Gabriel Prosser gathered a thousand-strong enslaved army for an August 1800 Richmond insurrection

Evidence

As he approached the Brook Swamp beneath the city of Richmond, Virginia, Gabriel Prosser looked to the sky. Up above, the clouds coalesced into an impenetrable black, bringing on darkness and a storm the ferocity of which the region had scarcely seen. He may have cried and he may have prayed but the thing Gabriel did not do was turn back. He was expecting fire on this night and would make no concessions for the coming rain. … And he was not alone. A hundred men, five hundred men, a thousand men had gathered from all over the state on this thirtieth day of August 1800. Black men, African men—men from the fields and men from the house, men from the church and the smithy—men who could be called many things but after this night would not be called slaves gathered in the flooding basin armed with scythes, swords, bayonets, and smuggled guns. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 517

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing interest in religious framing of insurrection and the ‘storm as divine sign’ rhetoric — relates to the Lindow Man/sacrifice chapter’s treatment of ritualized death.