Sublime

“The ultimate logic of racism is genocide,”

A group of five hundred townspeople in Balangiga—who had seen their food supplies destroyed, their agricultural tools confiscated, and their neighbors incarcerated—launched a surprise attack on a U.S. camp. They killed forty-five soldiers in a single day. The Balangiga Massacre, as it became known, struck terror into the hearts of the colonizers.

The white man behind it was Elihu Embree, an iron manufacturer and former slave owner who had evolved, at age thirty, into an abolitionist. Elihu mailed his newspapers to Southern politicians, intent on persuading them to end the horrors of slavery.

Long before Vesey, there was the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, in 1739. Those insurrectionists, led by an enslaved Angolan named Jemmy, planned to go to Florida, another nation then, where freedom had been promised. But they were intercepted and killed, or deported as slaves to the Caribbean. Prohibitions on gatherings, education, and group mo