Although it was the law of the land for more than 300 years, American slavery was challenged and resisted every day, by its victims, by its survivors, and by those who found it morally unacceptable. The long campaign to abolish the trade in human beings was one of the great moral crusades in U.S. history, and its success was the result of decades of organization and agitation by African Americans and their European American allies.
Negotiations and Insurrections
Daily life in a slave workplace was marked by countless acts of everyday resistance. Although their freedom was denied by the law, enslaved African Americans used a wide variety of strategies to contest the authority of slaveholders and to assert their right to control their own lives. Slaveholders depended on involuntary labor to keep their businesses solvent, and enslaved workers often used work slowdowns and absenteeism to negotiate some of the terms of their labor. Many enslaved African Americans defied the slave system by leaving it. Escape attempts were dangerous and uncertain, and slaveholders posted substantial rewards for captured fugitives, but every year thousands of enslaved people fled to free states or territories. On the way, they were aided by enslaved people on nearby farms and plantations and by networks of free African Americans and European Americans. By 1860, an estimated 400,000 people had escaped from slavery.
The form of resistance most feared by slaveholders, however, was violent insurrection. Throughout the history of slavery, African captives and enslaved African Americans had taken up arms and fought back against their captors. In the early 19th century there came a series of armed revolts in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida, punctuated by the rebellion led by Nat Turner in Southampton, Virginia, in which more than 50 European Americans were killed.
Slaveholders were haunted by the possibility of a large-scale uprising, and they publicized lurid accounts of the Turner uprising and other, sometimes fictional, conspiracies in the hopes of increasing public vigilance. In the North, however, their efforts found a much different audience than they expected. Throughout American history, enslaved people have resisted bondage in a variety of ways: some escaped, rebelled, or sabotaged work tools or work product. Enslaved Africans resisted bondage in a variety of active and less apparent ways. They fought against their initial capture, their transport to the Americas, and their forced labor in the New World. Individual resistance was common and included breaking tools, feigning illness, and sabotaging equipment.
