Black Rebellion

Black Rebellion

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Black Rebellion, by Thomas
Wentworth Higginson #5 in our series by Thomas Wentworth
Higginson
Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the
header without written permission.
Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is
important information about your specific rights and restrictions in how
the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a
donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since
1971**
*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of
Volunteers!*****
Title: Black Rebellion Five Slave Revolts
Author: Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Release Date: July, 2005 [EBook #8432] [Yes, we are more than one
year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on July 9, 2003]
Edition: 10

Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-Latin-1
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BLACK
REBELLION ***

Produced by Eric Eldred, Thomas Berger, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team.

[Transcriber's note: This text contains five chapters of T.W. Higgison's
'Travellers and Outlaws'. This collection is commonly referred to as
'Black Rebellion: five slave revolts'.]

TRAVELLERS AND OUTLAWS
Episodes In American History
by THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON
With An Appendix Of Authorities
* * * * *
NOTE
The author would express his thanks to the proprietors and editors of
the Atlantic Monthly, _Harper's Magazine_, and the Century, for their
permission to reprint such portions of this volume as were originally
published in those periodicals.
CAMBRIDGE, MASS.
* * * * *
CONTENTS.
THE MAROONS OF JAMAICA
THE MAROONS OF SURINAM
GABRIEL'S DEFEAT
DENMARK VESEY
NAT TURNER'S INSURRECTION
APPENDIX
* * * * *

THE MAROONS OF JAMAICA

The Maroons! it was a word of peril once; and terror spread along the
skirts of the blue mountains of Jamaica when some fresh foray of those
unconquered guerrillas swept down from the outlying plantations,
startled the Assembly from its order, Gen. Williamson from his
billiards, and Lord Balcarres from his diplomatic ease,--endangering,
according to the official statement, "public credit," "civil rights," and
"the prosperity, if not the very existence, of the country," until they
were "persuaded to make peace" at last. They were the Circassians of
the New World, but they were black, instead of white; and as the
Circassians refused to be transferred from the Sultan to the Czar, so the
Maroons refused to be transferred from Spanish dominion to English,
and thus their revolt began. The difference is, that while the white
mountaineers numbered four hundred thousand, and only defied
Nicholas, the black mountaineers numbered less than two thousand,
and defied Cromwell; and while the Circassians, after years of revolt,
were at last subdued, the Maroons, on the other hand, who rebelled in
1655, were never conquered, but only made a compromise of
allegiance, and exist as a separate race to-day.
When Admirals Penn and Venables landed in Jamaica, in 1655, there
was not a remnant left of the sixty thousand natives whom the
Spaniards had found there a century and a half before. Their pitiful tale
is told only by those caves, still known among the mountains, where
thousands of human skeletons strew the ground. In their place dwelt
two foreign races,--an effeminate, ignorant, indolent white community
of fifteen hundred, with a black slave population quite as large and
infinitely more hardy and energetic. The Spaniards were readily
subdued by the English: the negroes remained unsubdued. The
slaveholders were banished from the island: the slaves only exiled
themselves to the mountains; thence the English could not dislodge
them, nor the buccaneers whom the English employed. And when
Jamaica subsided into a British colony, and peace was made with Spain,
and the children of Cromwell's Puritan soldiers were beginning to grow
rich by importing slaves for Roman-Catholic Spaniards, the Maroons
still held their own wild empire in the mountains, and, being sturdy
heathens every one, practised Obeah rites in approved pagan fashion.
The word Maroon is derived, according to one etymology, from the
Spanish word Marrano, a wild boar,--these fugitives being all

boar-hunters; according to another, from Marony, a river separating
French and Dutch Guiana, where a colony of them dwelt and still
dwells; and by another still, from Cimarron, a word meaning
untamable, and used alike for apes and runaway slaves. But whether
these rebel marauders were regarded as monkeys or men, they made
themselves equally formidable. As