Stono Rebellion

By: Alan Gallay

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Stono Rebellion

The Stono Rebellion, which occurred on Sunday, 9 September 1739, was the most important slave rebellion in the history of the British southern mainland colonies. The rebels probably acted on a Sunday because many Europeans would have been at church, giving the slaves the opportunity to initiate plans without hindrance. That morning, about twenty miles south of Charles Town (later Charleston), South Carolina, a party of twenty or so slaves attacked a store to obtain arms and powder, killing and decapitating those inside. Moving south, they gained the following of sixty to one hundred more slaves. Within thirty-six hours the rebellion was crushed, but not before shock waves had been sent through the state. If there had been any doubt before that slaves threatened the colony, that doubt was gone: slaves had the capability of large-scale destruction.

The sources of a rebellion are almost always multifaceted—a convergence of forces leading potential rebels to take extraordinary risks in the face of extremely dangerous consequences. In the case of the Stono Rebellion, tensions between free Europeans and enslaved Africans had been rising for years, owing in large part to the growing restrictiveness of the slave system. The success of rice cultivation in the Carolina Lowcountry led to the importation of many new slaves. Rice and slaves generated great profits but also fear among planters, because the Africans outnumbered them, in some areas constituting 70 to 80 percent of the population. Moreover, the new slaves had only recently been wrested from their homes and freedom in Africa; they had neither been acculturated to slavery nor developed familial ties to other slaves that might have diffused rebelliousness.

The shift from frontier to plantation economy had adversely affected the quality of life for slaves. Under pioneer conditions male slaves performed a great variety of tasks, many of which provided a modicum of mobility and independence, such as fishing, hunting, piloting boats, raising cattle, and generating forest products. Confinement to the rice fields was entirely different; slaves especially resented the backbreaking work in disease-ridden paddies. The historian Edward A. Pearson suggests that laboring in the rice fields might have been the last straw for many recently arrived Africans, for in Africa fieldwork was performed by women; the rebels might have viewed forced cultivation of rice as intolerable emasculation.

Adding further context to the rebellion was the outbreak of slave conspiracies throughout the West Indies in the 1730s, which the slaves would have known about owing to the frequent communication between Carolina and the Caribbean. Both the Bahamas and Antigua experienced unrest, war with Maroons occurred in Jamaica, and rebellions broke out on Saint John Island and in Guadeloupe.

Most of the Africans who initiated the Stono Rebellion came from the kingdom of Kongo; they were led by a slave named Jemmy. The slaves were most likely Christians, since the Catholic Church had missionized the Kongo much earlier. Many Kongolese were literate in Portuguese, which would have aided them in establishing relations with the Spanish in Florida, who were also Catholic; the Spanish government in Saint Augustine had a long-standing policy of offering freedom to slaves who escaped the English. It had established a special settlement, the Gracia Real de Teresa de Mose, as a refuge for Africans.

When hostilities increased between Spain and England in the late 1730s, the Spanish actively promoted their offer of freedom, which the slaves would easily have learned about from Native Americans who traveled freely between Carolina and Florida, though Africans who had previously escaped to Florida also could have carried this information on covert return trips. Hundreds of slaves escaped slavery in South Carolina in the 1730s, and many lived in Maroon communities within the colony or on its borders. The knowledge that Florida was a potential permanent refuge more than likely played a significant role in the Stono Rebellion, as the rebels initially headed south toward Saint Augustine.

According to the historian John K. Thornton, the rebels probably included many slaves who had been soldiers in Kongo. Their military activity suggests familiarity with the weapons, tactics, and training then offered in their centralized homeland. Moreover, the rebels' unfurling of banners was typical of contemporary African armies. They had the skills and motives to risk everything for freedom.

Some slaves refrained from joining the rebels, choosing instead to protect and assist their masters. Whether they did so out of ethnic hostility to the Kongolese rebels, sympathy for their masters, or the belief that the rebellion would not succeed is unknown. One slave later earned his freedom for having killed a rebel, and thirty others received gifts of clothing from the legislature for their opposition to the uprising.

After their initial success, the rebels headed south, laying waste to plantations and killing inhabitants (though sparing some, whom they presumably considered to be humane masters). Lieutenant Governor Bull by chance spotted the rebels and escaped their pursuit; he fled to Charles Town to sound the alarm. What happened next is clear, although the motives remain open to question: With dozens of slaves flocking to the rebel standard, discipline apparently evaporated. The slaves celebrated their initial victory with dancing and singing, instead of continuing to Saint Augustine. Perhaps they had decided to stay in Carolina and conquer the colony, since they could expect their ranks to continue to swell. Whatever their reason for staying put, a well-armed militia arrived and crushed the rebellion. In the following months many of the surviving rebels were hunted down and killed by militia and Native Americans hired for that purpose.

In the aftermath of Stono the legislature created a slave code to prevent future rebellions, further limiting slaves' personal rights while taking measures to force masters to keep greater control over their bondpeople. Slaves adjusted to the code by finding creative ways to avoid strictures, and masters often displayed little inclination to police all the activity of their slaves. Nevertheless, South Carolina's white population had committed itself to fully institutionalizing and policing the slave system, a position it would not back away from until forced to do so by defeat in the Civil War.

See also Black Codes and Slave Codes, Colonial; Economic Life; Jamaica; Maroons; Masculinity; Resistance; Riots and Rebellions; Slavery: Lower South; South Carolina; and Violence against African Americans.

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