Rebellious Passage: The Creole Revolt and America's Coastal Slave Trade by Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie (review)

On November 7, 1841, nineteen enslaved African Americans rose up against the captain and crew of the brig Creole who were transporting them and 136 other slaves from Richmond, Virginia, to New Orleans slave markets. Commandeering the vessel, the rebels ordered the crew to sail to the Bahamas, where, with the support of the local Black population and British colonial officials, they gained freedom for themselves and the great majority of the other slaves on board. This was not a major uprising. Far fewer African Americans engaged in it than in Gabriel's 1800 revolt conspiracy near Richmond; the River Road rebellion in Louisiana in 1811; Denmark Vesey's revolt conspiracy in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822; and, especially, Nat Turner's revolt in eastern Virginia in 1831. But, unlike these larger undertakings, the Creole revolt succeeded in reaching its goal.

As a result of that success, during the months and years that followed, the Creole revolt attracted northern abolitionists' attention and helped incline them toward more aggressive antislavery action. Among these abolitionists was Frederick Douglass, whose 1852 novella, The Heroic Slave, provided a fictionalized account of revolt leader Madison Washington that included descriptions of abolitionists influencing him.

As Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie, author of Rebellious Passage: The Creole Revolt and America's Coastal Slave Trade, points out, interest in the Creole declined as more momentous events concerning American slavery and North-South sectional conflict occurred during the 1850s and 1860s. Historians did not begin to study the revolt until the 1970s. Since then, they have focused on its impact on North-South sectionalism in Congress, on the reaction to it among white southerners, on Washington, other leaders of the revolt, Anglo-American relations, and the abolitionist movement.

Kerr-Ritchie places the Creole revolt in most of these contexts as well as others. He goes beyond the revolt to explore the development of the American coastal slave trade and that trade's broader impact on relations between the United States and Great Britain. He largely succeeds, providing much more information than previous studies about aspects beyond the physical revolt. In doing so, though, he is torn between providing an overview of the Anglo-American conflict regarding the United States' coastal slave trade, on the one hand, and a close description of the Creole revolt and those involved in it, on the other. This divergence of subject matter, combined with the isolated nature of many of his chapters and excessive detail in others, causes problems in his narrative and analysis, including repetition, disconnection, and lack of clarity.

Rebellious Passages begins with a rambling history of Anglo-American relations, centered on the slavery issue, from the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth. The book then turns to slavery in the United States, Black history, slavery expansion, and a history of the American coastal slave trade. Kerr-Ritchie argues that historians, as they emphasize overland routes, have neglected the coastal aspect of American slavery's westward expansion by ship. He describes this trade as "a continuation of the forced voyage of enslaved Africans … rather than a radical rupture" with the terminated Atlantic slave trade (xxiv). He claims to portray "history from the bottom up" by centering on the African American experience as victims of the coastal trade rather than on the "traders, diplomats, politicians and lawyers" involved with the trade and the Creole (xxiv). But he discusses individual slave traders, representing firms in Baltimore, Richmond, Norfolk, and Alexandria, as well as diplomats and lawyers.

Although Kerr-Ritchie in the early chapters of Rebellious Passage refers a number of times to the Creole in passing, he does not begin to focus on it until about a third of the way through the book. Then he provides detailed accounts of the brig's earlier voyages between Richmond and New Orleans, the slave traders it served, the number of slaves transported, a mostly...