The momentous year of 1800 witnessed not only the “revolution” of Jefferson’s election but an attempted real one, a plot by slaves in Virginia itself to gain their freedom. It was organized by a Richmond blacksmith, Gabriel, and his brothers Solomon, also a blacksmith, and Martin, a slave preacher. The conspirators planned to march on the city, which had recently become the state capital, from surrounding plantations. They would kill some white inhabitants and hold the rest, including Governor James Monroe, hostage until their demand for the abolition of slavery was met. Gabriel hoped that “poor white people” would join the insurrection, and he ordered that Quakers and Methodists (many of whom were critics of slavery) and “French people” (whose country was engaged in the “quasiwar” with the United States described earlier) be spared. On the night when the slaves were to gather, a storm washed out the roads to Richmond. The plot was soon discovered and the leaders arrested. Twenty-six slaves, including Gabriel, were hanged and dozens more transported out of the state.
Blacks in 1800 made up half of Richmond’s population. One-fifth were free. A black community had emerged in the 1780s and 1790s, and the conspiracy was rooted in its institutions. Gabriel gathered recruits at black Baptist churches, funerals, barbecues, and other gatherings. In cities like Richmond, many skilled slave craftsmen, including Gabriel himself, could read and write and enjoyed the privilege of hiring themselves out to employers—that is, negotiating their own labor arrangements, with their owner receiving their “wages.” Their relative autonomy helps account for slave artisans’ prominent role in the conspiracy.
Toussaint L’Ouverture, leader of the slave revolution in Saint Domingue, in a portrait from a history of the island published in 1805.
Gabriel’s Rebellion was a product of its age. Gabriel himself had been born in 1776. Like other Virginians, the participants in the conspiracy spoke the language of liberty forged in the American Revolution and reinvigorated during the 1790s. The rebels even planned to carry a banner emblazoned with the slogan, reminiscent of Patrick Henry, “Death or Liberty.” “We have as much right,” one conspirator declared, “to fight for our liberty as any men.” Another likened himself to George Washington, who had rebelled against established authority to “obtain the liberty of [his] countrymen.” (This analogy carried the disturbing implication that Virginia officials had now replaced the British as enemies of freedom.)
If Gabriel’s conspiracy demonstrated anything, commented the prominent Virginian George Tucker, it was that slaves possessed “the love of freedom” as fully as other men. Gabriel’s words, he added, reflected “the advance of knowledge” among Virginia’s slaves, including knowledge of the American language of liberty. When slaves escaped to join Lord Dunmore during the War of Independence, he wrote, “they sought freedom merely as a good; now they also claim it as a right.” Tucker believed Virginians should emancipate their slaves and settle them outside of the state. The legislature, however, moved in the opposite direction. It tightened controls over the black population—making it illegal for them to congregate on Sundays without white supervision—and severely restricted the possibility of masters voluntarily freeing their slaves. Any slave freed after 1806 was required to leave Virginia or be sold back into slavery. The door to emancipation, thrown open during the American Revolution, had been slammed shut.