Secret history: the warrior women who fought their enslavers | Slavery | The Guardian

… “If you’re a black child, you learn about slavery but you don’t learn about slave resistance or slave revolt in America,” Rebecca Hall says.

“But if you’re taught the history of resistance, that our people fought every step of the way, that is a recovery that is crucial to our pride in our humanity and our strength and struggle. So the issue of slave resistance is something I think everyone should know about.”

She drew a blank though. Every book about slave revolts said more or less the same thing, that men led the resistance while enslaved women took a back seat. “I was like, what’s going on, I don’t believe it’s true,” says Hall.

So she started the painstaking process of sifting through the captain’s logs of slave ships, old court records in London and New York, letters between colonial governors and the British monarchy, newspaper cuttings, even forensic examinations from the bones of enslaved women uncovered in Manhattan.

Much of it made for difficult reading – human beings described time and time again in documents and insurance books as “cargo” with footnotes describing “woman slave number one and woman slave number two”. “Seeing them writing about my people as objects – It was horrific,” she says.

She learned that Lloyd’s of London was at the centre of the insurance market at the time, providing cover for slave ships, a “shameful” legacy for which it apologised last year. “They were insuring against the insurrection of cargo – I think that completely sums it up. How can cargo insurrect?” asks Hall.

As hard as this was to digest, it started to open new windows into the past – and as Hall pieced the information together she began to find women warriors everywhere, not only resisting their enslavers but planning and leading slave revolts.

In one example, Hall discovered that four women were involved in the 1712 revolt in New York, an uprising by enslaved Africans who killed nine of their captors before being, in some cases, burned at the stake. One pregnant woman was kept alive until she gave birth and then put to death (the execution was delayed, says the report, because the baby was “someone’s property”). Until now, it was assumed only men took part in this revolt. …