The Stono Rebellion and Resistance to Colonial Slavery

On Sunday, September 9, 1739, near the Stono River south of Charles Town, about twenty enslaved Africans broke into a store, killed the two shopkeepers, and seized guns and powder. Led by a man remembered as Jemmy, likely from the Kongo region where many were Catholic and many had military experience, they marched south along the road toward Spanish Florida, where the crown had promised freedom to fugitives from the English colonies. Beating drums, flying a banner and calling out 'Liberty,' they gathered recruits as they went, burning plantations and killing some twenty to twenty-five whites who stood in their way.

The rising burned for hours, not days. That afternoon the militia met the rebels, by then sixty to one hundred strong, at the Edisto River, and in the ensuing fight and weeks of pursuit most were killed or captured. Captured leaders were executed, their heads posted on mile markers as warning. Yet the rebels had come remarkably close to their aim: had they outrun the militia, the swamps and the Spanish border lay open before them.

South Carolina's response was the Negro Act of 1740, one of the harshest slave codes in American history. It barred enslaved people from learning to read, assembling, raising their own food, or moving without a pass, restricted manumission, and tightened every screw of control, while also, on paper, limiting masters' cruelest punishments. The colony even briefly suspended the African slave trade. The act's long shadow shows how deeply Stono had frightened the slaveholding minority of a majority-Black colony.

Stono was the largest slave rebellion in Britain's mainland colonies, but it was one current in a constant stream of resistance, from everyday defiance to conspiracies in New York and the Caribbean. It demonstrated that enslaved people understood the politics of empires, aiming deliberately for the Spanish promise of freedom, and that they would die fighting for liberty in a land that celebrated the word. The rebellion shaped the laws of the South for a century and remains a landmark in the long African American freedom struggle.

To read more about this topic:

Britannica: Stono Rebellion PBS Africans in America: The Stono Rebellion BlackPast.org: Stono Rebellion (1739)