Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel's Virginia, 1730-1810.

Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel's Virginia, 1730-1810. By James Sidbury. (New York, Cambridge, Eng., and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. x, 292. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-521-59860-5; cloth, $54.95, ISBN 0-521-58454-X.)

"This book," James Sidbury states on page one, "is not about Gabriel's Conspiracy." Rather, he writes, "the conspiracy provides a window on the ways that black Virginians perceived themselves, their oppressors, and their world in 1800--that is, on the complicated sense of corporate identity that Virginians of African descent had developed over the course of the eighteenth century" (p. 145). Sidbury takes Gerald Mullin's Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (New York, 1972), a work that focused on a slave-quarter-based, communal sense of black identity, and complicates Mullin's model by including more African background, Caribbean influences (principally the revolt in Saint Dominque), and connections to other Atlantic slave communities, like that of South Carolina. Sidbury highlights culture, power, and identity; he situates Gabriel's world in the "Atlantic World," and places African-American experiences in the foreground (it is Gabriel's, not Jefferson's, Virginia). This book, unlike Douglas Egerton's Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill, 1993)--the book with which it will be forever twinned in the minds of readers--does not provide an elaborate examination of every detail of Gabriel's revolt. Egerton's detailed examination of the conspiracy also features the transracial nature of artisanal republicanism and the election of 1800, an interpretive possibility that Sidbury downplays (p. 88, note 68). Sidbury underscores the importance of evangelical Christianity as an element of the revolt in his second chapter. Ideas about Christianity and about independence or revolution were rife in this period; Virginia slaves undoubtedly drew upon both traditions in fashioning their identities and actions.

Sidbury's prologue, the strongest portion of the book, describes the evolution of race consciousness among Africans and African-Americans in early Virginia and demonstrates how enslaved Virginians moved towards creating a corporate identity in the late eighteenth century. Chapters two through four describe this consciousness in action, examining the ways slaves used literacy, Christianity, and appropriated/transformed white symbols of authority in the rebellion. Chapter three shows how Pharoah and Tom, the slaves who revealed Gabriel's plans and thus undermined its success, were not mere betrayers. Their actions provide convincing evidence for Sidbury's thesis that there existed no single identity for black Virginians, but rather a tangle of conflicting identities that placed slaves on opposite sides of the same issue--even when that issue was freedom versus slavery.

Chapters five and six place Richmond at center stage, highlighting its early development and the world of urban slave work through 1800. Although the details indicate Sidbury's use of previously untapped city records and legal documents, these chapters reveal both too much and too little. They give Sidbury the specific urban and labor underpinnings needed for his thesis about slave identity in Richmond, but in the end they tell us that the world of black Richmonders was very similar to the urban worlds described in the books written by Richard Wade (Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820-1860 [London and New York, 1964]) or edited by Michael Johnson and James Roark (Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South [New York, 1984], and No Chariot Let Down: Charleston's Free People of Color on the Eve of the Civil War [Chapel Hill, 1984]). Similarly, chapter seven's scrutiny of black women in Richmond (why weren't they recruited for more prominent roles in the rebellion?) shares common ground with Suzanne Lebsock's study of nearby Petersburg (Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860 [New York, 1984]). Readers will find much that interests and intrigues them in the first half of Sidbury's work, but less novel information in the second half. Nonetheless, the book is a valuable new study of black identity in the Atlantic world.

SALLY E. HADDEN

Florida State University