In the morning of 22 August 1831, the most famous uprising in the United States took place in a rural area of Virginia. Was it a coincidence or did its leader, thirty-one-year-old Nat Turner, place himself into the larger context of Atlantic slave revolts when he launched his uprising on the anniversary of the start of the revolt in Saint-Domingue forty-two years earlier? Recruiting along the way, his initial small group of seven attacked three plantations, killed six people and took money and weapons. By the end of the day, about 40 insurgents had taken part in the movement; 55 whites had been killed as had 50 blacks - many of whom were tortured - and reinforcements had crushed the uprising. Turner went into hiding. He was captured on 21 October and hanged on 11 November. Eighteen men were hanged; 12 were deported and all in all, an estimated 200 black men were killed (Tragle, 1971; Greenberg, 2003).  
While mostly initiated by Africans - many of whom used their prior military expertise and cultural traditions - in the early period, revolts were led thereafter  
by native-born (Rucker, 2006). Two trends are discernible: the larger number of conspiracies and uprisings took place in the 1730s-1740s, decades that saw the peak of resistance throughout the Americas and, after 1791, due to the influence of the Haitian revolution. In this, North America followed the broad pattern of resistance in the rest of the Hemisphere.  
Resistance, whichever form it took, demanded courage and audacity. Runaways, maroons and insurgents, especially, faced a brutal society that was well-armed and numerically superior, and one that could also spy and divide. Beyond the academic debate that categorizes the enslaved experience as a binary 'victimization versus agency', the reality is that it was both. Resistance was embedded in the very foundation of slavery.