All previous indication of rebelliousness in San Domingo [before the Haitian Revolution of 1794] is relegated by Genovese to unimportance: "We find a Sambo stereotype and a weak tradition of rebellion ... when the island suddenly exploded in the greatest slave revolution in history, nothing lay behind it but Sambo and a few hints."

This conclusion is fundamentally absurd, the absurdity of sincere but pessimistic radical scholarship.

Slaves in North America were in every respect far outnumbered by the whites, who in any area could successfully hold off an attack until help came from elsewhere.

The slave revolt was not the usual method of direct action on the part of slaves in the United States because it was obvious that such a small, isolated minority could not successfully struggle this way. Rather the slaves usually chose other, more suitable tactics. While the slaves did not engage, particularly after the defeat of Nat Turner in 1831, in large revolts, they did struggle in a most conscious fashion and in a most successful manner through the Underground Railroad, strikes, and acts of individual withholding of or destruction of production. Most important, they fashioned their own independent community through which men and women and their children could find the cultural defenses against their oppressors.

The black community was the center of life for the slaves. It gave them, marked off from the rest of society, an independent base. The slave did not suffer from rootlessness – he belonged to the slave community and even if he were sold down the river, would usually be able to find himself in a new community much like his previous one, in which there would be people who shared a common destiny and would help him find a new life.

Despite Genovese’s stated respect for C.L.R. James, he seems to be turning the historian upside down. For the point James is making in The Black Jacobins – a point which cannot be missed by the careful reader – is that the oppressed continuously struggle in forms of their own choosing and surprise all mankind when they transform the day-to-day struggle into monumental revolutionary deeds. The pre-revolutionary activity was a necessary predecessor to the Haitian revolt; and without Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vessey and Nat Turner, there could have been no Fredrick Douglass, Rap Brown, Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver.

Through the instrumentality of the African cult [another term for slave culture], a concrete expression of a philosophy most adequate to the task at hand, the Afro-American slave prepared the ground and built the community out of which could come the struggles of the abolitionist movement. Abolitionism was at all times dominated by Afro-Americans, not by whites. Every abolitionist newspaper depended upon the support of Negro freedmen for its continuation. And these black freedmen received their impetus from the struggles of their brothers and sisters in slavery. Rather than stemming from the New England Brahmin conscience, abolitionism grew from, and carried, the necessity of black liberation whatever the cost. And in liberating the black community abolitionism transformed American society; it took the lead in creating a new America.

Although it will seem outrageous for those who think of movements as primarily organizations, offices, finances, printing presses and newspapers, writers and petitions, the heart of abolitionism was the slave community itself. The Underground Railroad, the efforts of the slaves for their own liberation, and their struggles’ impact on Northern Whites [sic] and slave blacks – these were the movement’s indispensible [sic] core. In the South, it gave the slaves the hope that enabled them to engage in the daily struggles that won for them that amount of breathing space which made more than mere continued existence possible. (my emphasis)

The slaves themselves created the conditions for the inner corruption of the Master Class. While the rulers portrayed the institution of slavery as beneficent, the constant rebellion of the slaves made them know they lied. And when there is no way in which men can believe in the fundamental morality of a social system, even one they profit by, that system begins to die because the masters lose their ability to defend it. The slaves, in the struggle to the death with the rulers, repudiate the latter’s claim of moral justification, demonstrate to all the bad faith of the masters. (Seen from this vantage point, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn depicts the superiority of the moral claims of the runaway slave, Jim, to those of the masters based on property rights.)

The southern slave owner was denuded of civilization by the very system he fostered. Instead of the southern plantation owner and the classes close to him being made up of the knights in armor of racist folklore, slavery produced a society in the American South dominated by a class who lived in corruption and within an atmosphere worthy of the Marquis de Sade. ...

The myth of the gracious South dies hard, but die it must. (my emphasis)

This is not to argue that the slave was in no sense Sambo. A man is Sambo precisely when he is at the very point of rebellion he is fearful of being the rebel. Rebel he must be, but self-confident he is not. The greatest of all abolitionist leaders, the ex-slave Fredrick Douglass, tells repeatedly in his autobiography that when in the very act of fleeing, he was not only afraid – he also felt he was doing something wrong. Everything seemed to tell him that he was incapable of being a freeman; but at the same time, everything told him he must be a freeman. Unless we understand the contradictory nature of the human personality in class societies, we can never portray reality. One never knows whether the victim or the rebel will manifest himself again, but then again one need never know. It does not matter. In real life, men engage and then they see. The man of courage is not afraid to act, not because he is certain he will not be the coward, but only because he knows that, if he does not act, he most certainly will be the coward.