n various ways.
The South no longer excused slavery, but began to defend it as an economic
system. The enforcement of the slave trade laws became notoriously lax
and there was a tendency to make slave codes harsher.

This led to retaliation on the part of the Negroes. There had not been in
the United States before this many attempts at insurrection. The slaves
were distributed over a wide territory, and before they became intelligent
enough to cooperate the chance of emancipation was held before them.
Several small insurrections are alluded to in South Carolina early in the
eighteenth century, and one by Cato at Stono in 1740 caused widespread
alarm. The Negro plot in New York in 1712 put the city into hysterics.
There was no further plotting on any scale until the Haytian revolt, when
Gabriel in Virginia made an abortive attempt. In 1822 a free Negro,
Denmark Vesey, in South Carolina, failed in a well-laid plot, and ten
years after that, in 1831, Nat Turner led his insurrection in Virginia and
killed fifty-one persons. The result of this insurrection was to
crystallize tendencies toward harshness which the economic revolution was
making advisable.

A wave of legislation passed over the South, prohibiting the slaves from
learning to read and write, forbidding Negroes to preach, and interfering
with Negro religious meetings. Virginia declared in 1831 that neither
slaves nor free Negroes might preach, nor could they attend religious
service at night without permission. In North Carolina slaves and free
Negroes were forbidden to preach, exhort, or teach "in any prayer meeting
or other association for worship where slaves of different families are
collected together" on penalty of not more than thirty-nine lashes.
Maryland and Georgia and other states had similar laws.

The real effective revolt of the Negro against slavery was not, however,
by fighting, but by running away, usually to the North, which had been
recently freed from slavery. From the beginning of the nineteenth century
slaves began to escape in considerable numbers. Four geographical paths
were chiefly followed: one, leading southward, was the line of swamps
along the coast from Norfolk, Virginia, to the northern border of Florida.
This gave rise to the Negro element among the Indians in Florida and led
to the two Seminole wars of 1817 and 1835. These wars were really slave
raids to make the Indians give up the Negro and half-breed slaves
domiciled among th