Well, it depends a little bit on how you define a 'major' slave revolt. The most significant example of a slave revolt in the New World is of course the Haitian Revolution, which ultimately resulted in the abolition of slavery and the creation of a sovereign state. Certainly, the United States never faced an uprising comparable in scale that threatened the immediate security of the State - but there were certainly uprisings or attempted uprisings, and particularly in the South there was a culture of fear surrounding the prospect of slave insurrection.

The most notable uprising and the one people are most familiar with is probably Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831. Turner lived in Southampton County, Virginia and was a literate, comparatively well educated slave; he was a devout Christian, some manner of Baptist, and believed that throughout his life he was receiving signs and visions from God. Turner and a group of co-conspirators secretly acquired weapons in the run-up to the revolt and, in response to what Turner construed as a sign of God, in August of 1831, began their uprising by going from house to house in the county, liberating slaves and murdering white owners they encountered. Several dozen white men and women were killed before the local militia was able to organise and defeat the rebellion.

Contrary to how it has sometimes been imagined, there is little evidence that Turner was inspired by any kind of northern abolitionist sentiment - which was still not especially strong in this period - nor by the writings of abolitionists. Indeed, he seems to have very much been acting under authentic and independent convictions, with a plan that he sincerely believed had been ordained by God for the injustice of slavery. Unfortunately though, our best account of Turner's motivations comes from a problematic piece called The Confessions of Nat Turner; though Turner was reportedly literate, this pamphlet was not written by him but rather by a white intermediary who interviewed him whilst he was awaiting execution. That intermediary, Thomas Gray, was a lawyer who may have been in significant financial difficulty, seeking an exciting and compelling story he could profit from. It's a flawed narrative that contains traces of Turner's authentic account weaved together by a hostile interpreter with an agenda of his own; I've written a little bit here about how awkward these kinds of sources can be.

Nat Turner's revolt should not be seen in isolation, however. There was also in the same year a much larger uprising on Jamaica today referred to as the Baptist War, which had distinctly similar features and qualities. There too, a particularly religious and privilged slave, involved in the Baptist community, led what can only be described as a large-scale strike by the enslaved population that quickly degenerated into a violent riot. Whilst Nat Turner's revolt contributed to a strengthening of the institution of slavery in the United States, the Baptist War helped to expedite the end of slavery in the British Caribbean. In the aftermath of these revolts, not only was there brutal and violent repression in both contexts but in the United States, passions were inflamed and tensions heightened. Many slaves in Virginia were executed as supposed co-conspirators in the months that followed.

Southern culture in the 19th Century was permeated with a fear of slave revolts - part of the motivation of the internal slave trade (whereby states like Virginia would sell 'surplus' slaves down to the plantations of the Lower South) was to curb them - and Nat Turner's revolt, which had taken his local community utterly by surprised and led to considerable death and damage, stunned and horrified civil society. This letter by a white student of the day talks about how he has joined a militia organised by white students in response to the uprising, reflecting the fear and paranoia gripping white civil society. In the aftermath of the revolt, Virginia's legislature extensively debated what the uprising implied for the future of slavery, and that debate largely arose out of petitions from a concerned public imploring lawmakers do something about the problem of slavery.

Curiously in that debate, contrary to the image of Southern society being uniformly and eternally pro-slavery, arguments were made for abolition. One lawmaker, Samuel Moore, gave an impassioned speech in which he urged that slavery was destroying white society by leaving it gripped by fear and misery, dragging down the economy and hurting the health of the white population. Others argued the State had the authority to seize slaves and could liberate them, to address a crisis of state security the growing population posed. Emancipation of slaves was seriously considered by Virginia as a response to the uprising - in that sense, the revolt was enormously significant (at the other extreme, so was the possibility of removing all free black people from the state). Ultimately the legislature was unable to come to an agreement to that end; instead, it would go on to pass legislation that increasingly restricted the rights of free black people, and imposed stricter conditions on the keeping of slaves, including restricting their religious rights.

Nat Turner's rebellion was not successful in the sense that it was ever anywhere close to achieving the goal of a black uprising across the state that could seriously challenge white supremacy. It was profoundly significant though in that it was able to generate such a massive shock to Virginian society that the state went so far as to seriously discuss all manner of (in the mind of its elites) extreme solutions to the problems it posed, including emancipation. Ultimately though, it served to crystallise and cement southern fears about slave violence and uprisings, and sparked legislative changes that brought even greater harm to African Americans, both enslaved and free. As abolitionist sentiment grows in the wider United States, slave rebellions increasingly become feared as part of a plot to destroy the South by abolitionists from the North; William McDonald wrote a polemic in 1865 called The Two Rebellions, or, Treason Unmasked which offers an interesting insight into this mindset.

David Allmendinger has recently published an extensive book exploring the specific context of the rebellion called Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County, which seeks to add much more context to Gray's account of Turner's confession and unpick the authentic elements of it from the rest of the narrative; Eva Sheppard Wolf's Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner's Rebellion (2006) is a good discussion of some of the impact that slave revolts had on Virginia's white society.

Though it's very old now, Herbert Aptheker's 1944 study American Negro Slave Revolts remains one of the most wide-ranging attempts to document slave uprisings (of which he finds evidence for 250 attempts or would-be attempts in US history); Aptheker's book is remarkable because it represents an early challenge to old orthodoxies in slavery studies that have now been widely rejected or seriously undermined. He portrays the South as a world in which slave's were active in resisting their degradation and oppression, and in which cruelty was a fundamental and indispensable component of American slavery - in that sense, he was rather ahead of his time and widely criticised by contemporary scholars who were determined to represent Southern slavery as benign. His figure of 250 is perhaps inflated by a lack of source criticism at certain points, but not comically or irrationally so, particularly as he works with a framework that sees revolt as including acts of extraordinary physical resistance rather than just violent uprising.

EDIT: Whoops, wasn't quite finished. Eugene Genovese's From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (1992) is a more modern treatment of the topic in a broader context; Genovese's broader ideas about slavery are controversial today and have their detractors (myself included), but he's certainly not a bad historian.