Rebels and Runaways: Slave Resistance in l9th-Century Florida by Larry Eugene Rivers (review)

Larry Eugene Rivers’ Rebels and Runaways provides detailed analysis of slave resistance in Florida from 1821 through the Civil War. By scouring newspaper reports, runaway advertisements, plantation journals, and other sources, Rivers examines the character of slave resistance from day-to-day disobedience to violent insurrection. Because of its heritage under Spanish rule, an influx of slaves from the upper South, topography, and its proximity to the Caribbean, Rivers argues that Florida presented a unique incubator for slave resistance. As he describes how these conditions fostered disobedience, runaways, and rebellion, Rivers further concludes that Florida hosted the “nation’s largest slave rebellion” in the Second Seminole War (131). Rebels and Runaways tells these stories while identifying the “forces that shaped the slave’s world and made resistance or revolution more possible” (4).

Rivers divides his study into three portions. The first section considers day-to-day resistance, the second examines runaways, and the final chapters focus on violent rebellion, particularly in the Second Seminole War and Civil War. River concludes that day-to-day resistance, feigned illness, work slowdowns and stoppages constituted the most common forms of rebellion by slaves as means to “wrest concessions from their masters as they strove to create, preserve and protect family and community” (35). Rivers found that slaves often manipulated their masters by playing on their facade of paternalistic care. For example, Rivers determined that female slaves feigned illness more frequently than males and had greater success doing so as masters likely sought to protect their reproductive fitness. Not surprisingly, day-to-day resistance and work stoppages were most frequent during harvests seasons. These acts of defiance, according to Rivers, led some Florida slave masters to turn to the task system in portions of East and West Florida to entice slaves into maximum productivity while those in Middle Florida held solidly to the gang system.

The need to carefully coerce productivity with the task system in East and West Florida may be further explained as Rivers begins to discuss runaways. “Slaves’ worldviews in West and East Florida were more diverse than those of their Middle Florida counterparts” (48). Here, slaves could often read or write and were more often exposed to political currents from the Caribbean and Atlantic World, particularly after the Haitian Revolution. Rivers convincingly argues that, more than northern abolitionism, the Atlantic shaped Floridian slaves’ ideas about freedom and also led them to view the Atlantic as a geographical means for escape. Additionally, Florida’s sparse population created vast swaths of land where slaves could abscond, if but temporarily. Rivers divides slave runaways into three categories: those who “lurked” nearby their plantations to visit family, “disgruntled absconders” who sought “temporary refuge from work routines, material conditions, or abuse,” and “true fugitives” who “sought to break the chains of slavery completely by fleeing as far away from their venues as possible” (65). Rivers determines that chief among the reasons for flight was “bondservants routinely being sold, hired out, and otherwise separated,” leading many, including a number of juveniles, to set out to reunite with family (95).

As he turns his attention to violent resistance, Rivers acknowledges the assaults and murders that took place in the sparsely populated slave state, but he devotes his final two chapters to slave resistance during the Second Seminole War and Civil War. Here, Rivers provocatively contends that the Second Seminole War was the nation’s “largest slave rebellion” and that it “came about through the leadership of maroons and was supported by hundreds, if not over a thousand, rebelling slaves” (131). The war that started as part of Indian removal led to nearly one thousand slave runaways, “many – if not most – of them meant to fight or at least support the fight” (137). Rivers further argues that slave participation in the war was not simply localized resistance but, “with an Atlantic perspective, many blacks who joined the war effort apparently viewed the overthrow of slavery...