Until about 1780 to 1790, the WestIndies and especially Saint-Domingue were the primary cottonproducers. After the collapse of the plantations on Saint-Dominguefollowing the slave revolt of 1791, the US South took up the torchand pushed the acquisition of slaves and the capacity for cotton pro-duction to unprecedented levels

First, the majority population in eastern Virginia were enslaved blacks. Whites lived in constant fear of slave insurrection. Everyone knew about the 1739 slave rebellion in Stono, S.C., when blacks broke into a store, decapitated the shopkeepers, seized guns and powder, and marched with flying banners, beating drums and cries of “Liberty!” Up to 100 joined the rebellion before being engaged by a contingent of armed, mounted militiamen. Scores died in the ensuing battle.

Amalia S. Levi@amaliasl·Jun 8, 2020The gap we see between April 13 and April 30, 1816, in #TheBarbadosMercury gazette does not signify lack of material. It reflects the slave revolt between April 14 to April 16 that shut down the island for nearly two weeks (printing house included). 6/ https://dloc.com/AA00047511/00001/allvolumes…12Amalia S. Levi@amaliasl·Jun 8, 2020(It is interesting that when the April 30 issue came out, there is no mention of the revolt. Only on the second page do we find information about the “perfidious league of slaves” that went around pillaging and destroying the island, and about their fate). 7/

The first large-scale revolt in the North Americancolonies took place in New York in 1712.

In 1818, a fifty-one-year-old free carpenter named Denmark Vesey started recruiting the thousands of s laves i n and around Charleston that would form his army—one estimate says 9,000. Vesey was well known l ocally as one of t he f ounders of Emmanuel A.M.E. Church, t he first African Methodist Episcopal church in the South.

Gabriel and Nancy Prosser, were organizing a slave rebellion

om. On January 8, 1811, a bout fifteen captives on a sugar plantation in an area known as t he German Coast wounded a planter, Major Manuel Andry, and killed his s on. Bearing military uni-forms and guns, c ane knives, and axes while beating drums and waving flags, t hey started marching from plantation to plantation, s welling their numbers and the dead bodies of enslavers. I n time, between two hundred and five hundred biracial and African people had joined the thirty-five-mile freedom march to invade New Orleans. Led by Asante warriors Quamana and Kook, a long with biracial men Harry Kenner and Charles Deslondes—and inspired by the Haitian Revolution—these revolutionaries waged the largest slave revolt in the history of the United S tates