William F. Cheek

In this excerpt from historian William F. Cheek’s 1970 book Black Resistance Before the Civil War, the author provides an overview of the various ways in which many slaves resisted bondage and forced labor. According to Cheek, resistance took many forms, which included laboring halfheartedly, running away, committing acts of individual violence, and organizing outright rebellions. He provides numerous anecdotes of such resistance and also details the circumstances surrounding some of the most serious slave revolts in American history, including those led by Denmark Vesey in 1822 and Nat Turner in 1831. Cheek concludes that slaves’ record of resistance is a proud one.

Many thousands of slaves chose to fight the system that bound them by running away, so many, in fact, that a regular feature of practically every issue of every Southern newspaper was...