Black Slaves Who Could Have Been American Founders

A courageous revolutionary during America’s founding period fought for freedom under his motto of “Death or Liberty.” One of his lieutenants declaimed, “We had as much right to fight for our liberty as any men.”¹ In pursuit of freedom, these men rose against oppression and lost their lives in the struggle. Were these freedom fighters among the heroes who founded the United States of America? They were not. They were black slaves in Virginia who were born and raised during the lifetimes of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. And, although they stood in staunch agreement with America’s founding principles and fought for those principles against their enslavement, they were executed by American authorities for so doing.

Gabriel Prosser, leader of this 1800 slave rebellion, and his lieutenants took seriously the ideals of the American Revolution, the principles that men have an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and have a right to rebel when those rights are denied. They were enraged at the hypocrisy of America proclaiming itself a free republic while denying these basic rights to several million Americans based on skin color.²

Prosser was but one of several black American slaves (or freed slaves) who led uprisings in a quest for freedom. Another was Denmark Vesey, a freedman who “lectured fellow blacks on the Declaration of Independence,”³ and who led his students in a slave rebellion in South Carolina in 1822. A third was Nat Turner, a slave who planned his original uprising to occur on July 4, 1831, a date the significance of which he fully comprehended.⁴

These and other such men of the time understood the meaning and importance of the principle of individual rights as well as did any of America’s Founding Fathers. But for the trivial fact of their skin color, these men could have been among the Founders of the United States of America.

Many blacks of the revolutionary era understood the basic principles of America’s founding. And many of them—such as Crispus Attucks, a runaway slave killed in the Boston Massacre, and Peter Salem, a hero at the Battle of Bunker Hill—fought at the side of white Americans in the struggle for independence from Great Britain. Indeed, five thousand of the roughly three hundred thousand soldiers who fought for American independence were black.⁵

Additionally, some black American slaves joined the opposing side in pursuit of freedom. Tens of thousands escaped to the British during the Revolutionary War, many serving His Majesty’s Army as laborers or soldiers. The British promised freedom to slaves who ran away from rebel masters—and many blacks took them at their word. Historian Benjamin Quarles explains that these slaves’ “major loyalty was not to a place nor to a people, but to a principle,” and a man of principle on this matter “was likely to join the side that made him the quickest and best offer in terms of those ‘unalienable rights’ of which Mr. Jefferson had spoken.”⁶

Britain, homeland of John Locke and birthplace of the principle of individual rights, during this period also faced uprisings from slaves who understood the meaning and importance of these Anglo-American principles of liberty. Samuel Sharpe, for example, a black slave in Jamaica, led a slave uprising in 1831 that cost the lives of fourteen whites and greater than five hundred slaves, most of the latter by trial and execution. Before being hanged, Sharpe said, “I would rather die on yonder gallows than live in slavery.”⁷

Many such uprisings occurred during the founding era, and the details often were gruesome. The purpose here is not to recount all of the rebellions or the myriad horrors involved, but rather to focus on the meaning of the rebellions, the ideas that gave rise to them, and the nature of the men who understood those ideas sufficiently to act on the ideal of “Give me liberty or give me death!” Toward that end, let’s consider a few rebellions, beginning with that led by Gabriel Prosser just a score and four years after the founding of America.

Prosser was born in Virginia in either 1775 or 1776. He was a blacksmith by trade, exceptionally intelligent, fully literate, and described by a peer as “a fellow of courage and intellect above his rank in life,”⁸ who intended to create a silk flag emblazoned with his motto: “Death or Liberty.”

By August of 1800, Prosser and his subalterns had roused hundreds of slaves to their cause and had set the rebellion’s date for August 30. But their plans were thwarted by two unrelated events. Several slaves who caught wind of the rebellion had informed their “owner,” who warned the Virginia governor and future U.S. president, James Monroe, who promptly called out the militia. In addition, a cataclysmic thunderstorm, described by a local citizen as the most torrential rain he ever witnessed in Virginia,⁹ created rising waters that made key roads and bridges impassable. Some of Gabriel’s men gathered at the appointed meeting place, but conditions rendered their planned assault impossible.

Over the subsequent few days, white Virginians mobilized, swung into vigorous action, and arrested scores of blacks.¹⁰ In the end, some twenty-odd slaves, perhaps as many as thirty-five, including Prosser, were hanged.¹¹

Two decades later, Denmark Vesey planned what was to be the most extensive slave uprising in U.S. history. In 1800, Vesey had succeeded in purchasing his freedom but not that of his wife and children. He and several of his compatriots in Charleston, South Carolina, were artisans—carpenters, harness makers, mechanics, and blacksmiths. All of them were literate, and Vesey, by all accounts, was brilliant. Although having received no known schooling, as an adult Vesey spoke and wrote fluent English and French, and spoke Creole, Spanish, and other languages.¹² His one-time “owner,” Joseph Vesey, a retired captain of a slave ship, testified that, first seeing Vesey as a young man, the captain “was taken with the boy’s beauty, alertness, and intelligence.”¹³

Vesey deployed his great intelligence in pursuit of freedom. He embraced the principles of America’s Declaration of Independence and taught them to others. He carefully studied the congressional debates that resulted in the Missouri Compromise, noting the questions raised regarding the nature of slavery and its place in a free republic.¹⁴ He sought to establish contact with the Haitian government, black leaders of a country founded by a successful slave revolution. To the Haitian slaves who had been transplanted to South Carolina by white masters escaping that country’s successful slave uprising, Vesey, with his powerful intellect, vast knowledge, and thorough familiarity with Haiti’s history, was another Toussaint L’Ouverture, the brilliant black general and statesman whose genius was largely responsible for transforming a society of slaves into the free republic of Haiti.¹⁵

By 1822, Vesey, almost sixty years old, saw it as his mission to lead black men out of servitude and to establish their freedom in accordance with the revolutionary principles of the 18th century. Late in 1821, he began carefully planning a massive slave uprising. Through the early months of 1822, he and his lieutenants, all literate, all imbued with America’s revolutionary spirit, reached out extensively in all directions and extending as far as eighty miles from Charleston, seeking enslaved black men to join their cause and enlisting full support of, at minimum, sixty-six hundred rebels, possibly as many as nine thousand.¹⁶

The appointed date was Sunday, July 14, 1822, Bastille Day.

By late May, Vesey’s men had secretly made hundreds of pikes, bayonets, and daggers; his artisans had manufactured bullets; his followers had stolen a keg of gunpowder and obtained a length of fuse; and they had plans to assault armories and steal guns.

The planned assault involved five groups of armed slaves converging on Charleston from differing directions, and a sixth company, a cavalry, to sweep the streets and kill all whites encountered. The only whites to be left alive in Charleston were sea captains whose harbored vessels were to be commandeered and deployed for escape to Haiti.

But in June the massive plot was exposed by a black slave of a white slave “owner.” Investigations commenced, arrests were made, and Vesey and his lieutenants were eventually implicated. Some 131 Charleston blacks were arrested; forty-nine were condemned to death; twelve were eventually pardoned and transported from the area, to serve as slaves in the deeper South; thirty-five were hanged, including Vesey. He and his primary lieutenants went silently to the gallows, refusing to acknowledge guilt or plead for mercy, intent, in their own words, “to die like a man.”¹⁷

The most famous American slave insurrection, and the costliest in white lives, was the Virginia rebellion led by Nat Turner in 1831.

Turner believed that he had been born to accomplish some noteworthy task—which, in time, he came to believe, was to lead a revolt to liberate local slaves.¹⁸ He was literate, notoriously bright, and a religious leader among the area’s blacks. Turner told four other slaves of his plans, they joined him, and these slaves in the state of Virginia planned to revolt in pursuit of liberty on July 4, 1831.

Their plans delayed (due to Turner being ill), they finally rose on the evening of August 21, killing Turner’s master, Joseph Travis, and his family. Seizing arms and horses, they pushed into the countryside; dozens of slaves, perhaps seventy in all, joined them. By the morning of August 23, the rebels had killed roughly sixty whites¹⁹—men, women, and children—and were approximately three miles from the county seat, where a sizable supply of arms was stored. That day, at a field owned by a wealthy planter, the rebels were met by a militia aided by a number of armed white volunteers. In the ensuing battle, the rebels were defeated, scattered, and/or apprehended. Turner himself eluded capture for two months, finally being caught on October 30.²⁰

In the aftermath, the government of Virginia—home state of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Patrick Henry—hanged perhaps twenty black rebels, including Nat Turner, for fighting for their liberty. In addition, reprisals by white militia and mobs killed many more, some of them not implicated in the rebellion. In the end, Nat Turner’s revolt cost the lives of roughly sixty whites and some two hundred blacks.²¹

As disturbing as are the details of such rebellions—especially the murder of civilians, including children—the impetus to rebel, to anyone who cherishes liberty, is understandable. When human beings are enslaved, and when they comprehend their right to be free, they have every justification to rebel righteously. And when their “owners” seek to suppress the legitimate insurrections, the predictable result is hellishness.

If Turner and his men were guilty of killing children—and if Vesey and others planned to perpetrate the same atrocities—it was the hideous institution of slavery that established a context in which such horrific acts were conceived and perpetrated. As Ayn Rand wrote, “morality ends where a gun begins.” When guns are pointed at men from all directions, forcing them into chattel slavery, morality is void; their actions in pursuit of freedom cannot objectively be condemned.

Historian Lerone Bennett makes a related point: “Nat Turner reminds us that oppression is a kind of violence which pays in coins of its own minting. He reminds us that the first and greatest of all gospels is this: that individuals and systems always reap what they sow.”²²

America’s founders rebelled and went to war because they were increasingly taxed by Great Britain without representation. Turner, Vesey, and the others rebelled because they were enslaved in a country founded on the principle that all men have an inalienable right to liberty. The Founders went to war because they were treated like subjects of a king. The American slave rebels went to war because they were treated like draft animals. If human beings are treated brutally, it is to be expected that they will respond brutally.

Another significant factor is that whereas the oppressors of white Americans were an ocean away and incapable of pervasive suppression, the oppressors of black southern slaves were omnipresent. The slaves were surrounded by a society consisting of a huge majority of whites, many heavily armed and militarily trained, and virtually all of them were intent on keeping blacks enslaved. In such a context of endless and ubiquitous injustice, a freedom-seeking uprising is almost guaranteed to be permeated with unchecked rage.

The stories of Turner, Vesey, Prosser, and such men remind us that any people who celebrate and embrace freedom for themselves—but who keep other human beings enslaved—must expect revolts on the part of the slaves. One cannot both support freedom and deny it; one cannot live a contradiction.

And the contradiction here was well understood by heroes of the American Revolution. In May 1775, for instance, the Hancock and Warren Commission ruled that freedmen were the only blacks to be deployed militarily against the British—because the use of slaves “would be inconsistent with the principles that are to be supported.”²³

In this spirit, therefore, it is perfectly fitting that the brilliant writer and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, in 1863, during the Civil War, speaking to the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment of black volunteers—subsequently known as the “Glory” brigade—favorably recalled one of these early black freedom fighters. “Remember Denmark Vesey,” Douglass exhorted. “Who would be free themselves must strike the blow.”²⁴

The black men who led slave rebellions in early America understood the principles of individual rights and liberty as well as did the abolitionists among the Founding Fathers, and perhaps more clearly than did the great and brilliant, but morally inconsistent, Virginians. Were it not for the intellectually and morally inconsequential detail of their skin color, these black freedom fighters could have been among the Founders and/or leaders of the American Republic. They should be remembered in that vein.

About Andrew Bernstein

Andrew Bernstein holds a PhD in philosophy from the Graduate School of the City University of New York and taught philosophy for many years at SUNY Purchase. He is the author of Capitalism Unbound: The Incontestable Moral Case for Individual Rights (2010), Capitalist Solutions (2011), and, most recently, Heroes, Legends, Champions: Why Heroism Matters (2020).

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