[On September
9, 1739, enslaved African Americans began a brief but bloody rebellion in
South Carolina. So this week on the 280th anniversary I’ll
AmericanStudy Stono and other rebellions and contexts, leading up to a weekend
post on cultural representations of such revolts.]
On two
historical lessons from a largely forgotten colonial-era revolt.
By various
historical measures, the slave
revolt that began on this date two hundred eighty years ago was the largest
and most significant in the British mainland colonies. Roughly 60 enslaved
African Americans took part, following the lead of an
enslaved man known alternately as Jemmy and Cato (the latter likely due to
his slave-owners, the Cater family whose plantation was located near the Stono
River). Over the following week Jemmy and his fellow rebels took part in
multiple armed encounters with South Carolina whites as they marched toward
Spanish Florida and the promise of freedom (more on that in a moment), with 25
whites and nearly 50 rebels killed in those conflicts. Although the rebels did
not achieve their goal, the revolt resulted in a number of important changes in
the colony: especially the passage of the restrictive Negro Act of 1740;
but also various attempts to mitigate the harshest treatment of slaves by South
Carolina slave-owners. Yet while the warehouse where the rebellion began has
since 1974 been designated a National Historical
Landmark, I would argue that outside of that area the revolt has not
been well-remembered (as an example, I had never heard of it until I was
searching for historic anniversaries as topics for weekly series).
For all those
significant aspects, and for the simple fact that it happened, the Stono
Rebellion should be better remembered (and I was happy to see panels about it
at the National
Museum of African American History & Culture when my family and I
visited a few weeks back). And better remembering the revolt likewise helps us
engage with complexities to colonial American history and identity. For one
thing, the Spanish influence on the rebellion highlights the multi-national
realities of colonial America: as part of their ongoing conflicts with England,
both in the Americas and in Europe, Spain
had proclaimed that any enslaved African American held in an English colony
would be free if he or she were to make it to Spanish territory; just a year
prior to the revolt, free African Americans had indeed founded a settlement of
their own, Fort
Mosé,
near the Spanish city of St. Augustine. Of course the history of Spanish imperialism
and settlement in the Americas was entirely intertwined with the foundational
and ongoing histories of slavery, and this particular proclamation and era can’t
be viewed outside of those larger contexts (or as an idealistic, abolitionist
stance from the Spanish). But all those factors simply add to a nuanced
narrative of multi-
and trans-national communities and relationships across the 18th
century Americas.
At the heart of nearly
all of those transnational communities by the 18th century, of course,
were enslaved African Americans. And what the Stono Rebellion especially helps
us remember is just how significantly multi-national the community contained in
the reductive phrase “African Americans” truly was. Jemmy was described in a
contemporary account as “Angolan,” which historians
such as John Thornton have argued makes it likely he, along with the cohort
of enslaved men with whom he began the revolt, had been born in and kidnapped
from the West/Central
African kingdom of Kongo. Long linked to Portuguese traders, the Kongolese
had converted to
Catholicism as early as the 15th century, and the kingdom
maintained its own
relationship with the Vatican. Those factors made it more likely both for
these Portuguese-speaking enslaved people to have learned of the Spanish offer
of freedom and for them to be drawn to Catholic Florida as a religious as well
as social alternative to South Carolina. Moreover, the rebels began their
revolt on the Feast
of the Nativity of Mary, a choice that seems clearly to have linked the
rebellion to their Catholic identity and ideals. Besides helping contextualize
the Stono Rebellion, those details remind us that the community of enslaved
African Americans was, in reality, a profoundly multi-national collection of
cultures, all of which had already become part of an evolving American community
by September 1739.
Next rebellion
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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