, 1831 - Fear of insurrection in North Carolina, in Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1861 On slave uprisings, documents in History Matters (George Mason University and the City University of New York) - "Negro Plot" trials testimony, 1741 General Resource in African American History & Literature, 1500-1865

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1 Colin A. Palmer, Passageways: An Interpretive History of Black America, Vol. I: 1619-1863 (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Grouping, 2002), p. 62.

2 Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943).

3 James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, "A Federal Assault: African-Americans and the Impact of the Avoiding Slave Law of 1850," in Paul Finkelman, ed., Slavery and the Law (Lanham, Doctor: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), p. 154.

Images: Cato Carter, William Colbert, Delia Garlic, and Carter J. Jackson, former slaves interviewed in the Federal Writers' Project, WPA, 1936-1938. Photographs courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Sectionalisation.

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Source: http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai/enslavement/text7/text7read.htm

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