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he younger men usually stayed out until well past dark on summer Sundays, but some came back from the fish feast early, complaining that the women had “eat up all the fish.” Just about the only thing worth telling about was those big talkers from the Prosser place and their claims about how many guns and swords they got and what they intended doing with them. Brothers Gabriel and Solomon, traveling freely from one gathering of blacks to another, boasted about the swords they had fashioned out of scythes at the blacksmith’s forge. Each scythe, broken in the middle, heated and pounded, made two swords, which were hidden away for a bloody uprising against the whites, their masters. These two and the men they recruited met with bondmen and free blacks singly and in groups. Anywhere that black men gathered, Gabriel or one of his followers was likely to be in the summer of 1800.1 Throughout the spring and summer of 1800, Gabriel and his fellows organized a wide-ranging and complex conspiracy to invade Richmond, seize the state capitol and the store of arms nearby, hold the governor captive, and negotiate for the release of all slaves. But Gabriel’s conspiracy was betrayed by both nature and man, when a heavy rain washed out a bridge on the night planned for moving toward Richmond and two slaves informed their owner of Gabriel’s plans. After his arrest, Gabriel said little, but his recruits testified that he had approached free blacks and slaves while they were hoeing corn, fishing under the bridges, working in a blacksmith’s shop, at fish feasts and barbeques, after church services, and while playing quoits and cards. Trial depositions referred to secret lists and letters carried from town to town One A Small Frisson of Fear, Soon Soothed T and claimed that Gabriel had been shown every room in the capitol and promised the keys.2 Gabriel and his lieutenants constructed their rationale from the world in which they lived and explained themselves and their plans within the familiar political and cultural discourse of the early Republic. Ben Woolfolk testified that he and fellow slave Gilbert intended to purchase a piece of silk for a flag on which they would inscribe “death or Liberty.” One witness claimed that if the whites agreed to their freedom, Gabriel would “dine and drink with the merchants of the city on that day.” “Outlandish Africans ,” those born in Africa, were recruited to the conspiracy because “they were supposed to deal with witches and wizards and, of course, [were] useful in armies to tell when any calamity was about to befall them.” Although the powers of African magic were respected, the conspirators assumed that none among them still had those powers. In another case, George approached Ben who was chopping wood and asked if he wanted to join a society of Freemasons. No, was the response, based on the contemporary debate over secret societies and their supposed atheism and elitism; “all free masons were going to hell.” George then asked directly if Ben was willing to fight the white people for his freedom, and, with the question reformulated, Ben said he would “consider of it.”3 White Virginians who read the state’s evidence printed in the Virginia Argus or who heard even more exotic rumors were alarmed. The trial testimony of Gabriel’s followers confirmed white fears that black Virginians identified with Virginia’s recent Revolutionary past and were conversant with the political debates that animated Richmond. Since the establishment of the American republic, Richmond and Virginia had offered the nation not just the rhetoric of faction, but excellent examples of its fractious formation. Both followers and prosecutors of Gabriel later connected his conspiracy to the fresh memory of the American and French Revolutions, to the complex and ongoing slave rebellion in St. Domingue, and to the charged atmosphere of an American election year.4 If ever evidence was needed of the discontent of slaves, of their mobility and frequent social interactions, and of their connections with free blacks, it had now been provided. James Monroe, the state’s governor, attempted, with some success, to soothe nervous citizens by presenting Gabriel’s plot as an aberration. The fear that was palpable in the aftermath of the rebellion was soothed with time-honored incantations that enslaved Virginians were either content or not capable of sustained rebellion. Most white Virginians were willing publicly to echo...

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