On the morning of August 22, 1831, Nat Turner and his followers rose in rebellion against the master class. The mob killed the family to whom Turner belonged and rampaged through Southampton killing nearly sixty whites (Stampp 278). Why was this rebellion one of the few organized attempts to protest slavery? What prevented slaves from overthrowing their masters when they sometimes had over one hundred slaves to one master? The relative lack of slave revolts in the antebellum south was due to the absence of a rebellious influence, the masters' continuous effort to make the slaves submissive, and the strength of the family. The slaves did not accept their lot in life, however, and they rebelled without using violence.
             This is not to say that there were not slave revolts. The previously mentioned Turner rebellion was not the first uprising in the South. Several earlier conspiracies could have resulted in something much larger than the Turner rebellion. The Gabriel Conspiracy in Henrico County, Virginia, involved over a thousand slaves. A march on Richmond was barely avoided when two slaves warned the town. Ten years later more than five hundred slaves in the St. John Baptist Parish, Louisiana, marched towards New Orleans armed with various homemade weapons. The planters and some troops were able to stifle the uprising. Furthermore, in 1822, Denmark Vesey, a free Negro, planned a conspiracy which never materialized after it was given away by another slave. More revolts occurred with the creation of the Republican Party in the election years of 1856 and 1860. One of the last slave revolts occurred in October, 1860, around Plymouth, North Carolina. They planned to influence several hundred slaves to join them as they marched to Plymouth and to kill all the whites they met on the road, burn the town, take money and weapons, and escape by ship through Albemarle Sound. Once again a fellow slave betrayed the plot. Most...