Stono Rebellion

9 Key excerpts on "Stono Rebellion"

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  Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History

  An Encyclopedia [3 volumes]

  • Steven L. Danver(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  Second, despite the existence of Spain’s 1773 decree and the arrival of the Spanish vessel in Charleston, there is little his- torical evidence for direct Spanish involvement in the Stono Rebellion. However, the knowledge that possible freedom awaited in Florida did prompt those in the Stono Rebellion, as well as many other individuals before 1739, to escape south toward the Spanish colony. —Terry M. Mays See also all entries under New York Slave Insurrection (1741); Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s); Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831); New Orleans Riot (1866); New Orleans Race Riot (1900); Atlanta Race Riot (1906); Springfield Race Riot (1908); Houston Riot (1917); Red Summer (1919); Tulsa Race Riot (1921); Civil Rights Move- ment (1953–1968); Watts Riot (1965); Detroit Riots (1967); Los Angeles Uprising (1992). Stono Rebellion (1739) 71 Further Reading Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History . Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. Smith, Mark M. “Remembering Mary, Shaping Revolt: Reconsidering the Stono Rebellion.” Journal of Southern History 67, no. 3 (August 2001): 513–534. Thornton, John K. “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion.” American Historical Review 96, no. 4 (October 1991): 1101–1113. Wax, Darold D. “ ‘The Great Risque We Run’: The Aftermath of Slave Rebellion at Stono, South Carolina, 1739–1745.” Journal of Negro History 67, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 136–147. Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974. 72 Stono Rebellion (1739) Slave Codes Many states enacted slave codes as early as the 17th century and maintained them until the end of the Civil War. The codes were state regulations governing the movement and activities of slaves and, in some cases, the conduct of plantation owners.

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  The Counter-Revolution of 1776

  Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America

  • Gerald Horne(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • NYU Press

    (Publisher)

  5The Stono Uprising

  Will the Africans Become Masters and the Europeans Slaves?

  What was known as Stono’s Revolt—a mass uprising of enslaved Africans in September 1739 in South Carolina that led to the massacre of dozens of settlers—took place at a time of rising tension with Spain and increased restiveness by Africans, suggesting that the newest firewall that was Georgia was proving to be quite porous. The authorities thought that what instigated this frightful upsurge was the repeated proclamations issued at St. Augustine by His Catholic Majesty promising freedom to all Africans who deserted from the north.1 Perhaps if the massacres had been confined to the fiery border between Carolina and Georgia, the problem could have been contained. But Stono was simply part of a larger conflict between London and Madrid that stretched to Cartagena. London was unable to seize this city on the northern coast of South America, nor Cuba, while Madrid—despite significant aid from armed Africans—was unable to dislodge mainland settlers in Carolina and Georgia permanently. Nonetheless, one did not have to be far-sighted to envision that London had stumbled into a corrosive long-term problem unless it could neutralize or eviscerate the advantage accrued by His Catholic Majesty in arming Africans. Contrarily, heedlessly and perilously, manacled Africans continued arriving in the southeast quadrant of the mainland where the Union Jack fluttered, where they became ripe targets for recruitment by His Catholic Majesty.

  After the slaughter of twenty-nine settlers2 near the Stono River, viewed with stark suspicion was the delegation from Florida that had appeared just before this trailblazing event, supposedly with the aim of delivering a letter to General Oglethorpe—though it was generally known that he was in Georgia. An official report, after stressing that the “insurrection” actually “depended on St. Augustine for a place of reception afterwards,” pointed to the curiosity that the Spanish delegation bearing the letter included an African who “spoke English very well” and, presumably, briefed the insurrectionists.3

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  American Slave Revolts and Conspiracies

  A Reference Guide

  • Kerry Walters(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  The chanting and dancing that historian John Thornton interprets as a war ritual were in fact, claimed George Cato, drunken antics. According to him, the militiamen “found many of de slaves was singin’ and dancin’ and Cap. Cato and some of de other leaders was cussin’ at them sumpin awful. From dat day to dis, no Cato has tasted whiskey, ‘less he go ‘gainst his daddy’s warnin’ … When de militia come in sight of them …, de drinkin’ dancin’ Negroes scatter in de brush and only 44 stand deir ground.” 29 George Cato’s account of his ancestor also disagrees with historian Peter Charles Hoffer’s hypothesis that the Stono Rebellion started off as a simple burglary. George admits that even though he asked, none of his older relatives knew exactly how it came to pass that slaves went on a rampage on that September night in 1739. But he was convinced that his ancestor was motivated by a desire for freedom and remarks that the literate Cato had often forged passes for his fellow slaves. The oral tradition in his family held that when surrounded by the militiamen, Cato defiantly cried out, “We surrender but we not whipped yet.” Then the elder Cato, and his 43 companions, were hanged, although there is no contemporary record of Cato’s execution. “He die,” remarked George Cato, “but he die for doin’ de right, as he see it.” 30 NOTES 1. “Report of the Committee Appointed to Enquire into the Causes of the Disappointment of Success in the Late Expedition against St. Augustine” (July 1741), in Mark M. Smith (ed.), Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), 29. 2. “Lieutenant Governor Bull’s Eyewitness Account,” in Smith, 17. 3. Eugene Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baron Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 21. 4. “Account of the Negroe Insurrection in South Carolina” (October 1739), Smith, 14. 5

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  Armed Citizens

  The Road from Ancient Rome to the Second Amendment

  • Noah Shusterman(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • University of Virginia Press

    (Publisher)

  might be available, was Oglethorpe, the “anonymous” author. It was Oglethorpe’s other activities that left a record, not his involvement—however marginal it may have been—in the Stono Rebellion. Again, the rebellion itself left few traces. And while part of this lack of evidence stems from white fears that news of the rebellion would spark another rebellion, that is not the only reason. By some measures, the Stono Rebellion was not that important.

  That verdict is not one all historians share. For Peter Wood, the rebellion hastened a “concerted counterattack” from the slave owners, as the earlier frontier society gave way to a plantation society. For others, including historians Michael Mullin and Eugene Sirman, the event lacked that importance.19 The deaths of twenty-five whites and fifty or so Africans mattered relatively little in the grand scheme of the colony’s history. A pair of epidemics around the same time had killed far more South Carolinians, white and black alike. Even Bull’s account makes the uprising seem merely a part of a larger conflict, that of England against Spain, played out in the New World as a battle between South Carolina and Florida. Those arguing for Stono’s unimportance would seem to be bolstered by the relative lack of information available about it. Again, Bacon’s Rebellion had produced far more documentation and far more inquiries from London. But then, Bacon’s men had torn apart the colony and burned Jamestown to the ground during an uprising that had lasted for several months.

  For understanding the history of colonial American militias, though, Stono merits as much attention as Bacon’s Rebellion. The two events showed different sides of the colonial militia. Bacon’s Rebellion showed, in its earliest forms, the emergence of what would be a long-term American pattern: citizen militias could be unstable. By arming its citizens and relying on those citizens to enforce the laws, Virginia had no way to enforce unpopular laws. Laws that divided the citizenry would divide the militia as well. Berkeley had little ability to impose his will on Bacon and his men. Bacon’s Rebellion also showed how white colonists could tolerate a significant amount of violence when that violence came from other whites. Many of the settlers who did not support Bacon were still unwilling to heed Berkeley’s call to fight against Bacon.20 Yet Britain’s North American colonies would continue to rely on militias, despite the instability that would occasionally result. There would continue to be uprisings among white colonists angry at government policies, and colonial governments would be similarly hamstrung in their responses—a pattern that would continue into the early years of the republic.21

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  101 African Americans Who Shaped South Carolina

  • Bernard E. Powers, Bernard E. Powers, Jr.(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • University of South Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  Thirty members of the rebel force escaped, many of whom were hunted down the following week. Whites perceived the Stono insurrection to have continued at least until the following Sunday, when militiamen encountered the largest group of disbanded rebels another thirty miles south. A second battle ensued, this one effectively ending the insurrection. Yet white fears echoed for months. Mi-litia companies in the area remained on guard, and some planters deserted the Stono region in November “for their better Security and Defence against those Negroes which were concerned in that Insurrection who were not yet taken.” Some of the rebels were rounded up in the spring of 1740, and one leader was not captured until 1742. The rebellion resulted in efforts to curtail the activities of slaves and free blacks. The 1740 Negro Act made the manumission of slaves dependent on a special act of the assembly and mandated patrol service for every militia-man. The colony also imposed a prohibitive duty on the importation of new slaves in 1741 in an effort to stem the growth of South Carolina’s majority black population. About forty whites and probably as many blacks were killed during the Stono insurrection. The willingness of slaves to strike out for freedom with such force heightened anxieties among whites over internal security in the South Carolina slaveholding society for years to come. MARK M. SMITH Pearson, Edward A. “‘A Countryside Full of Flames’: A Reconsideration of the Stono Rebellion and Slave Rebelliousness in the Early Eighteenth-Century South Carolina Lowcountry.” Slavery and Abolition 17 (August 1996): 22–50. Smith, Mark M. Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt. Colum-bia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005. Thornton, John K. “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion.” American Historical Review 96 (October 1991): 1101–13. Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion.

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  Black Patriots and Loyalists

  Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence

  • Alan Gilbert(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  Introduction

  Fear, Hope, and the Two Revolutions in America

  My declaration that I would arm and set free such slaves as should assist me if I was attacked has stirred up fears in them which cannot easily subside as they know how vulnerable they are in that particular, and therefore they have cause in this complaint of which their others are totally unsupported.

  —Lord Dunmore to the Earl of Dartmouth, June 1775

  As Aristotle once said of the helots in Sparta, slaves were “lurking in ambush” for their American masters in the early eighteenth century.1 On September 9, 1739, launching what became known as the Stono Rebellion, blacks in South Carolina marched along the Stono River with banners that proclaimed “Liberty!” Led by “Jemmy,” they killed the two owners of a gun shop and armed themselves. By evening, they numbered nearly one hundred. The rebels killed twenty-five whites before Lieutenant Governor William Bull rallied the better-armed whites to kill half of the blacks and eventually to arrest the others.2 Similar uprisings in Manhattan in 1712, where the black slave population rivaled that of free whites,3 and in Maryland in 1740, where authorities suppressed a plot to seize Annapolis,4 reveal an ongoing black resistance to bondage.5

  But legends of revolt terrified whites as much as real violence, and even accounts of actual acts of rebellion reveal as much or more about white anxieties concerning the possibility of slave revolts as they do about the black resistance to slavery itself. In 1741, for example, ten fires broke out in New York, and Cuffee, a black man, was seen running from one. Powerful New Yorkers, particularly Daniel Horsmanden, a judge and member of the governor’s executive council, suspected a conspiracy. They charged and hanged a group that included both blacks and poor whites, some of whom had congregated at John Hughson’s tavern. Curiously, all other “legal” records have perished; only Horsmanden’s account of the trials survives.

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  Fugitive Movements

  Commemorating the Denmark Vesey Affair and Black Radical Antislavery in the Atlantic World

  • James O'Neil Spady(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • University of South Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  So the silent St. Maló remains rele-vant. He raises disquieting questions about who today is still silent in the face of anxious power, lest they risk their own lives or the lives of their loved ones. What are the counterhistories being made of this very moment? Who is telling them? Will future historians ever hear, and who will listen? 136 S H AW N H A L I F A X A N D T E R R I L . S N Y D E R Slavery, Resistance, and Memory in the Lowcountry The Commemoration of the Stono Rebellion In 2006 the Sea Island Farmers Cooperative unveiled a South Carolina high-way historical marker on its property south of Charleston beside the Savannah Highway (US 17). 1 The sign describes the Stono Rebellion (1739) as the “largest slave insurrection in British North America” and depicts the rebels as the free-dom fighters that they surely were. It was not the first official recognition of the site’s importance to early American history. In 1974, thirty-two years before the Marker was unveiled, the site where the Stono Rebellion began was successfully nominated as a National Historical Landmark (NHL). According to the Charles-ton Evening Post, along with the Robert Smalls House in Beaufort, Stono was the first African American history site to gain this Landmark status in South Carolina. 2 Although an official NHL plaque was issued in 1974, the Stono site is on private property, and owners are not required to provide public access to an NHL. For another three decades, therefore, the Stono site lacked a physical sign or designation that was accessible to the public. That oversight was remedied, however, when the Cooperative erected its highway marker in 2006. Before the twenty-first century, the public and historic sites that recognized the history of slavery in the United States did so only timidly, according to his-torian Ana Lucia Araujo. 3 In contrast, thousands of public monuments memo-rialized battles and figures associated with the Confederacy.

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  Slavery in the South

  A State-by-State History

  • Clayton E. Jewett, John O. Allen(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Those who survived the massacre were later executed. The Stono Rebellion was sig- nificant because it raised the issue concerning the lack of slave codes to regulate the peculiar institution and, thus, gave birth to the slave codes in South Carolina. On May 10,1740, Lieutenant Governor William Bull signed into law the Negro Act. This act established the black codes for South Carolina, influ- enced the Georgia black codes, and remained virtually unaltered through- out the slave years. The Negro Act established the death penalty for plotting insurrections, running away, committing arson, murder, concoct- ing poisons, poisoning someone, and teaching another to make poisons. In the colonial era, slaves guilty of committing arson, poisoning people, or convicted of other heinous crimes were often sentenced to death by burn- ing. Accounts exist that confirm that this method of execution survived until the 1830s. As a more humanitarian approach to execution emerged in the wake of increasing national abolitionist influence, and the need to justify slavery increased, South Carolinians abandoned the practice of burn- ing a slave to death in favor of hanging, which was deemed less barbaric. Owners, however, did receive compensation for their executed slaves, ex- cept in the cases in which a slave murdered a white person or took part in a rebellion (Ware 1990, 106). In addition to establishing the death penalty for specific crimes, the Negro Act also made it illegal for a slave to travel off the master's land without a pass, to own firearms, to own livestock, or to trade publicly on his own account. Furthermore, the Negro Act banned the practice of slaves hiring themselves out. Any slave guilty of violating the law in one of these or other instances was subject to a whipping and often branded on the cheek to mark the administration of the punishment. Such brandings could have a negative financial impact for the owner if he desired to sell the slave at a later date.

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  Education and the Racial Dynamics of Settler Colonialism in Early America

  Georgia and South Carolina, ca. 1700–ca. 1820

  • James O'Neil Spady(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  30

  Figure 1.3 The “Catawba Map.”

  Source: “Map of the several nations of Indians to the Northwest of South Carolina.” Francis Nicholson (Contributor). [S.l.: s.n, 1724] Map. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/2005625337/ >

  The “Stono Rebellion” was the most dramatic and well-documented example of patterns of learning that other conspiracies and rebellions sometimes shared. Plans frequently called for a quick, immediate seizure of firearms. Rebels expected to escape either to a powerful English adversary (the Spanish) or to a defensible location, such as a swamp. Early in the century, slaves sometimes ran away in ethnic-identified groups, reflecting African knowledge and identity. As early as 1711, one ethnically aligned group formed a raiding band and attacked plantations. In 1720 and 1730, two further conspiracies appear to have shared some of these ethnic-affinity features. Eventually, runaway groups formed without reference to shared ethnicity as well. As one Carolina commentator explained it in 1737, “the Negroes sometimes make use of … the Woods, where they will stay for months together before they can be found out by their Masters, or any other Person.” And again, in 1738 as many as 70 South Carolina slaves escaped to St. Augustine to join the free black community there. There was no reference to a shared ethnic identity, which suggests that newly learned social identities as black people may have come along with new geographical knowledge. In 1765, a maroon band set up camps on the Savannah River and began assaulting plantations in Georgia. Other reports suggest this community persisted, possibly as late as 1786. A visitor to South Carolina in 1772 personally observed a group of 60 slaves in a secret meeting for dancing and sociability in the woods five miles from Charleston, with most of the revelers coming from Charleston. In December 1774, Georgia whites put down a small-scale rebellion. In July 1776, South Carolinians interrupted an intended uprising in which a leader had drawn together “great crouds of Negroes” in the woods and planned to “take the Country by killing the whites.” Several of the leaders were Christianized slaves, including two women.31

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