Beschreibung:

Title: Collection of legal documents about a squashed N.Carolina slave arson plot Author: Place: North Carolina Publisher: Date: 1832 Description: 4 Autograph Documents Signed by several Justices of the Peace. Rowan County, North Carolina, Feb. 12-March 3, 1832. 7pp.total, 8 x 13” “Examinations” (interrogations) and arrest orders, naming five Negro slaves who conspired to burn down the barns of several masters, detailing the conspiracy, which was nipped in the bud. When asked of their motive, the ring-leader, a slave named, Jack revealed that this was in retaliation against the “patrollers…they had been riding and that any man would raise his hand before he would suffer death and there would have to be a stop put to them (the patrollers)…”, a more poignant personal reason being that his master had “struck Jack’s wife at home”. A very rare and significant archive dated just months after the suppression of the legendary Nat Turner slave rebellion in Virginia. “Patrollers” (also called “paddy rollers”) were organized groups of white men who policed slave areas to enforce discipline on defiant Blacks and to hunt down runaway fugitive slaves – forerunners of the post-Civil War Ku Klux Klan. According to the Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion (2007) “Arson was one of the most significant tools that slaves employed as a means of resistance…” and “intensified white slave owners fears of their slaves to the point of hysteria, "incediarism" becoming “comparable to their fears of slave insurrection generally - as it came swiftly and without warning." Its clear from these documents that a group of slaves, meeting secretly at night, planning to burn down several farm buildings of different owners, represented not an isolated act of revenge but rather an incipient slave rebellion. Lot Amendments Condition: Very good. Item number: 271657