"The sky became a sheet of flame": The Transatlantic Climate of Slave Rebellion in 1831

In 1831, two momentous slave rebellions—the “Nat Turner revolt” in Virginia and the “Baptist War” in Jamaica—erupted within four months of one another. Yet the relationship between the two events has rarely been... [ view full abstract ]

In 1831, two momentous slave rebellions—the “Nat Turner revolt” in Virginia and the “Baptist War” in Jamaica—erupted within four months of one another. Yet the relationship between the two events has rarely been examined. This paper argues that they were connected by a shared ideological climate, produced by transnational circulation of people and ideas. Through analysing the ceremonies that inaugurated both rebellions, I locate connections in the cultures of Akan and Ibo ethnic groups that shaped each region, in the syncretization of West African religious traditions with Baptist Christianity, and in the common example of the Haitian Revolution. These political and cultural connections were underpinned by the forced migrations of slavery that connected the regions; the importation of Baptist doctrine to Jamaica by black Virginian missionaries; the black sailors who acted as “roving ambassadors” from Haiti to the U.S. and British Caribbean; and the circulation of abolitionist print throughout the Atlantic world. Through these material networks, prospective rebels developed a shared view of slavery as an unnatural social relationship. In order to ensure its destruction, they insisted on communal solidarity, on behalf of a transatlantic “imagined community of the race.”