9781422274224

William Wells Brown escaped slavery at age nineteen, and became a well-known abolitionist and author. In 1862 he wrote a short biography of Madison Washington and the rebellion he led aboard the Creole. Brown described Washington as “one whose tall figure, firm step, and piercing eye attracted at once the attention of all who beheld him.”

other slaves to overpower the crew and sail the ship to the British West Indies, a group of Caribbean islands controlled by Great Britain. The British had abolished slavery throughout their empire seven years earlier, so officials in the Bahamas chose to free the Creole slaves, rather than return them to the United States as the American government requested. The nineteen Creole rebels were placed on trial for their actions, but were acquitted in April 1842. Because slavery was illegal, the British court ruled that the slaves had the right to use force to escape from their confinement. In terms of numbers of slaves freed, Madison Washington had led one of the most successful slave revolts in American history. THE BIRTH OF AMERICAN SLAVERY The institution of American slavery, as well as resistance to it, pre-dated the birth of the United States in 1776. The first Africans brought to the New World, as the Europeans called the Americas, arrived on the island of Hispaniola in 1502. The Spanish who settled there had already killed off most of the Native Americans. They needed needed slave labor to work on farms and mines so that their colony would thrive. As the Spanish established other settlements in Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean, slavery

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SLAVE REVOLTS AND REBELLIONS