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Gabriel's Conspiracy: A Documentary History. Edited by Philip J. Schwarz. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013. Pp. 260. Cloth, $59.50; paper $24.50.)
Reviewed by Douglas R. Egerton
For nearly three decades, historians and editors labored, unsuccessfully, to publish the documents pertaining to the Richmond-area slave conspiracy of 1800. In the 1980s, the late Armstead Robinson began the task. After Robinson's death, the Library of Virginia took it up, but the proposed volume fell victim to budget cuts. At long last, the job has been admirably completed by Philip J. Schwarz, author of Twice Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Law of Virginia and other essential books on slavery in the early republic.1
Most of the documents included here are the handwritten records of the oyer and terminer court-a Virginia tribunal reserved for slave crime-for the four counties at the center of the plot. Schwarz supplements the trial documents with letters, newspaper accounts, and military and financial records, all sensibly arranged in strict chronological order, so that the story unfolds for the reader as it did for those living through these events. Compared to the wealth of documents generated by later conspiracies, and especially those organized by Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, the public documents retained by Virginia in 1800 are often maddeningly brief. The court clerks adopted a basic template, so that each trial starts with the date, the name of the accused and his owner, a list of co-conspirators, the defense attorney, the justices who heard the case, and typically but not always, witnesses. In a handful of cases, those blacks who resolved to save their lives by turning state's evidence provided lengthy affidavits and confessions. In other cases, the clerks omitted everything but the names of...