Produced by Eric Eldred, Thomas Berger, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team BLACK REBELLION: FIVE SLAVE REVOLTS From Travellers and Outlaws Episodes In American History By Thomas Wentworth Higginson With An Appendix Of Authorities [Transcriber's note: This text contains five chapters of T.W. Higgison's 'Travellers and Outlaws'. This collection is commonly referred to as 'Black Rebellion: five slave revolts'.] AUTHOR'S NOTE: The author would express his thanks to the proprietors and editors of the _Atlantic Monthly_, _Harper's Magazine_, and the _Century_, for their permission to reprint such portions of this volume as were originally published in those periodicals. CAMBRIDGE, MASS. CONTENTS. THE MAROONS OF JAMAICA THE MAROONS OF SURINAM GABRIEL'S DEFEAT DENMARK VESEY NAT TURNER'S INSURRECTION APPENDIX THE MAROONS OF JAMAICA The Maroons! it was a word of peril once; and terror spread along the skirts of the blue mountains of Jamaica when some fresh foray of those unconquered guerrillas swept down from the outlying plantations, startled the Assembly from its order, Gen. Williamson from his billiards, and Lord Balcarres from his diplomatic ease,--endangering, according to the official statement, "public credit," "civil rights," and "the prosperity, if not the very existence, of the country," until they were "persuaded to make peace" at last. They were the Circassians of the New World, but they were black, instead of white; and as the Circassians refused to be transferred from the Sultan to the Czar, so the Maroons refused to be transferred from Spanish dominion to English, and thus their revolt began. The difference is, that while the white mountaineers numbered four hundred thousand, and only defied Nicholas, the black mountaineers numbered less than two thousand, and defied Cromwell; and while the Circassians, after years of revolt, were at last subdued, the Maroons, on the other hand, who rebelled in 1655, were never conquered, but only made a compromise of allegiance, and exist as a separate race to-day.