THE GREAT RESISTANCE

A broad-based history of rebellion, escape, and agitation in the name of abolition in the slaveholding Americas.

Writes historian Gibson, resistance against slavery “was built into the system as it evolved, even after the slave trade spread up and down the [West African] coast.” Although a long-popular image is that of subdued villagers sadly but compliantly accepting their fate, Gibson notes that armed Africans set upon the caravels of the first enslavers with fleets of canoes, firmly believing, as one Portuguese captain was told, that “we Christians ate human flesh, and that we only bought negroes to eat them.” In a sense they were correct. In the European colonies of the Americas, the enslaved had almost no chance of ever returning home, as their cultures were consumed and their families broken apart. So it went for 400 years, from those first Portuguese slave ships all the way down to the final emancipation in late-19th-century Brazil. Gibson writes of the communities of the formerly enslaved, freed by manumission or escape, in the remote jungles and badlands of the colonies, noting in passing numerous ironies and curiosities—for one, that Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture owned or rented enslaved people himself, and for another, that Black enlistees in the British army, having run away from the Southern plantations to which they were bound, were among the troops that burned the White House in the War of 1812. Gibson mixes little-explored episodes with better-known stories such as Denmark Vesey’s conspiracy, swirling around “a simple rumor [that] could alert a militia and cause 35 necks to snap in a matter of weeks.” Throughout, as does Sudhir Hazareesingh in his contemporaneous and more fluently told study Daring To Be Free, Gibson insists on the primacy of the enslaved themselves as agents of their own liberation, “the true instigators of liberty.”

A solid contribution to the literature of the New World slave trade.