Hampton Smith
Sometime in the spring of 1800, enslaved tobacco cutters in Henrico County, Virginia, brought their scythes to one of Brookfield plantation’s blacksmiths, Solomon Prosser, for sharpening.[1] Instead of whetting the blades to aid in expedient cultivation, however, Solomon detached each curved blade from its wooden handle. Then, using a pair of iron tongs and hammer, he worked alongside other enslaved blacksmiths to warm each scythe blade over charcoal until it was “red hot,” a point at which hardened iron transforms from red through orange and yellow to a blinding white, indicating malleability.[2] One of the blacksmiths placed the scythe atop an anvil and then hammered a chisel down its center until it was completely divided in half.[3] Solomon’s brother, Gabriel, then began to attach hand-carved wooden handles to the blades, thus retrofitting a scythe into two cutlasses or curved swords for an insurrection set to take place on Saturday, August 30, 1800, at midnight.[4]
The revolt, now known as Gabriel’s Rebellion, was prematurely quashed when an unprecedented downpour on the planned night—“the greatest rain perhaps ever known”—made bridges and roads impassable.[5] Shortly thereafter, state militia, acting upon information provided by two enslaved informants, stepped in to apprehend the suspected individuals. The cutlasses were later deemed by the authorities to have been created for the “purpose of carrying into execution the plan of an insurrection.”[6] Indeed, the act of furnishing weapons, or of making tools that could become weapons, served as justification for white Virginians to sentence thirty-five enslaved people to be executed and to banish ten from the state.[7] The rerouting of artisanal knowledge towards insurgence nevertheless delivered a powerful message to slaveowners: enslaved craftspeople might dismantle their masters’ houses using their tools.[8] No longer simply an ordinary form of craft labor, toolmaking became a lethal practice—proof of commitment to “consult, advise, and conspire.”[9]
Despite its clear importance to both the enslaved and their enslavers, craft knowledge has been underthought in histories of Gabriel’s Rebellion.[10] Instead, scholarship has focused on why Gabriel’s occupation as a carpenter and blacksmith made him a viable leader.[11] Within urban centers like Richmond, Virginia, black craftspeople like Gabriel were “hired out” to complete tasks when their labor was not required on their master’s plantation.[12] Across his varying job sites in the city and surrounding plantations, Gabriel likely heard the news of other period revolts, obtained first-hand experience of the physical terrain, and formed bonds with other enslaved communities. For these reasons, Gabriel’s occupation has led historians to overemphasize his leadership within a larger project of revolutionary and abolitionist sentiment. Much like the subsequent Denmark Vesey’s Rebellion (1822) and Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831-2) (two other insurrections named after their artisan ringleaders), Gabriel the individual has become inseparable from the revolt’s interpretation. The focus on Gabriel’s occupation, however, has ironically overshadowed the material expertise he possessed as well as the contributions of the many artisans and skilled laborers involved in cutting scythes into cutlasses.[13]
This essay contends that a comprehensive understanding of Gabriel’s Rebellion, and of slave rebellions more generally, necessitates an examination of the collective process of toolmaking, particularly the repurposing of tools as weapons. Building on recent efforts to analyze the “object lessons,” “vast materials,” and “material cultures” of enslavement and its legacies, this essay explores how the knowledge of enslaved individuals can be discerned through objects often overlooked in art history. At the same time, these neglected objects prompt an important question for the field: How do craft techniques produce knowledge?[14] If the “full account [of slavery] must include things as well as words and deeds,” then it must also include an account of how things were made.[15] And as the making process required the know-how to alter the material world, this essay links scholarship on craft knowledge with that of Black ecologies, especially Kathryn Benjamin Golden’s recent formulation of an “insurgent ecology,” or the strategic use of the geographical environment in overt resistance.[16] Building from these scholars, this article traces the materials, ecological supply chains, and collaborative conditions of production involved in turning scythes into iron cutlasses to reveal how the toolmaking process itself sponsored an extended network of Black artisans asserting their will towards a life beyond enslavement. In what I term “insurgent tooling,” artisanal praxis enacts ideals of an abolitionist future.
Contrary to viewing tools as mere means to predetermined ends, insurgent tooling emphasizes the inherent adaptability and transformative nature of the toolmaking process.[17] Indeed, the act of making a tool, according to media theorist Vilém Flusser, “serves to give other objects a form. And more, to produce tools, other tools must be produced in a practically infinite regress.” For Flusser, there is a potential “danger” in industrial toolmaking: its future-oriented processes may “turn humans into tools for producing other products.”[18] Yet for those enslaved who were already bound to their masters as what one white visitor to the South described as “veriest tools,” the act of making a tool was less a commitment to modern industrial efficiency than a radical means to survive it and even enact new futures.[19] Insurgent tooling was another instance of engendering what Black studies scholar Kara Keeling calls “futurity,” or an “alternative organization of time in which the future, if there is such a thing, has not been promised; it had to be created by reaching through and beyond what exists.”[20]
My emphasis on craft process as a locus for insurgent thought is purposeful, for the tools’ intended use as weapons very rarely came to fruition, nor are they materially extant today.[21] The concept of insurgent tooling thus accords with Jennifer Chuong’s definition of “tacit protest” as “a form of political contestation … whose significance lay more in the act of making than in its material effects.” Especially useful to a discussion addressing “how people without access to forceful language can express dissent” (like most enslaved craftspeople and toolmakers in colonial and antebellum America), Chuong’s formulation of tacit protest grounds revolutionary consciousness within and through craft technique. However, in contrast to the acts of free printers discussed by Chuong, the strategic acts of tooling by enslaved blacksmiths were more than forms of protest: the re-orientation of enslaved craftspeople’s collective knowledge was a radical, violent means to survive enslavement and establish abolitionist frameworks.[22] The action of splitting a scythe into cutlasses therefore provides a model to assess the material and social act of toolmaking’s integrality to the formation of Black radicalism across the long nineteenth century. In examining this moment of production, we will see how enslaved craftspeople enacted social arrangements throughtheir toolmaking processes: an “insurgent social life” forged through the preparation of conspiratorial plots that often failed to materialize.[23] This article investigates how we might read the insurrection as a workshop wherein black craftspeople tacitly practiced modes of relation that evaded the scripts of their enslavers.
Transforming Iron
Scythes and cutlasses were vital to insurgency due to their conditional status as tools, utilitarian objects that enslaved craftspeople were expected to use. Their familiarity was an advantage. A large part of any plantation or urban workshop’s inventory, sharpened blades were but a few of the tools necessary for the agricultural, artisanal, and industrial pursuits that shaped and fueled slavery’s economy. On a large plantation like George Washington’s Mount Vernon, for instance, one could find some 3,064 tools—2,620 of which were for carpentry, 120 for blacksmithing, 50 for decorative finishing, and 22 for masonry.[24] Whether in the plantation smithy or an urban workshop, hand tools were integral to the everyday lives of enslaved peoples, as illustrated in encyclopedic depictions that diagrammatically linked tools and Black laborers (Fig. 1).[25] While stockpiling weapons like guns might raise the concern of an overseer or master, it was unremarkable that enslaved blacksmiths were working on scythes and cutlasses in the Brookfield plantation’s smithy.
Such a strategy largely relied upon the transformative properties of iron. The ability to work iron stems from its crystalline, lattice-like structure, which allows iron atoms to bond strongly in the face of deformation, heat, and pressure. As the most common element found within the earth by mass, iron is considered the cheapest and most abundant metal. Iron’s ubiquity and transformative potential provided seemingly limitless applications across branches of manufacture. As Scottish physician and political theorist Andrew Ure once noted, “iron accommodates itself to all our wants and desires, even to our caprices; it is equally serviceable to the arts, the sciences, to agriculture, and war; the same ore furnishes the sword, the ploughshare, the scythe….”[26] Iron has shaped histories of globalization and industrialization, while at the same time garnering significant disrepute for the violence with which it was associated. Pliny the Elder, for instance, described iron’s tendency to rust as a “penalty” exacted by nature, who “[makes] nothing in the world more mortal than that which is most hostile to mortality.”[27] And as Lewis Mumford aptly put it centuries later: modernity was made of “blood and iron.”[28]
At the same time, artisans’ ability to transform iron meant that the metal held explicit material and symbolic importance to Black communities across the Atlantic world. Blacksmiths were seen as important individuals in many African, Afro-Caribbean, and African American communities. The transformative actions of repeated hammering, annealing, folding, and welding at the forge are, according to some anthropologists, metaphorically linked to the growth and maturation of various African communities.[29] Their ability to mold iron—transforming and creating new forms despite the process’s perceived danger—positioned blacksmiths as mediators of the forces of life and death. Often charged with making the objects used to invoke supernatural agency, African blacksmiths were believed to be infused with spiritualism and vitality.[30]
Imagining an enslaved blacksmith finding spiritual meaning in their craft, however, should give us pause. Within the context of the transatlantic slave trade, iron’s fungibility rendered it both a literal and metaphorical currency through which violence was enacted.[31] Although often not regarded as a “hard” currency for backing paper money—like gold or silver—iron served as a “soft” currency used in the uneven exchanges between European slave traders and West Africans. Europeans brought iron bars, cloth, cowries and copper for trade, all of which were then repurposed as currency in West Africa (Fig. 2). However, as one slave trader wrote in 1799, “Thus a certain quantity of goods of whatever denomination appearing to be equal in value to a bar of iron constituted in the trader’s phraseology a bar of that particular merchandise. Twenty leaves of tobacco, for instance, were considered as a bar of tobacco…a bar of one commodity being reckoned equal in value to a bar of another commodity.”[32] With goods of any kind equated in value to a bar of iron, white enslavers found themselves “forced to make use of their [African] Smiths, to cut [the bars] to proportion.”[33] Iron bars, often made by African-born enslaved craftspeople, nevertheless alchemized inequity: the exchange value of iron traded for African captives was of lower value to Europeans, giving them the upper hand in determining economic value. [34] Moreover, the iron currency used to purchase Africans for enslavement could easily be repurposed into shackles, which might then transform into slave collars and once again into other devices of capture (Fig. 3). As evinced by an incident in Gabriel Prosser’s life, who, after arguing with a white man over a stolen pig, was branded on his left hand, iron tools could swiftly transition into weapons of control.[35]
Enslaved craftspeople nevertheless redirected iron’s mutability towards the forging of alternative bonds and modes of filiation such as those formed through slave revolts. The act of transforming a scythe into a cutlass represented a reimagining of slavery’s reliance on iron as a material employed to violently enforce proprietorship. More specifically, scholars have aligned African ironworking traditions with slave revolts across the Atlantic world, noting that these uprisings were products of the “ritualistic,” “powerful” beliefs and practices of African blacksmiths.[36] Especially pertinent to these studies is blacksmithing’s ties to Ogun, the deity of iron, warfare, and hunting in Yoruba and several other diasporic religions.[37] Catherine Goucher’s analysis of a cutlass buried with ritual objects at an eighteenth-century foundry site in Jamaica—potentially a shrine to Ogun—underscores how diasporic Africans attached spiritual meaning to smithed iron tools.[38] While slavery attempted to diminish any sense of an enslaved person’s intimate connectivity with their homelands, kin, and spirituality, iron’s metamorphic intelligence offered a means of recuperating those bonds by symbolically and materially linking Black individuals across the diaspora.
In the case of Gabriel’s Rebellion, historian Walter Rucker contends that the influx of enslaved blacksmiths and their expertise in ironworking from regions such as Biafra, Senegambia, Benin, and Saint-Domingue to Virginia during the late eighteenth century likely infused enslaved communities across the Chesapeake and Tidewater regions with “martial, technological, and spiritual meaning.”[39] Rucker argues Gabriel’s blacksmithing skills made him a “potent spiritual and martial symbol” amongst the enslaved in Virginia. He was a “natural leader” with the “ability to craft weapons,” and he had extensive knowledge of “familiar symbols and spaces.”[40] While Gabriel’s status as a blacksmith and carpenter might explain why a heterogeneous group of enslaved people accepted his leadership, envisioning revolt ultimately required a collective process oriented around the transformation of iron, wood, charcoal, and coal into tools that could double as weapons. For, in addition to Gabriel, his brother Solomon and various other craftspeople across the Chesapeake Region were integral to turning scythes into cutlasses. Understanding these collaborative endeavors not only sheds light on how enslaved craftsmen orchestrated rebellion, but it also underscores their cultivation of a shared sense of belonging in a land they were forced to inhabit and skillfully work.
Sensing Supply Chains
To assert that toolmaking was essential to fostering a sense of collective identity, it is important to underscore the inherent recursiveness of the craft. Unlike other forms of making, which often require a tool of a different material (such as the use of a brush in painting), blacksmithing stages a recursive encounter with the tools of its making. This process is visualized within Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751-65), wherein blacksmiths are depicted forging a piece of iron with iron tools, some of which are scattered about the floor, while others hang neatly in the leftmost corner (Fig. 4). Indeed, the act of forging something metallic cannot be conceived without preceding acts of tooling. Blacksmithing is therefore an art form founded upon recursivity and relationality. Within this framework, cutting scythes into cutlasses was not only an act of resistance; it also fostered connections within a system that actively sought to deny such social bonds. While visually imperceptible in the blades they crafted, the insurgent blacksmiths necessarily sensed the presence of other enslaved people’s labor through their negotiation of the internal and external qualities of iron.
The relationality of blacksmithing becomes even more significant when considering that iron’s malleability emerges only after undergoing numerous transformative processes. Descriptions of iron as “accommodating” apply only after iron itself has gone through many prior metamorphoses. Immense amounts of pressure and heat are necessary for the extraction, smelting, forging, and smithing processes. As contemporary blacksmith Alex W. Bearler underscores, unlike copper, lead, gold, and silver, iron is a “stubborn, reluctant, exasperating material.”[41] Furthermore, as farming equipment was not directly made from iron ore, but rather forged from previously smelted and refined pig or bar iron, the ability to split scythes was predicated on the labor of those who had alreadytouched and transformed it. While a completed iron tool or cutlass might appear uniform in composition, workable iron varies significantly in structure at the anvil. As Bearler describes of colonial blacksmiths, “each piece of iron he heated in his forge offered a unique challenge, a new adventure” due to minute differences embedded within a given piece.[42] When hammering their chisels into scythes, insurgent blacksmiths navigated the prior actions of enslaved miners, refiners, and smelters that fueled iron plantations stretching across the Chesapeake region.
Enslaved labor was deeply connected to the production of iron. During what historians term industrial slavery, enslaved Africans fueled industries such as “manufacturing, mining, lumbering, turpentine extraction, processing of agricultural crops, and the construction and operation of transportation facilities.”[43] Some of the earliest colonial expeditions in the Americas were driven by a desire for minerals like iron; by the eighteenth century, the British government’s mercantile policy revealed its perception of colonial competition. In 1719 it ruled that “none of the plantations should manufacture iron wares of any kind, out of any sows, pigs, or bars whatsoever, under certain penalties.”[44] Nevertheless, the need for iron was seemingly unquenchable for the slowly industrializing British imperial powers and American colonists. Soon enough, the demand for skilled smiths led to enslaved Africans being tasked with the work. As Isaac Weld Jr., a naturalist working across the American continent during the eighteenth century, noted regarding Chesapeake iron production: the “forges and furnaces are all worked by negroes, who seem to be particularly suited to such an occupation.”[45] Weld’s statement aligns with climatic theories that associated Black skin with the ability to withstand extreme heat, justifying the use of slave labor for the most fatal of trades.[46] That the coal and iron industries would take a disproportionate amount of life insurance policies out on their enslaved laborers later in the nineteenth century indexes both the lethal nature of these trades as well as the enduring impact of such statements.[47]
Beyond mining and refining iron ore, enslaved Africans were also involved in coal mining and the extensive felling of timber needed to produce charcoal, which was a crucial fuel for iron smelting. In other words, the components necessary for turning scythes into cutlasses—wood, charcoal or coal, and iron ore—linked localized ecological knowledge to the insurgent cause. Yet these materials also shaped how the revolt was organized. As scholars of the rebellion have indicated, the mobility of enslaved and free artisans of color, like Gabriel, fostered a vast network of information-sharing. This network stretched from Richmond to Petersburg, Suffolk, Norfolk, and as far north as Caroline County, across the extensive river system connecting the Tidewater to the Atlantic World.[48] Notably, enslaved people were recruited for the revolt in the very locations where the materials used to make the cutlasses were refined: the “Tuckahoe Coal Pits” and “Mr. Ross’s Iron Works.” With extensive communities of skilled black laborers, these sites were key nodes for establishing an insurgent network, and their use reveals how the supply chains of toolmaking could shape the development of conspiracy itself.[49] The materials involved in the toolmaking process, in other words, were mapped onto the very insurgent network they aimed to support.
Fundamental techniques of transformation and refinement also connected enslaved blacksmiths to a much larger praxis of resistance that took place across the Chesapeake and Tidewater regions. From maroons—autonomous communities of escaped slaves living in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia—to Gabriel’s coordination of Black tradespeople across diverse geographies, enslaved people strategically transformed their geographical environments into what Kathrine Benjamin Golden calls an “insurgent ecology” to reject the terms of their enslavement and reroute their futures.[50] Their efforts paralleled those of diasporic communities across the Atlantic world. As scholars have illustrated, Black diasporans chose to commune together symbolically and literally with the land. Some individuals brought botanical and agricultural skills to their plantations, whereas others mixed dirt, blood, and water into a tincture to drink before rebellions. Some used grave dirt to practice the spiritual and healing practice of Obeah, and others were caretakers of communal subsistence plots.[51] What is often unacknowledged, however, is how many of these acts ultimately relied upon tools forged, at least in part, by other Afro-diasporic peoples within the Atlantic world. Whether in the Caribbean or the Deep South, enslaved people worked with tools made from materials forcibly harvested and refined by other enslaved communities within the dense iron ore and hardwood-forest deposits across the Upper South. Every tool that aided resistance—from machetes to plows—embodied the interconnected histories, ecologies, and labor of Afro-diasporic peoples, uniting their skills into a shared struggle for freedom.
Tooling’s Spatial and Relational Contours
The supply chains of toolmaking crossed within spaces of production both on plantations and in urban settings. However, the dissemination of information through these channels was fraught with risk. Plantation landscapes were often monitored by an owner or driver. Whether in broad daylight or at night, enslaved artisans were subject to the violent whims of their enslavers. For example, according to Jacob Stoyer’s slave narrative, one white overseer would
Go to the shop of the blacksmith or carpenter, and would pick a quarrel with him, so as to get an opportunity to punish him.” He would say to the negro, “Oh, ye think yourself as good as ye master, ye–‘ Of course he knew what the overseer was after, so he was afraid to speak; the overseer, hearing no answer, would turn to him and cry out, “ye so big ye can’t speak to me, ye–“, and then the conflict would begin, and he would give that man such a punishment as would disable him for two or three months.[52]
Blacksmiths’ workshops were also foremost places of labor, where Blacksmiths and their apprentices worked in high temperatures, with toxic substances, and routinely dealt with injuries and chronic illness.[53] Despite these dangerous conditions, the blacksmith shop emerged as a crucial locus for clandestine coalition-building. Positioned behind the main house on the Brookfield plantation, the forge provided a discreet space for enslaved individuals to convene and strategize away from the prying eyes of overseers. According to Ben Prosser’s testimony on October 9, 1800, the blacksmith shop was where they “would raise and enlist men.”[54] In addition, on the night that the revolt was to occur, “the place of meeting was near Prosser’s blacksmith’s shop in the woods.”[55] Just as the spaces for extracting and refining materials for the cutlasses—the “Tuckahoe Coal Pits” and “Mr. Ross’s Iron Works”—informed the creation of an insurgent social network, so too was insurgency conceived and organized through the blacksmith’s workshop. Artisanal making therefore took place in the interstices of plantations and urban centers alike—spaces for communication between bodies, materials, and spirituality to cohere in what scholar Stephanie Camp calls “rival geographies,” or “alternative ways of knowing and using plantation and southern space…that conflicted with planters’ ideals and demands.”[56]
Rival geographies were also potentially intimate, fostering close relationships between enslaved artisans. At the forge, Gabriel, Thornton, Solomon, and others were able to convene privately. If Solomon was the lead blacksmith, he likely had several “strikers” or “hammermen” that worked alongside him (see Fig. 4). Led by the smith, the strikers applied the correct amount of force at the same angle and in the exact position repeatedly, requiring someone with careful attention to hold down the burning metal with tongs. As many contemporary blacksmiths emphasize, this working relationship is not articulated through spoken language, but rather by an intimate choreography of synchronic movement and rhythm.[57] Legible within the rhythmic unity between striker and smith, the smithing process potentially mirrored the larger act it sought to bolster: a collective, unified endeavor oriented towards change.
Crafting Community
Even though their acts of insurgent tooling did not lead to the result they imagined, through craft techniques, toolmakers involved in Gabriel’s Rebellion skillfully enacted alternatives to their condition as chattel. They found ways of intimately connecting themselves to one another, other enslaved communities, and their environment through shared, often embodied languages that cohered around the seemingly straightforward act of splitting a scythe in half. The thoughts and voices of the myriad enslaved artisans across the Americas remain elusive due to archival limitations. As enslavers controlled the production of evidence to further the commodification of enslaved human beings, the primary documents that inform this essay potentially tell us more about enslavers than the enslaved.[58] Yet, as W. E. B. Du Bois once noted of enslaved blacksmiths, “many had secret processes of their own for tempering tools which they guarded with zealous care.”[59] Perhaps the lack of information about enslaved craftspeople’s processes from these records might itself be considered resistance—echoing larger pan-diasporic efforts to “obstruct, obscure, and withhold” knowledge.[60] To write an art history of enslaved people’s artistic processes is therefore to embrace a kind of failure in line with the hopes of the insurgents themselves. “Too often,” writes Robin D. G. Kelley, “our standards for evaluating social movements pivot around whether or not they ‘succeeded’ in realizing their visions rather than on the merits or power of the visions themselves…yet it is precisely those alternative visions and dreams that inspire new generations to continue to struggle for change.”[61] Coalition building on the path to toolmaking offered another way of living and relating together. In so doing, black artisanal communities reoriented the skills they were forced to obtain under enslavement towards abolition.
Hampton Smith is a Doctoral Candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Mellon Foundation Fellow in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia, PA
Acknowledgments: I extend my gratitude to editors and reviewers for their generous comments and suggestions on this article. Thanks to Vincent Brown, Jennifer Van Horn, Marley Lix-Jones, Hannah Scruggs, and Kristel Smentek for their feedback and support.
[1] H. W. Flournoy, ed., Calendar of Virginia State Papers and Other Manuscripts, 11 vols. (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1890), 9:141-2 (hereafter CVSP): “Ben the property of Th H Prosser – That the prisoner brought two Scythe blades to Gabriel for the purpose of having them made into Swords and that 4 Swords were made out of them by Solomon at request of Gabriel.”
[2] M. T. Richardson, Practical Blacksmithing (New York: Richardson, 1889).
[3] Cyril Stanley Smith, “The Early History of Casting, Molds, and the Science of Solidification,” in A Search for Structure: Selected Essays on Art, Science, and History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 127.
[4] CVSP, 9:141-2; 147.
[5] CVSP, 9:169.
[6] Six of the enslaved informants were pardoned. CVSP 9:141.
[7] Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion & the Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 187.
[8] I make this claim fully acknowledging the importance of the now-canonical Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (1984),” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 2007), 110-14. Drawing on Cedric Robinson’s theorization of the “Black Radical Tradition,” I have in mind a collective united by the experience of racialization against slavery and capitalism. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition [1983](Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
[9] Henrico County, VA. Judgements and Ended Causes, 1800, Box 70, folder “Sept.–Oct. 1900: Commonwealth Causes [Gabriel’s Rebellion],” Library of Virginia, reprinted in Philip Schwarz, Gabriel’s Conspiracy: A Documentary History, (University of Virginia Press, 2012).
[10] This essay is not long enough to properly make such a case within the larger historiography of Black resistance. However, while objects have been identified as important and meaningful to enslaved and freed Black communities by archaeologists, art historians, and historians alike, often “artisanal knowledge,” or the actual intelligence necessary to make or maintain an object, is left underexamined. On artisanal knowledge, see Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
[11] Gerald Mulin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972); Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion; James Sidbury, Ploughshares Into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730-1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997);Walter C. Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 2008); Michael L. Nicholls, Whispers of Rebellion: Narrating Gabriel’s Conspiracy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012).
[12] Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion, 28-30.
[13] My understanding of the problem of the scholarly tendency to single out slave leaders, often male, is influenced by Alexander Mazzaferro, “‘A Nat Turner in Every Family’: Exemplarity and Exceptionality in the Print Circulation of Slave Revolt,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 10, no. 2 (2022): 267–303. Mazzaferro builds on John Mac Kilgore, “Nat Turner and the Work of Enthusiasm,” PMLA 130, no. 5 (2015): 1347–62, which argues that the singling out of Nat Turner “blinds us to the heterogeneous and collective nature of the insurrection.” Laura Thiemann Scales argues that Turner’s “prophetic personhood provides an alternative to liberal individuality and interrogates the very value of individuality” in “Narrative Revolutions in Nat Turner and Joseph Smith,” American Literary History 24, no. 2 (2012): 205–33. Saidiya Hartman clarified the problem of how liberal narratives of individualism idealize mechanisms of domination and discipline in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self‐Making in 19th Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 122, 141.
[14] Wayne Modest and Tim Barringer, “Introduction to Object Lessons,” Victorian Jamaica (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 51-4; Tiya Myles, “Packed Bags and Pieced Quilts: Sampling Slavery‘s Vast Materials,” Winterthur Portfolio 54, no. 4 (2020): 205-22; Whitney Nell Stewart, “Why, What, and How: a Note on Material Culture Theory, Sources, and Methods,” This is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2023), 163-9.
[15] John Michael Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts (Athens: Brown Thrasher Books, University of Georgia Press, 1990), viii–ix.
[16] For an overview of Black Ecologies and Black Geographies, Alex A. Moulton and Inge Salo, “Black Geographies and Black Ecologies as Insurgent Ecocriticism,” Environment and Society 13, no. 1 (2022): 156-74. Kathryn Benjamin Golden defines insurgent ecology as “a geographical environment aiding overt resistance” in “‘Armed in the Great Swamp’: Fear, Maroon Insurrection, and the Insurgent Ecology of the Great Dismal Swamp,” The Journal of African American History 106, no. 1 (January 2021): 1–26.
[17] Tools “extend the sphere of our existence” while providing a “materialization of the interaction of matter with the means to transform it” in André Leroi-Gourhan, Evolution et technique–L’Homme et la matière, 2nd edn. (Paris: Albin Michel, 1971), 319. On the use of tools for escaping enslavement, see Tiffany Momon, “Shooting for Freedom: Examining the Material World of Self-Emancipated Persons,” Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century: Art, Mobility, and Change, ed. Wendy Bellion and Kristel Smentek (London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2023), 41-61.
[18] Vilém Flusser, “The Gesture of Making,” Gestures, trans. Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 44.
[19] “She has become indeed the veriest tool, the most complete slave of an iron will,” in Caroline E. Rush, The North and South, Or, Slavery and Its Contrasts: A Tale of Real Life (Philadelphia: Crissy & Markley, 1852), 295.
[20] Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures (New York: New York Unviersity Press, 2019), 35-6.
[21] On the loss of visual and material objects associated with Indigenous and Black rebellions, see Ananda Cohen Aponte, “Reimagining Lost Visual Archives of Black and Indigenous Resistance,” Selva 3 (2021. https://selvajournal.org/article/reimagining-lost-visual-archives
[22] Jennifer Y. Chuong, “Isaiah Thomas’s Stamp Acts: Printers and Tacit Protest in Revolutionary America,” Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Bellion and Smentek, 161-3.
[23] Fred Moten, Stolen Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 186.
[24] Jean Stoll, “Shaping Mount Vernon: How George Washington Obtained and Used Tools of the Building Trades,” The Chronicle of the Early American Industries Association 70, no. 2 (June 2017): 57–66.
[25] Chris Evans, “The Plantation Hoe: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Commodity, 1650–1850,” The William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 1 (2012): 71–100.
[26] Andrew Ure, A Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures, and Mines Containing a Clear Exposition of their Principles and Practice (London:Longman, Orme, Brown, Greene, & Longmans, 1839).
[27] Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938–62), vol. IV, 231.
[28] Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 165.
[29] Allen F. Roberts and Marla C. Berns, “Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths,” African Arts 51, no. 1 (March 1, 2018): 66–85.
[30] Roberts and Berns, “Striking Iron,” 66-85.
[31] Jenny Bulstrode, “Black Metallurgists and the Making of the Industrial Revolution,” History and Technology 39, no. 1 (January 2, 2023): 1–41.
[32] Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior of Africa (1799, reissued Folio Society, London, 1984), 14.
[33] Richard Jobson, The Golden Trade: Or, a Discovery of the River Gambra, and the Golden Trade of the Aethiopians (London: Nicholas Okes, 1623), 120-1. See Chris Evans and Göran Rydén, “‘Voyage Iron’: An Atlantic Slave Trade Currency, Its European Origins, and West African Impact,” Past & Present 239, no. 1 (May 1, 2018): 41–70.
[34] See Toby Green, A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution, (London: Penguin United Kingdom, 2019); and Jennifer Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021).
[35] Trial of Prosser’s Gabriel, October 7, 1799, Henrico County Court Order Book, reprinted in: Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion, 21. For tools as violent objects, see Justin Roberts, “The Whip and the Hoe: Violence, Work and Productivity on Anglo-American Plantations,” Journal of Global Slavery 6, no. 1 (January 2021): 108–30.
[36] Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1983); Patrick McNaughton, The Mande Blacksmiths: Knowledge, Power, and Art in West Africa (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1993); Candice Goucher, “African Metallurgy in the Atlantic World,” The African Archaeological Review 11 (1993): 197–215 and “European African Hammer Anvil: West African Iron Technology in the Atlantic Trade Era,” in Bassey W. Andah, ed., Cultural Resource Management: An African Dimension (Ibadan, Nigeria: Wisdom Publishers Ltd., 1990) 200–08.
[37] Africa’s Ogun: Old World and New, ed. S. Barnes, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1997), 235–59.
[38] Catherine Goucher, “Rituals of Iron in the Black Atlantic World,” Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic, ed. Akinwumi Ogundiran and Paula Saunders (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 108-24.
[39] Rucker, The River Flows On, 208.
[40] Rucker, The River Flows On, 213.
[41] Alex W. Bearler, The Art of Blacksmithing (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1976), 130.
[42] Bearler, The Art of Blacksmithing, 130.
[43] Robert S. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (New York: Galaxy Books, 1970), vii. For a helpful overview of literature on industrial slavery in the United States, see Isabel Cole and Walter A. Friedman, “A Guide to the History of Industrial Slavery in the United States,” Business History Review 97, no. 2 (2023): 385–409.
[44] Adam Anderson, An Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origin of Commerce from the Earliest Accounts to the Present Time, 2 vols. (London: Millar, Tonson, Rivington, 1764), VOL:283.
[45] Isaac Weld, Jr., Travels through the States of North America and the Provinces of Upper and Lower Canada During the Years 1795, 1796, 1797 (London, 1800), 178. See also Ronald L. Lewis, Coal. Iron, and Slaves: Industrial Slavery in Maryland and Virginia, 1715-1865 (Westport, CT: Bloomsbury Academic, 1979); Charles B. Dew, “David Ross and the Oxford Iron Works: A Study of Industrial Slavery in the Nineteenth-Century South,” William and Mary Quarterly 31, no. 2 (1974): 189-224; “Disciplining Slave Ironworkers in the Antebellum South: Coercion, Conciliation, and Accommodation,” American Historical Review 79 (1974): 393-418, and Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge (New York: Norton, 1994).
[46] Mark M. Smith, How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 11–28; Jennifer Van Horn, “Racialized Thermoception: An Eighteenth-Century Plate Warmer,” Journal18, Issue 16 Cold (Fall 2023).
[47] Michael Ralph, “Value of Life: Insurance, Slavery, and Expertise,” American Capitalism: New Histories, ed. Sven Beckert and Chris Desan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 257-284.
[48] Eric Sloane, A Museum of Early American Tools [1964] (New York: Courier Corporation, 2008), 5.
[49] Trial of Martin, CSVP, 9:146. A Black mail carrier who traveled between Richmond and Charlottesville noted “that he had conveyed the intelligence respecting the Insurrection as far as Mr. Ross’s Iron Works.” See Executive Papers, Va. State Library in Charles B Dew, “David Ross and the Oxford Iron Works: A Study of Industrial Slavery in the Early Nineteenth-Century South,” The William and Mary Quarterly 31, no. 2 (1974): 189–224.
[50] Kathryn Benjamin Golden, “‘Armed in the Great Swamp’.”
[51] Sylvia Wynter, “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” Savacou 5 (June 1971): 95–102; Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001); Katharine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (University of Minnesota P, 2006); J. T. Roane, “Plotting the Black Commons.” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 20, no. 3 (2018): 239–66; Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).
[52] Jacob Stroyer, Sketches of My Life (Salem, MA: Salem Observer Book and Job Print, 1885), 18.
[53] Bealer, The Art of Blacksmithing.
[54] CVSP, 149.
[55] CVSP, 141.
[56] Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 7.
[57] Charles M. Keller and Janet Dixon Keller, Cognition and Tool Use: The Blacksmith at Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
[58] Maria R. Montalvo, Enslaved Archives: Slavery, Law, and the Production of the Past (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024).
[59] William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, The Negro American Artisan: Report of a Social Study (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1912), 35.
[60] Mary H Nooter, “Secrecy: African Art That Conceals and Reveals,” African Arts 26, no. 1 (1993): 56.
[61] Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (New York: Beacon Press, 2002), xlvii.
Cite this article as: Hampton Smith, “Insurgent Tooling and the Collective Making of Slave Revolts,” Journal18, Issue 18 Craft (Fall 2024), https://www.journal18.org/7536.
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