Why weren't there more slave revolts in the US? Did the small number of 
revolts signify that slaves were basically satisfied with their 
condition in life?

These are the kinds of questions that one might reasonably ask. My 
advisor in grad school years ago (Eugene Genovese) had a blunt one-line 
answer to the first of these: the slaves weren't stupid. They 
reckoned--correctly--that attempted revolts in the circumstances they 
faced in the US would have been suicidal, so they bided their time and 
found other ways to resist the hardships and agonies of their lives.

There were a fair number of revolts in the Caribbean basin and South 
America, Haiti being the site of the largest and most successful. Why so 
many more in these areas? 1) slaves greatly outnumbered whites, often by 
more than 10:1 (in contrast, US slaves were outnumbered by whites in 
nearly every state and decisively in the country as a whole; there was 
never anything like a 4:1 B:W ratio in Virginia, where slaves 
constituted at most 40% of the total population); 2) the slave 
populations outside the US were heavily African-born, while that in the 
US was mainly native-born (i.e., born in the US) from well before the 
Revolution--the idea being that those born into slavery are less likely 
to rise up against the institution; 3) geography in the US did not favor 
a major slave rebellion--where would they go? where could they hide? 4) 
in the US, the white majority was mobilized (in slave patrols, etc.) to 
watch out for any sign of trouble among the slaves; 5) the wide 
distribution of American slaves on farms and plantations of many 
different sizes made communication and planning among the slaves very 
difficult, whereas on a Caribbean island where sugar was the main crop, 
the slaves were concentrated on big plantations; 6) the conditions--work 
and health-related--in the sugar regions were abysmal, compared to those 
(bad enough, to be sure) in the tobacco and cotton-growing American 
South, which made slaves in the former more desperate than those 
elsewhere; and 7) there were a host of other factors pertaining to the 
lives and outlook of US slaves that made large-scale revolt unlikely, 
including the reasons presented by Mr. Forest.

I should add that some historians have begun to examine the large exodus 
of slaves from their plantations during the War for Independence in 
mainland North America and to treat it as, in effect, a large-scale 
slave revolt. The jury is still out in that discussion....

Doug Deal

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