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, m

Black drivers and black domestic servants were used to enforce the plantation rules. Black drivers were forced to keep the slaves at their tasks and flog other slaves for breaking the plantation guidelines. The driver was in a very tough position. If he was too good of a driver, he won praise from the master and hatred from his fellow slaves. If he was easy on the slaves, he received demotion and flogging. The slaves usually hated the drivers and the master treated them as spies. The slaves complained of his exploitation of slave women, his favoritism with rewards, and his brutality in punishment. However, the slaves' assessment of the driver depended on whether or not the master gave him the power to flog the slaves. When flogging was prohibited, the driver had to motivate his fellows with threats to tell the master if they did not work hard. The role of the driver was also largely affected by the size of the plantation, the number of slaves, the crop, the presence or absence of owners, managerial style of masters, and the resort to the task system or gang labor. The drivers provided a work motivator while the domestic servants provided the master's eyes and ears. Coerced by rewards the domestic servant kept the master informed of the slave's activities. These servants often foiled plans to revolt. The domestic servant was trained to speak kindly of his master in front of Northerners. These two offices of slavery were very valuable to the plantation owner (Blassingame 258-260).

Despite the fact that there was a relative lack of slave revolts, the slaves did not merely accept their lot in life. Many forms of rebellion took place other than violence, most on a more individual level. Slave resistance created for all slaveholders a serious problem of discipline. Masters termed slaves a "troublesome property." Slaves always attempted to limit the amount of work they completed. Some slaves stole cotton from the gin to be weighed again the next day. Some concealed dirt or rocks in their cotton to make it heavier and escape punishment. Slaves worked as hard as they wanted to, and the masters could only threaten and punish them. Some slaveholders agree "that every attempt to force a slave beyond the limit that he fixes himself as a sufficient amount of labor to render his master, instead of extorting more work, only tends to make him unprofitable, unmanageable, a vexation and a curse" (Fogel 270-271). The use of force would most often make the slaves slow down rather than speed up the work. Besides slowing down, some slaves intentionally did careless work and damaged property. Slaveholders had to search for methods to prevent slaves from abusing horses and mules, plowing and hoeing wrong, damaging tools, killing young plants, and picking bad cotton. Not only did slaves wreck things when they worked, but also some did not work at all. Slaves would pretend they were sick to avoid working in the fields. The masters could not tell who was sick and who was faking it. If they made a sick slave work they risked damaging their valuable property. One slave woman was getting out of work because of swellings in her arms until it was discovered that she was sticking her arms into beehives. Slaves would also run away to avoid work. Runaways were generally young male slaves. Furthermore, slaves even seemed to have their own moral code. Stealing was not considered an offense among slaves as long as no one got caught. One master observed: "To steal and not to be detected is a merit among them" (Stampp 274). Field hands killed hogs and stole corn. House servants stole wine, whiskey, jewelry, trinkets, and anything else that was not locked up. Some slaves even made theft their business by which they could obtain luxuries which they might not normally have. Stolen goods were sometimes traded to whites of to free Negroes. "Dishonesty," commented one master, "indeed seemed to be a common if not inherent trait of

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Approximate Word count = 3450
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page double spaced)