ABSTRACT
Although this unhappy tendency has begun to change in recent years, the impression most readers would get from leading college textbooks is that enslaved Americans rose in rebellion but three times: in 1800, 1822, and 1831. Textbook authors, of course, are cursed with the requirement of brevity. But even scholars who can probably name other examples of overt rebellion—and one hopes that anyone trained in American history knows about the Stono River rebellion, or the 1741 conspiracy in New York City—instinctively think only of Gabriel, Vesey, and Turner. I have literally lost count of the number of colleagues who have asked me whether I plan to write a monograph about General Nat, having already written book-length accounts of Gabriel's plot and Vesey's conspiracy. I have yet to be asked, however, if I plan to write about the 1712 uprising in New York, or the many examples of black rebelliousness during the British invasion of the Chesapeake during the War of 1812, and that probably says something about the way my profession tends to think about black rebelliousness.
