In “Gabriel’s Defeat,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in September 1862, the abolitionist minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson relates a history of Gabriel’s Conspiracy (1800) drawn mostly from newspaper accounts. Writing in the midst of the American Civil War (1861–1865), he places the planned insurrection in the context of Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831) and John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry (1859).
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