Awards

• Winner of <DIV>Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Award, Florida Historical Society, 2013. Bronze Medal, Florida Book Awards Nonfiction Category, 2013.</DIV> 2013

Overview

This gripping study examines slave resistance and protest in antebellum Florida and its local and national impact from 1821 to 1865. Using a variety of sources such as slaveholders' wills and probate records, ledgers, account books, court records, oral histories, and numerous newspaper accounts, Larry Eugene Rivers discusses the historical significance of Florida as a runaway slave haven dating back to the seventeenth century and explains Florida's unique history of slave resistance and protest. In moving detail, Rivers illustrates what life was like for enslaved blacks whose families were pulled asunder as they relocated from the Upper South to the Lower South to an untamed place such as Florida, and how they fought back any way they could to control small parts of their own lives. Against a smoldering backdrop of violence, this study analyzes the various degrees of slave resistance--from the perspectives of both slave and master--and how they differed in various regions of antebellum Florida. In particular, Rivers demonstrates how the Atlantic world view of some enslaved blacks successfully aided their escape to freedom, a path that did not always lead North but sometimes farther South to the Bahama Islands and Caribbean. Identifying more commonly known slave rebellions such as the Stono, Louisiana, Denmark (Telemaque) Vesey, Gabriel, and the Nat Turner insurrections, Rivers argues persuasively that the size, scope, and intensity of black resistance in the Second Seminole War makes it the largest sustained slave insurrection ever to occur in American history. Meticulously researched, Rebels and Runaways offers a detailed account of resistance, protest, and violence as enslaved blacks fought for freedom.

Full Product Details

9780252079665

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Reviews

Offered new insightful research on Florida's unique role in slave resistance... Recommended. --Choice A valuable--indeed indispensable--account that profoundly alters our understanding of slave protests and rebellion. Rivers offers perspectives that reach beyond Florida to embrace a regional and global context for a new understanding of freedom and unfreedom. Steeped in remarkable research, this is a must read book for anyone who studies slavery. --Orville Vernon Burton, author of The Age of Jackson Most studies of antebellum slavery have either ignored or forgotten the bold actions of hundreds of enslaved Africans in Florida. Rivers's poignant study makes a strong case that this thrilling human drama--played out over many generations--constitutes perhaps the largest slave rebellion in American history. After reading this splendid book, historians and others interested in America's history will never look at slave resistance in the same way again. --James M. Denham, author of A Rogue's Paradise: Crime and Punishment in Antebellum Florida, 1821--1861 River's often insightful investigation of evolving forms and patterns of slave resistance underscores the gross imbalance of forces that slaves, individually and collectively, confronted in trying to acquire the space necessary to even think freedom a remote possibility. --Civil War History A masterful, comprehensive, and captivating analysis of resistance and absconding in Florida. Rivers fluidly and movingly examines the complex and highly differentiated experiences of the enslaved in Florida, and their variable reactions to that condition. A must read for those interested in their sweeping and compelling story. --Michael A. Gomez, author of Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora A sweepingly impressive and admirably provocative study, Rebels and Runaways illuminates changes and meanings of slave resistance and armed rebellion. This important contribution offers a significantly sophisticated understanding of the complexities of resistance and rebellion to the tyranny of slavery. --Darlene Clark Hine, coeditor of Black Europe and the African Diaspora and The Black Chicago Renaissance

<p> A masterful, comprehensive, and captivating analysis of resistance and absconding in Florida. Rivers fluidly and movingly examines the complex and highly differentiated experiences of the enslaved in Florida, and their variable reactions to that condition. A must read for those interested in their sweeping and compelling story. --Michael A. Gomez, author of Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora A sweepingly impressive and admirably provocative study, Rebels and Runaways illuminates changes and meanings of slave resistance and armed rebellion. This important contribution offers a significantly sophisticated understanding of the complexities of resistance and rebellion to the tyranny of slavery. --Darlene Clark Hine, coeditor of Black Europe and the African Diaspora and The Black Chicago Renaissance

Author Information

Larry Eugene Rivers is president of Fort Valley State University in central Georgia and the author of Slavery in Florida: Territorial Days to Emancipation.

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