ABSTRACT
From the moment the institution of slavery established its first toeholds in the Americas, the enslaved engaged in struggle against it. Their struggles were guided by personal and group histories, by their places of origin, their ages and genders, their work skills and regimens, their spiritual practices, the alliances they could fashion, the temperaments and resources of their owners, the geopolitical location of their captivity, and, of course, the wider historical context. The historian Hilary McD. Beckles can therefore write, in reference to the British West Indies, of the slaves’ “two hundred year war” against slavery (Beckles, 1988). Inevitably, struggles against slavery, wherever and whenever they took place, had as
their aim the limiting, weakening, or destruction of the power of slaveholders. Thus some level of “freedom” always proved to be an objective for slaves struggling against enslavement. Slaves might flee individually from new or abusive owners, or might head in groups to less accessible terrain and try to establish fugitive settlements called maroon communities. More commonly, they would push back against the demands of their masters and the imperatives of enslavement, seeking to form relations of kinship and friendship, find time to provide for one another, create spaces to meet and worship together, and, of course, mitigate as best as possible the brutality of their daily lives. On occasion, when circumstances appeared most opportune, they might conspire to rebel against slavery as they knew it. At all events, they battled to constrain the reach of slaveholders, define relations and activities subject to some of their own control, and turn privileges that owners may have conceded into rights they could embrace and defend. Slaves looked, that is, to carve small spaces of freedom in a large world of slavery. Waged with varying degrees of success across the hemisphere, these struggles
contributed, by the last third of the eighteenth century, to a deepening crisis of slave regimes on both sides of the Atlantic. We know best about the growing moral doubts that slaveholding came to raise among Quakers and some Protestant evangelicals, as well as about the intellectual and economic challenges that the Enlightenment and the new political economists of England and France hurled at the hierarchies, coercions, and inefficiencies that slavery appeared to represent (see, for example, Davis, 1965; Brown, 2006; Drescher, 1987). But these may have come to little had they not been allied with the energies of slaves on the ground, which began to intensify during the 1770s and disrupted more and more of the Atlantic for at least the next six decades. In this sense, freedom was being “forged” well before it was officially proclaimed (Blackburn, 1988).
