![]() They were largely sovereign but they had to police future runaways and revolts. By the late 1720s and ’30s, they were at war with the British, and to keep the colony, the British signed treaties with the maroons that allowed them to maintain much of their autonomy. ![]() VB: Maroons were formerly enslaved people who had fled and formed communities and military encampments. Can you talk about the maroons in Jamaica and their role in this war? In fact, you note that “the black-white racial distinction was rarely the most salient division among contending parties.” One thing I admire about the book is that it succeeds in describing a capillary model of war and also of power, rather than a simple two-sided engagement. HJ: During the revolt itself, there were surprising alliances and also opposition within groups. But at the same time this gets translated into racial science that vision that associates black masculinity with criminality and animal aggression has its roots in whites’ reactions to slave wars. Pennsylvania ultimately passed a gradual abolition statute partly as a response to that sense of insecurity. In 1760s Virginia, reading reports of Tacky’s Revolt, the legislature tried to pass new duties on the slave trade. VB: In 1739, after the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, the legislature instituted a 10-year moratorium on the transatlantic trade in slaves - they didn’t want to bring in any more Africans because they recognized the situation as dangerous. In the US, Virginia came surprisingly close to abolishing slavery after Nat Turner’s insurrection, and you write about how Tacky’s Revolt led some whites to argue for the abolition of the slave trade as a security measure. We think of them as failures when they did not overturn slave society at once, but in fact these battles often had an immediate impact on policy that is overlooked. This is related to the question of the success of slave revolts your book makes it clear that their impact is underestimated. He was rare among white Americans for that time, though he eventually inspired many others to embrace violence, even sworn pacifists, and of course many of the men who enlisted in the Union army. His position was that Black people and their allies were justified in killing those who would enslave them, that military tactics are the appropriate and necessary form of engagement in that context. ![]() HJ: In the US context, John Brown said that, too - that slavery was war. It was a war within a series of other overlapping wars - not just between races, but between European imperial powers including the British, the French, the Spanish, and the Dutch. I thought that Tacky’s Revolt might be better understood on that larger scale. Slave revolts are commonly imagined as isolated, local flare ups rather than as geopolitical events, except in the case of the Haitian Revolution. ![]() People look at slave revolts mostly as a refusal of the authority of slaveholders - as resistance - and the key for me was to break away from taking that authority as a given. He said that when you make people slaves you compel them to live in a state of war. Vincent Brown: One of the most famous autobiographers of slavery, Olaudah Equiano, wrote that slavery is war. Holly Jackson: What do we gain by imagining the experience of slavery as one of pervasive, ongoing war? The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. ![]()
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