Stono

Description

A sourcebook for understanding an uprising that continues to incite historical debate

In the fall of 1739, as many as one hundred enslaved African and African Americans living within twenty miles of Charleston joined forces to strike down their white owners and march en masse toward Spanish Florida and freedom. More than sixty whites and thirty slaves died in the violence that followed. Among the most important slave revolts in colonial America, the Stono Rebellion also ranks as South Carolina's largest slave insurrection and one of the bloodiest uprisings in American history. Significant for the fear it cast among lowcountry slaveholders and for the repressive slave laws enacted in its wake, Stono continues to attract scholarly attention as a historical event worthy of study and reinterpretation.

Edited by Mark M. Smith, Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt introduces readers to the documents needed to understand both the revolt and the ongoing discussion among scholars about the legacy of the insurrection. Smith has assembled a compendium of materials necessary for an informed examination of the revolt. Primary documents-including some works previously unpublished and largely unknown even to specialists-offer accounts of the violence, discussions of Stono's impact on white sensibilities, and public records relating incidents of the uprising. To these primary sources Smith adds three divergent interpretations that expand on Peter H. Wood's pioneering study Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. Excerpts from works by John K. Thornton, Edward A. Pearson, and Smith himself reveal how historians have used some of the same documents to construct radically different interpretations of the revolt's causes, meaning, and effects.

Sujets

• Civil Rights
• Social Science
• HISTORY
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Sociologie, société et politique
• François Dominique Toussaint-Louverture
• Benín
• Mr.
• The Other Hand
• Peter Linebaugh
• Vincent Harding
• Atlantic World
• E. Franklin Frazier
• Stono Rebellion
• Gibbet
• James Oglethorpe
• Reprisal
• Manumission
• Letter of marque
• Civil and political rights
• Slavery
• History of the Americas
• Human rights
• Abettor
• Denmark Vesey
• Herbert Aptheker
• United States
• Olaudah Equiano
• FL
• William Lloyd Garrison
• Henry Laurens
• KY
• LA
• TN
• MR
• MS
• SC
• NC
• AR
• Toussaint Louverture
• VA
• Dahomey
• GA

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 31 octobre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781643360942
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

STONO
STONO

Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt
Edited by
MARK M. SMITH

The University of South Carolina Press
2005 University of South Carolina
Cloth and paperback editions published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2005 Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina by the University of South Carolina Press, 2019
www.sc.edu/uscpress
23 22 21 20 19 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print editions as follows:
Stono : documenting and interpreting a Southern slave revolt / edited by Mark M. Smith.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-57003-604-7 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 1-57003-605-5 (pbk : alk. paper)
1. Slave insurrections-South Carolina-Stono-History-18th century. 2. Slave insurrections-South Carolina-Stono-History-18th century-Sources. 3. Stono (S.C.)-Race relations-History-18th century. 4. Stono (S.C.)-Race relations- History-18th century-Sources. 5. South Carolina-Race relations-History-18th century. 6. South Carolina-Race relations-History-18th century-Sources. I. Smith, Mark M. (Mark Michael), 1968- II. Title.
F279.S84S64 2005
975.7 9102-dc22
2005016161
ISBN-13: 978-1-57003-605-7 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-64336-094-2 (ebook)
Publication of this book is made possible in part by the generous support of the Partnership Board of the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina.
Front cover illustration: Blow for Blow , engraving by William A. Stephens; courtesy of the Library of Congress
C ONTENTS
List of Maps
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Finding Stono
I. D OCUMENTING S TONO
1 Spanish Designs and Slave Resistance
2 A Ranger Details the Insurrection
3 News of the Revolt Enters Private Correspondence
4 Overwork and Retaliation?
5 The Stono Rebellion as National News
6 Account of the Negroe Insurrection in South Carolina
7 Lieutenant Governor Bull s Eyewitness Account
8 Rewarding Indians, Catching Rebels
9 Deserting Stono
10 An Act for the Better Ordering
11 The Official Report
12 Viewing Revolt from 1770
13 An Early Historical Account
14 An Abolitionist s Account, 1847
15 As it come down to me : Black Memories of Stono in the 1930s
II. I NTERPRETING S TONO
1 Anatomy of a Revolt Peter H. Wood
2 African Dimensions John K. Thornton
3 Rebelling as Men Edward A. Pearson
4 Time, Religion, Rebellion Mark M. Smith
A Working Bibliography on the Stono Rebellion
Index
M APS
Lowcountry South Carolina
Detail of the Ashley River and Stono River area
The world
Detail of the coasts of Africa, North America, and South America
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
For his invaluable help and guidance on a variety of matters, I thank my colleague and friend Walter B. Edgar. Walter s counsel, his extraordinary knowledge of colonial South Carolina history, and his respect for the revealing detail has shaped this reader in some important ways. Robin Copp of the South Caroliniana Library rendered expert assistance with the maps, and Alex Moore proved not only a wonderful editor but also full of helpful advice. Thanks also go to my wife, Catherine, for her excellent detective work, to Mike Reynolds for his help in the archives, and to the undergraduate students who took my course the Historian s Craft in spring 2005 (particularly to Christopher Hulbert for alerting me to an otherwise unknown newspaper account). David Prior s help with the index was invaluable, as was Peter Coclanis s guidance and support for the project.
Peter Wood, John Thornton, and Ted Pearson were all immensely helpful when it came to securing permission to reprint the edited versions of their work. I remain in their debt.
This book has been published with the generous financial assistance of the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina. I gratefully acknowledge this support.
I NTRODUCTION
Finding Stono
Live oak branches braid high above, their bark fingers capillaries against blue sky just off U.S. Highway 17, about twenty miles southwest of Charleston, South Carolina. Grottolike, the trees lead to a plantation, a short distance north of the road to Jacksonboro ferry, a place called Battlefield. 1 Visible clues to the area s bloody history are few, nonexistent really. You d never guess that hereabouts witnessed one of the largest and costliest slave revolts in colonial North America. Nothing suggests the beheadings, the wailing, the ferocity of battle that could be seen and heard during the Stono Rebellion in 1739.
Tourists rarely go to Stono, and even when they do, explaining the context, nature, meaning, and significance of the revolt is beyond the narrative and analytic powers of a snappy historical marker. Slave revolts are complicated things, and Stono is no exception. 2 The slaves involved in the Stono insurrection left few clues indicating why and how they revolted, and most of the evidence comes to us, often secondhand, from whites who themselves sometimes disagreed on important details. Even basic facts are annoyingly elusive. Who led the slaves, and what was his name? Was it Jemey/Jemmy, Arnold, Cato? How many slaves were involved in the revolt? How many died? How many whites were killed? When did the revolt start? Late on September 8? Or was it early on September 9? When did the rebellion end? Did it end quickly, as some contemporaries claimed, or did it last longer than just a few days?
Assessing the meaning and nature of the revolt is also difficult. At first blush Stono is impossibly contradictory, an event framed in binaries, seemingly irreconcilable opposites. The rebels were bloodthirsty and brutal yet rational and discriminating; they cut off white heads even as they used their minds; the revolt was intensely local and deeply connected to larger developments in the Atlantic world; the participants were at once Kongolese Africans and influenced by Portuguese Catholics; they fought as soldiers and prayed as Christians; some were loyal to their masters, others loyal to their cause; the event was timed precisely yet hobbled by chance. The list could go on. In some important respects though, the meaning of the Stono Rebellion, as the documents and essays presented in this collection show, is best understood not by trying to flatten the binaries but, rather, by treating them as reliable indicators of the complicated, textured, multivalent world in which the slaves and white South Carolinians lived in 1739.
The Stono Rebellion occurred in a decade noted for its slave unrest. As historian Edward A. Pearson notes (see essay 3 in this collection): The 1730s was a decade of slave unrest throughout the New World plantation complex. Conspiracies were uncovered in the Bahamas in 1734 and in Antigua a year later, while war between colonists and maroons broke out on Jamaica in 1739. Other rebellions erupted on St. John in 1733 and on Guadalupe four years later. Part of the Atlantic system, South Carolina likewise experienced unrest and discontent among its slave population as well as military threats from the Spanish. Enslaved people throughout the New World rejected bondage and either ran away to, or fought for, liberty. Sometimes, as at Stono, they did both at once. Regardless of their location, slave rebels used similar strategies and tactics to achieve their ends. They appropriated forms of punishment and violence whites used with slaves, such as beheading. In slave hands decapitation became a direct challenge to white authority, an inversion of customary power relations. Arson was also common both in the Caribbean and on the North American mainland as a means of destroying slaveholders property (of property attacking property) and as a mechanism for alerting potential rebels to the act of insurrection. Did the slaves who conspired to revolt in New York City in 1741, those on the Danish island of St. John who revolted in 1733, those slaves and Irish workers who machinated to burn Savannah, Georgia, in 1738, and those who rebelled at Stono in 1739 act in concert, with knowledge of one another s revolts? Hardly. Communication networks, while more evolved among the dispossessed than we are sometimes apt to believe, were nonetheless too immature, too capricious to allow for that kind of coordination. Still the conspiracies and revolts of the period are, in the words of two recent historians, best understood by attending to the Atlantic experiences of the conspirators, by understanding the connections among military regiments, the plantation, the waterfront gang, the religious conventicler, and the ethnic tribe or clan. 3 As the articles reprinted here suggest, the Stono Rebellion cannot be properly or fully understood without attention to this larger context. While the insurrection at Stono was not a conscious challenge to the world capitalist system of which it was part, it was nevertheless a product of that system and the revolt shaped its evolution. Even as many of the Stono slaves probably sought to escape and establish autonomy rather than initiate revolutionary upheaval, their actions were guided by transatlantic connections, and the revolt itself influenced not only the political, economic, and social future of South Carolina slaveholding society but also became part of a much larger imperial struggle between England and Spain over the southeastern part of North America. 4 After all it is worth remembering that a century before antebellum slaves looked north to freedom, they looked south to Spanish promises of liberty for those who escaped and reached Florida. Slaves in South Carolina had been running to northern Spanish Florida for yea