1. As I noted in a previous posting, slaves in the Caribbean and South America were concentrated on large plantations of scores, if not hundreds, of slaves, with absentee slaveowners; slaves in the US were concentrated on small farms, with one resident slaveowning family and a handful of slaves.
2. Slavery in the Caribbean, and to a lesser extent South America, was based on a system of production in which slaves were worked intensively until the point of death, and at such time, were replaced with newly kidnapped slaves from Africa. Note that, as a consequence, there was a huge gender disparity between slaves in the Caribbean and South America, were male slaves were as much as 90% of the slave population. By contrast, slaves in the US were pretty much evenly divided between men and women, and there was a focus on using the reproductive capacity of slave women; American born slaves constituted an ever more important component of the enslaved population. Given the predominance of smaller farm settings, there was little economic sense in working slaves to death.
3. These social structural factors had cultural effects. There was a great deal more social and cultural autonomy for slaves in the large plantation setting which dominated in the Caribbean and South America; moreover, with large numbers of recently arrived, African-born slaves constantly replenishing the enslaved populations, much closer ties were kept with African cultural patterns. Note, for example, the much stronger presence of religions with much heavier African elements (voodoo, obeah, candomble, etc.) in the Caribbean and South America than in the US.
4. The social and cultural factors also had effects on organizational capacity: it is much easier to organize in units of scores and hundreds of people in large, more autonomous slave quarters than it is to organize in units of less than ten in very closely surveilled circumstances.
5. The tropical climate in the Caribbean and South American created great 'rain forests' in which maroon societies could hide indefinitely; there was no similar refuge in the US.
In combination, all of these conditions made armed rebellions in the Caribbean and South America much more likely to be successful, and thus, much more likely to be undertaken. While the ideology of the French Revolution did provide a fertile ground for conceiving of a revolution in Haiti, a complete overhaul of the social order, it would not have been undertaken if these social conditions were not already present, leading to a tradition of armed rebellions.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --