I'm not hip enough to know what "Spartacus-style" means exactly, but there have been a number of slave rebellions in America.

For my money, perhaps the most important slave rebellion in North American history was the 1831 rebellion orchestrated by Nat Turner. Referred to as either Nat Turner's Rebellion or the Southampton rebellion, this uprising led to the deaths of about 50 or 60 folks, most of whom were white. The rebellion was eventually suppressed, and Turner was put on trial, found guilty, and hanged. Additionally, about 200 blacks (free and enslaved) were killed in retribution in the days following the Southampton rebellion.

Turner's confession is a short and provocative read, though take it with a grain of salt: his confession is not written by Turner himself, but rather "transcribed" by Thomas Gray, who provides quite a bit of editorializing parenthetical commentary throughout.

Why I think this rebellion is so important is this: it contributed directly to the creeping sentiment shared by many slaveholders that slaves must be kept completely illiterate. See, Nat Turner was a highly literate slave (he claims to have gained the ability to read and write through a sort of divine intervention; Gray states that it's more likely that his parents taught him). Not only that, but Turner actually developed a secret code in order to organize his slave rebellion, and then taught that code to the 70 or so men that helped him with the rebellion.

When officials got word of that fact, they freaked out. See, two years earlier, a black Abolitionist by the name of David Walker wrote and distributed a document he modeled after the US Declaration of Independence. Titled "Walker's Appeal in Four Articles (it has a much longer title), this document made a number of startling (for the time) claims and issued a number of even more startling calls to action. Key among these calls-to-action was Walker's insistence that all African Americans, free and enslaved, devote themselves to learning how to read and write which, Walker claimed, could help them overthrow the oppressive white governments of the North and South.

Whites across the country freaked out about Walker's appeal; blacks rejoiced. In fact, in an early case of piracy, blacks started to reprint and secretly distribute Walker's appeal wherever they could.

So when Nat Turner seemed to use literacy to aid him in his rebellion, white lawmakers thought it was the threat of Walker's appeal come to fruition. And in the decade following Turner's rebellion, southern states passed new anti-literacy laws (or bolstered those anti-literacy laws already in existence). These laws made it illegal for anyone to teach slaves how to read or write. Some of them even made it illegal for slaves to know how to read and write (that is, a literate slave could be punished if he was ever caught reading or writing). Still others went so far as to make it illegal for anyone to teach both slaves and freed blacks and for both slaves and freed blacks to know how to read and write.

In The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861, Carter Woodson suggests that there were actually more literate slaves in 1800 than there were in 1860. Northern abolitionists thought these anti-slavery laws were just about the last straw. These abolitionists started agitating and campaigning in the North (and sometimes in the South), essentially generating a sort of ideological anti-slavery wave that would sweep the Union. At the same time, many ex-slaves (notably Booker T. Washington, either in My Larger Education or Up from Slavery, I can't remember which) suggest these anti-slavery laws caused an uproar in the enslaved black communities; an uproar that would eventually put a tremendous amount of internal pressure on the slaveocracy, just as the Confederacy was dealing with external pressure from the Union.

Then, the Civil War.

So, in short: Walker & Turner inspired fear in Southern lawmakers. In turn, Southern lawmakers passed anti-literacy laws. These anti-literacy laws pissed off a great number of Northern abolitionists as well as black slaves in the South. In turn, these abolitionists and black slaves started to disrupting the mechanisms of the Southern slaveocracy, both externally via the Northern insistence that the South give up slavery, and internally via agitating and resistant slaves.

Now this is a huge and shaky causal tree that connects Turner's uprising with the Civil War and the eventual emancipation of American slaves. That said, there is no doubt that Turner's rebellion, violent and deadly though it certainly was, did contribute greatly to mounting tensions between those opposed to slavery and those dependent on it.