Gabriel Prosser imagined a slave army seizing Richmond with white working-class allies

Evidence

Gabriel Prosser was executed on October 10, 1800. Eighteen hundred: the year of John Brown’s and Nat Turner’s births, the first year of Denmark Vesey’s life as a freedman. As he awaited the gallows near the foot of the James River, Gabriel could see all that was not to be: the first wave of men tasked to set fire to the city perimeter, the second to fell a city weakened by the diversion; the governor’s mansion, James Monroe brought to heel and served a lash for every man, woman, and child enslaved on his Highland plantation; the Quakers, Methodists, Frenchmen, and poor whites who would take up with his army and create a more perfect Union from which they would spread the infection of freedom. Gabriel saw it all. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 521

Categorization

• XREF: The executed man envisioning a thwarted future inverts the ‘origin stories as infrastructure’ framing — Gabriel’s counter-Union as a refused alternative origin for America.