The World That Fear Made: Interview with Jason T. Sharples

Interviewed by Madeline Lafuse

Today on the blog, Madeline Lafuse speaks with Jason T. Sharples, author of the recently published The World That Fear Made : Slave Revolts and Conspiracy Scares in Early America, about how the fear of slave conspiracies shaped New York City and early America.

I particularly enjoyed how you track the “conceptual vocabulary of American racial slave conspiracies” over time. Could you explain a bit what you mean by “conceptual vocabulary of American racial slave conspiracies”? How does it aid the study of enslaved resistance?

The World That Fear Made: Slave Revolts and Conspiracy Scares in Early America
By Jason T. Sharples
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020
365 pages

In early America, when people talked about slave rebellions, they tended to use concepts from a bank of pre-existing ideas. I call this stock of concepts a lexicon or a vocabulary because people recombined elements in creative, if devastating, ways to address their particular circumstances. The pool of ideas included decoy fires, outside agitators, racial massacre (which was not a common feature of slave rebellions), and social inversion: replacing high-ranking white male enslavers with Black conspirators who took their houses, titles, and even their families and names.

While news reports and early histories of slave rebellions did draw on these ideas, the "conspiracy scares" that form the core of this book made prolific use of the concepts. That's because a conspiracy scare was an investigation into a rumor of a planned rebellion — a plan that never came to fruition, whether because of its discovery or because it never existed in the first place. Investigators' use of torture and other coercions, as well as suspects' coordination in jail, introduced many opportunities and incentives for participants to draw on this conceptual lexicon in their questions, confessions, reports, and public statements.

With each of these investigations, participants variously reinforced and updated elements of the conceptual vocabulary. The boogeyman of a white agitator who helped slaves to organize morphed from a Quaker or Catholic in the colonial period, to a Loyalist or free Black in the American Revolution, to a refugee from Saint Domingue during the Haitian Revolution, to a northern abolitionist in the 19th century.

In some cases, an idea from this bank of concepts grew from a kernel of truth, as with the trope of insurgents coordinating with an invasion force, forcing their oppressors to fight on two fronts. The reality is that some rebels did take advantage of moments of crisis, and sometimes did find common cause with invasion forces. (Just as often, though, invaders viewed enslaved people as chattel to be claimed as a war prize.) The idea of a province-wide uprising that was planned in coordination with invaders was an exaggeration of that real scenario.

Other times, the concept grew from prejudicial ideas rather than events. For example, many white people insisted that enslaved people of African descent did not have the intellectual capacity to organize themselves effectively for a rebellion. Instead, they believed, large rebellions would occur when outside agitators, very often rogue whites, insinuated themselves into enslaved populations to suggest the idea and coordinate the rank-and-file rebels. This idea was rooted in an earlier, deeper belief about so-called "brutish" — or animalistic — people such as peasants and servants. Their natural talent, the thinking went, was in taking orders rather than making plans. We know that wasn't true, of course. We have ample evidence of enslaved people organizing themselves into political structures within slavery. One chapter in The World That Fear Made traces the relationship between enslaved people's community politics and the conspiracy investigations that tore through their fragile social and political networks.

This book feels quite timely, as it’s easy to believe that fear and race are still shaping our world in important and interrelated ways. How does your work resonate with the present moment? What conversations happening today influenced this book?

When I started researching this subject in 2005, post-9/11 conversations influenced my thinking, sometimes in ways I see only now. That act of terrorism was a societal trauma that reshaped us and changed our own "conceptual lexicons" about what seemed possible. When the US government used torture, it failed not only morally but also from an intelligence perspective. As in the 17th and 18th centuries, torture was not only ineffective: it was completely counterproductive. After 9/11, our leaders used and abused the concept of "the terrorist," and even racialized it, to achieve political ends. Our police departments became militarized through Homeland Security grants, much as slave patrols and state militias grew as colonists seemed to discover more and more threats of domestic insurrection. All of that is still resonant in this book.

As I finished writing the book, Black Lives Matter's spotlight on police brutality and racial injustice in policing influenced me just as deeply. In the slavery-based colonies, officials often spoke of "striking a terror" into the enslaved population to attempt to control them. They believed that people of African descent could and should be governed through fear. Enslavers did this daily through threats of the whip, separation through sale, and other punishments. The state contributed to this by creating our country's earliest forms of policing: slave patrols and militia musters. In conspiracy scares, governments executed Black men on slim evidence and displayed their bodies at crossroads and market squares to "strike a terror" in others. Black fear, they were saying, was salutary for creating a society arranged to serve white people's desires. Today, a prevalent approach to law enforcement continues to emphasize terrorizing a population into obedience. While policing is not organized explicitly in racial terms today, historical and systemic inequalities have perpetuated conditions that can lead law enforcement officers to falsely presume and exaggerate the criminality and dangerousness of persons of color. With a policing system founded on violence, the result is the killings that Black Lives Matter has raised in our awareness.

Today's protests and counterprotests are — from the perspective of my book — about whose fear our society finds to be legitimate and whose we're more willing to overlook. The justice system has consistently sided with the fear that law enforcement officers experience when they make traffic stops and serve warrants. That empathy with law enforcement's fear permits the killings to continue. Similar reasoning legally protects private citizens in stand-your-ground laws that hinge on whether someone feels that their life is threatened. In contrast, Black Lives Matter insists that our society begin to take just as seriously Black people's fears for their lives during police encounters. There are so many stinging examples of officers shooting unarmed Black people, on top of brutality, harassment, and intimidation. The fear that people of color experience during these encounters is at least as real and legitimate as that experienced by an armed officer who is backed by the power of the state.

In slave conspiracy investigations, those who held enormous power also thought themselves more vulnerable than they actually were. They also regarded themselves as the people most worthy of living without fear. And, to assuage their own fear, they were willing to tolerate and even incite terror in others. For these reasons, during a conspiracy scare in Richmond, VA, in 1810, a white woman expressed contentment that “the blacks in this City are under more apprehensions … than the whites are” due to the “White arm’d men … parading all over the City.” She had the luxury of saying “I shall go to bed and shall feel … safe.”

You look at New York City from the perspective of the 1741 Slave Conspiracy. In what ways do you think your vision of the city will most surprise readers? What does the 1741 Slave Conspiracy reveal about New York City?

Readers might be surprised by how much the West Indies and slavery shaped New York City at an early date. Some powerful white colonists from the Caribbean resettled in New York and forced enslaved people to migrate with them. The city's merchants ran a robust trade with the islands, and the grimmest form of that commerce — the traffick in humans — brought a large number of enslaved people of African descent from the Caribbean. All of this means that Caribbean currents in economics, politics, and ideas — whether Black or white — reached NYC.

The violent policing crackdown that occurred in New York in 1741 took its shape from stereotypes in the news, histories, and personal experiences that white people brought from the West Indies. During the investigation into rumors that New York's slaves planned to rebel, the investigators asked questions that were inspired by everything they knew — or at least thought they knew — about Caribbean slave rebellions. Were the mysterious fires a decoy for ambushing sleepy colonists? Did they plan to massacre all of the white men and rape their wives? Did a Catholic spy organize the slaves, who white people assumed couldn't organize themselves? Did the conspirators coordinate their planned uprising with an invasion by a Catholic imperial power? These untrue stereotypes, and others, originated in the Caribbean, circulated in the New-York Weekly Journal and framed the questions that investigators asked when interrogating enslaved people who were suspects.

From enslaved Black people's perspective, knowledge that originated in the West Indies could be a tool for survival. In 1741, two suspects shared a jail cell: Bill and Pedro. Bill was from Antigua and survived a similar investigation there five years earlier. He saved his own life in Antigua by becoming a trial witness against at least fourteen men (three were executed, eleven banished). In New York, he coached Pedro that he could save his own life by falsely confessing and then implicating several new suspects. He encouraged Pedro to include the stereotype of racial massacre at a decoy fire to "make the Judges believe him." In the end, only one of the two men survived.

Scholars have hotly debated if trial records of enslaved conspiracies reflect the lived reality of enslaved lives or if they reflect white paranoia. How did you approach these trial records? How is it possible for a historian to tell from these materials if enslaved people were indeed planning a revolt?

While this book tries to reframe conspiracy investigations as symptoms and, more than that, engines of enslaved people's terror and white people's fear, many readers will come to this book with your question in mind. For any given case, it's almost impossible to know whether enslaved people were really planning a revolt. The crux of the problem is that an investigation distorted its own findings through the use of torture and other coercions on informants and, in some of the bigger cases, cramming informants into makeshift jails where they could confer and collude. Behind the torrent of forced confessions and exaggerations, though, there may well have been the kernel of truth that some enslaved people discussed rebellion. After all, people obviously resisted their oppression in many ways and sometimes organized collective uprisings.

If the question is whether any plan existed, you need to examine how exactly the initial revelations came to light. Were there independent sources for the rumor? How did power relations or other historical conditions inflect how someone spoke or how someone else listened? Approaching the trial record as a historian of information is essential.

If the question is what comprised a rebellion plan that you're pretty sure existed, we can test the records from two angles, both of which are very broadly comparative. Do the details in the confessions hew to the usual "script"? Very many conspiracy trial records have consistent distortions that reflect the preoccupations of interrogators and enslavers: that conspirators took direction from foreign agents, coordinated with European or Native American invasion forces, and planned to massacre and replace white men. These and other stereotypes ought to be filtered out.

The other comparison is to the actions that rebels actually took when they rose up against their oppressors. Descriptions of actual revolts are tainted in their own ways, but at least they do not suffer from distortion by the warped power relations of the courtroom under the shadow of the gibbets. Rebellions that came to fruition differed markedly from what informants told enslavers to expect. Rebels planned their own uprisings rather than wait for instructions from white spies; they fled from colonies rather than try to conquer them; they avoided pitched battle rather than massacre white men and rape white women.

Given these broad patterns in a comparative analysis, and the essential nature of conspiracy trials as "information" events, my book sidesteps the did-they-or-didn't-they question and tackles the experience of fear, the use of terror, and their complex relationship to policing.

Jason T. Sharples is an Associate Professor at Florida Atlantic University. His research focuses on racial fears and the policing of black people in Early America.

Madeline Lafuse studies enslaved people poisoning their masters in nineteenth-century New Orleans from a cultural perspective. She is interested in how poison reveals contradictions between the household, national expansion, and slavery. She is also interested in the history of emotions and affect studies.