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‘I am painting a historical landscape,” writes Carrie Gibson – “one that stretches the entire length and breadth of the Americas.” The story she applies this panoramic approach to is that of “the largest, longest-running and most diverse ongoing insurrection the world has ever known”: the fight for freedom by enslaved Africans and their descendants in the Americas, from the 1500s to the 1800s.
It is an ambitious project. In 1979, the historian Eugene Genovese remarked that this story “might require 10 large volumes to tell in adequate detail”. Gibson attempts it in 500 pages. Flitting from Baltimore to Bridgetown to Bahia, her 35 chapters are a catalogue of escapes, armed uprisings and revolution – a dense tapestry as rich in stories from Spanish Cuba, Portuguese Brazil, French Martinique or Dutch Curaçao as from the more familiar settings of the United States or the Anglophone Caribbean.Not that it ignores well-known events or prominent people. William Wilberforce and the campaign to end the slave trade feature, as does Abraham Lincoln and the American civil war. But such familiar terrain is placed within a much broader context.
Gibson tells her stories with a firm focus on how enslaved people “envisaged their freedom, and fought for it”. Those people include figures such as Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, men born in slavery who rose to become leaders of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), as well as more obscure characters, like an Akwamu noble known as King Claes and a woman known only as Breffu, who in 1733 helped lead an African uprising on the small Danish-Caribbean island of Saint John.Gibson narrates the achievements of escapees who carved out their own “maroon” societies in the upcountry hills and forests of the plantation colonies. We learn how enslaved Africans put to use the martial skills they brought with them across the Atlantic and how, in the 19th century, enslaved people born in the Americas redirected their efforts from escaping into self-contained communities towards a full-frontal attack on the slave system itself.
Gibson’s extended chronicle of this “tireless fight for liberation” relies on what she calls “a vast sea of scholarship”. Despite her observation that rebellions have often been “shoved into the margins” in accounts of emancipation, they have caught the attention of generations of scholars, from pioneering historians of resistance such as CLR James and Herbert Aptheker to Genovese (whose work is curiously not mentioned other than in a footnote) and the increasingly varied and detailed scholarship of recent decades.
For all her reliance on that rich reservoir of research, however, Gibson finds surprisingly little to say about the most common types of resistance by enslaved people. We know that they tried to bring meaning to their own lives through song and storytelling. They also used small acts of theft or sabotage to strike back against their enslavers, eking out better ways to survive their ordeal. For most people most of the time, that day-to-day defiance was the great resistance.
Sometimes it burst into the open. As Gibson points out, enslavers were terrified at the very real prospect of the people they treated as “property” responding to the violence of slavery by seeking violently to free themselves. Enslaved people faced oppressors who were heavily armed and continually on guard. Rebellion was relatively rare precisely because it was so risky. The final chapters tell how slavery came to an end at different times and in different ways across the Americas. Historians have long since moved on from explanations that attribute this shift simply to evangelical white abolitionists and enlightened European rulers seeing the light and bestowing the gift of liberty. But debate still rages about just how and to what extent slave uprisings shaped the process.
For Genovese, the Haitian Revolution was the critical moment, marking a transition from localised rebellions to a broader push for complete freedom. He called his chapter on the topic “the turning point”. Gibson does her readers no such favours. Amid swiftly drawn sketches involving an ever-changing cast of characters, in chapters with cryptic single-word titles such as “Liberation”, “Lashings” and “Repeat”, it is difficult to detect any clear explanation for the changes sweeping her grand historical landscape.
Gibson does note the significance of the Haitian Revolution, describing it as “a volcanic explosion”, the “hot ash and glowing embers” of which ignited “more blazes” across the Caribbean and beyond. Such exhilarating metaphors, however, do not amount to analysis of the influences that were transforming methods of resistance during a time of worldwide revolutionary upheaval.
Those transformations were facilitated by transatlantic networks of communication that brought the political cultures of enslaved people across the Americas into dialogue with one another, as well as with the ideas of reformers elsewhere. Despite their profound differences – in ideology, approach and aims – black abolitionists such as Samuel Sharpe, who in 1831 led a huge uprising in British-colonised Jamaica, were inspired in some measure by men like William Wilberforce. In turn, as the Trinidadian historian Gelien Matthews has shown, enslaved rebels in the Caribbean shaped abolitionist thinking in Britain, although that never amounted to equal dialogue.
As Gibson reminds us at the conclusion of her book, practically every white act of abolition came with some sort of caveat, whether that was the £20m “compensation” the government awarded to British slaveholders as part of the 1833 emancipation act or the Brazilian “law of the free womb”, which freed children, but only on the basis that they remained under the control of their enslavers until adulthood.
In these closing pages Gibson finally offers a cursory overview of key lessons from four centuries of complex conflict. From the outset, as she points out, “people used every possible route out of slavery”; but that is not the same as seeking to overturn the entire institution. She concedes that over time, something else – something more – became apparent: “Freedom had to be for everyone, otherwise it was a lie.”
