In the fall of 1799 Gabriel, later to become the famous leader of a slave conspiracy, initiated a less well-publicized act of resistance. He and his brother Solomon, both blacksmiths and well-entrenched members of the Prosser plantation's slave community, joined a man named Jupiter to steal a pig from the nearby farm on which Jupiter worked. The farmer, a former overseer and a newcomer who had just begun renting in Henrico County, saw the brothers making off with his pig, confronted them, and a fight ensued. Apparently Gabriel was bigger and stronger than Johnson, for he got the better of their fight. By the time the two were separated Gabriel had bitten off part of Absolam Johnson's left ear.

Gabriel was tried by a court of Oyer and Terminer composed of justices who served on the Henrico County Court, just as he would later be tried for attempting to foment a slave rebellion. Like most trials of slave defendants, Gabriel's first encounter with the Henrico County Court produced a meager documentary record, a record full of suggestive but inconclusive hints about the contexts that gave meaning to his decision to fight Absolam Johnson. That three slaves from two different farms joined together to steal the hog suggests but does not prove that the neighborhood surrounding Thomas Henry Prosser's plantation was home to the kind of tight-knit slave community that had developed around Virginia plantations over the course of the eighteenth century. Perhaps the three defendants had been planning a barbecue for the Black community.