Ploughshares Into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel's Virginia, 1730-1810 (review)

This unpretentious book makes a whole series of wonderful contributions as it sets a famous event in a radically new perspective. James Sidbury shows how—in the divisive crisis brought on by the Jeffersonian Republican challenge to Federalist authoritarianism and to Adams’s continued presidency—a slave blacksmith named Gabriel became leader of a wide-reaching conspiracy. His followers would seize the fast-growing new capital, Richmond. They would seize freedom—and perhaps the entire promised land of Virginia. The promise was initially given to a carefully recruited army, but after that it was extended to all—white and black—who would enter into the new order.

Sidbury begins with an apparently modest intention to use the surviving records to “open a window on the perceptions of people of African descent in Richmond at the turn of the nineteenth century” (p.1), rather than to tell the story of the conspiracy and its repression one more time. But readers who persist—and all are strongly urged to persist—will discover that the “window” is ambitiously designed not just to find a place for Gabriel Prosser in Thomas Jefferson’s comparatively well-known Virginia but to give a view of Gabriel’s world—the scarcely-known-at-all Virginia of an enslaved blacksmith and his kind.

Sidbury’s work is thorough almost to a fault; but seeking an unfamiliar world in fragmentary records, all generated with hostile intent, the reader soon comes to appreciate this scrupulous thoroughness. Both parts of the two-part book carefully trace the emergence of the Black, White, and mixed communities in which Gabriel lived, boldly acted, and died. “Creative appropriation” is a key concept in a triad with “community” and “identity” for the cultural analyses of Part I. We follow the making of racialist colonial society and the upheavals that rendered it—in the Whites’ self image— “one of the freest republics on earth;” at the same time we see that there had been called forth a strong culture of slave resistances. Sidbury uses minute examination of the evidence brought against the conspirators on trial to demonstrate an emergent identity of “Black Virginians” (p.vii). Though sensitive to African communalistic continuities, Sidbury shows how much there had been “creative appropriation” of White Virginians’ individualistic legal, political, and evangelical religious modes. In a specially impressive chapter, Sidbury labors to make sense of the informers who betrayed the conspiracy before it could launch into action. He notes that they acted so late as to give the conspirators some chance of succeeding had not a violent storm cut the roads. The study of the informers is used to trace the ambiguities deeply inherent in the co-existence of communal and individualistic value-systems in Virginia. It traces also the opportunities for individual self-betterment that were offered slaves within the same commercializing process that called forth both the conspirators’ aspirations and their sense of opportunity.

In Part II—“Social Practice”—we follow the rise of a fickle, polymorphous segregatednon-segregated commercial world in fast-growing Richmond town. The forms of employment and the conditions of work are again minutely explored. Court records enable Sidbury to elucidate emergent structures from heart-rending cases where disputes and jury verdicts, subtly interpreted, yield great insight into harsh but inconsistent norms operating both between and within the racial groups and across the dividing lines of gender, class, and race. There is indeed a very fine chapter showing the marked gender divisions prevailing in the Black communities in the face of White assumptions that slave women (of whom they demanded heavy physical labor) were scarcely to be differentiated, being “as ferocious and formidable as the males” (p.220).

The two parts of the analysis and presentation of this work both contribute strongly to its author’s impressive determination to deal with mixed forms. There is no pseudo-anthropological insistence on isolating some ‘pure’ cultural original; we are continually engaged with...