nation’ s capital now undefended, the Colonial Marines helped British forces sack and burn the U. S. Capitol and White House – which were built largely with slave labor.
While the war inspired Francis Scott Key to write“ The Star-Spangled Banner,” a patriotic bar song that 114 years later became the national anthem of the United States, it did little to inspire patriotic fervor among enslaved Blacks.
Born in Frederick, Maryland, in 1779, Key was a lawyer who owned slaves and railed against abolitionists. He was among the American forces at the Battle of Bladensburg that were chased from the battlefield by British forces that included the Corps of Colonial Marines.
It was this drubbing that is believed to have inspired Key to write these words in the third verse of what is now this nation’ s national anthem:
“ And where is that band who so vauntingly swore, That the havoc of war and the battle’ s confusion A home and a Country should leave us no more? Their blood has wash’ d out their foul footstep’ s pollution. No refuge could save the hireling and slave From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave”
In 1820, the United States was equally divided between slave and free states. Two years earlier, Missouri had become the first territory west of the Mississippi River to apply for statehood. But the legislation stalled in Congress for two years over the question of whether it would be admitted as a state in which slavery would be allowed. The impasse was broken when Henry Clay, the
Speaker of Congress’ House of Representatives, brokered a deal: Missouri would be admitted as a slave state and Maine as a free state.
The land above the 36th parallel would enter the United States as free states. Territories below the 36th parallel would permit the expansion of slavery. This deal delayed the national reckoning over the conflict between this nation’ s founding principles of freedom and selfdetermination and its enslavement of millions of people of African descent.
Throughout the first five decades of this nation’ s life, resistance to slavery took many forms. Abolitionists argued against slavery in the halls of Congress, town halls and the streets of America. An“ underground railroad” of safehouses and escape routes were used to help enslaved people flee their captivity, and many Blacks physically resisted their enslavement.
Gabriel Prosser
In the summer of 1800, Gabriel Prosser, an enslaved blacksmith in Richmond, Virginia, planned a slave rebellion to free all enslaved people in the state, the home of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. In August, Prosser massed more than 1,000 slaves near Richmond, where they planned to seize an armory and take hostage James Monroe, the state’ s governor. But a violent rainstorm forced Prosser to delay the start of the rebellion. Before Prosser could reassemble his forces, two traitors, concerned about the harm that might befall their master, told him of the plot. The state militia quickly arrested more than 70 people, who were charged with insurrection.
Prosser, his two brothers and 23 other enslaved men were executed. Pharaoh and Tom, the two enslaved men who betrayed Prosser, were freed by the governor – and the state paid their master $ 1,000 for the loss of his property.
In 1822, Denmark Vesey, a 55-yearold Black preacher in Charleston, South Carolina reached the boiling point. After paying $ 600 to buy his way out of slavery, he was frustrated in his efforts to purchase the freedom of his wife and son. Determined to free them and many others, Vesey plotted a rebellion that by some accounts involved as many as 9,000 slaves in and around Charleston. But his plan was betrayed and Vesey and 32 others were hanged.
While both rebellions were stopped before any blows were struck, a fourday rebellion erupted in Virginia in August 1831. It was the bloodiest slave revolt in U. S. history. Fifty-five Whites and 120 Black people died in the fighting, and the retaliation of White mobs that followed. Its leader was an enslaved Black preacher and
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