Stono Rebellion And The Security Act Of 1739

” For many, the economic structure of slavery still held strong and it established status in British America. Slavery had begun in the later half of the 17th century and in many ways, it had made Atlantic commerce and overseas settlement possible. Thousands of Africans had been shipped overseas to work in the fields of staple crops. In the years leading up to the American Revolution, high concentrations of slaves remained in the southern colonies where they continued to labour on cotton and tobacco plantations. Of the thirteen colonies, Georgia, Virginia and the Carolinas held the highest concentrations of slaves. In 1775, it is estimated that of the 2.5 million people living in the thirteen colonies, 500,000 were blacks. The vast majority of these blacks were slaves, with many labouring for their masters under harsh conditions. Although their experiences were difficult, blacks rarely revolted or staged rebellions against their masters. This has often been associated with the plantation system, and the role it played in severing blacks’ ties to one another. As highlighted by historian Silvia Frey, “The North American plantation organization, with the dominating presence of the master, inhibited the development of the tribal cohesiveness that characterized the islands’ plantation organization and produced widespread violence against whites by black guerrilla bands.” However, despite the absence of any significant

Peter Wood’s Black Majority is a social history examining the cause and effects, both explicit and implicit, of the black majority that emerged in colonial South Carolina. His study spans the time period from the settlement of Carolina through the Stono Rebellion, which took place in 1739. He also takes into consideration and examines certain events that took place in the years immediately preceding the settlement of 1670, as well as those that immediately followed, as a direct result of, the Stono Rebellion and their respective relationships to the black majority that existed in the colony. Wood introduces the book as possibly the first real study of this black majority and its impact on the colony in its earliest years. Wood also

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries colonial America experienced a number of rebellions by various groups for a variety of reasons. The protests took place in Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York. Each protest began for a different reason, however, all involved the discontent that some groups underwent in the colonies. Some of the most notable rebellions include Bacon's Rebellion, The Regulator Uprising, Leislor's Rebellion, Culpepper's Rebellion, and the Paxton Boys Uprising.

The Stono Rebellion was at the time the biggest slave rebellion to ever take place in the American colonies. It came at a time when owning slaves was one of the accepted things in the colonies and the colonists depended on the labor the slaves were doing. Some colonies entire economies depended on it. In South Carolina, there were more slaves than free men in the colony. This was because of the African slave trade.

The origins and development of slavery within Britain’s North American colonies in the period 1607 to 1776 was majorly in part by the English need for economic power. England had just arose as the strongest naval of the North Atlantic had they had to keep their high standing in the world. Bacon’s Rebellion, the profit received by cash crops, and the ability to easily purchase slaves through trade highly boosted Britain’s economy. The colonists within the British colony kept through economic standing and power by making themselves higher than any other through slavery.

The slaves used rebellions or anti-slavery movements as a form of resistance against slavery. However, the result of slave insurrections was mass executions, and many of them avoided these rebellions for the fear of being executed. The famous insurrections in the American history were the Gabriel Prossey's conspiracy in 1800, Nat Turner's Rebellion in 1831, and the Stono Rebellion of 1739. Among these rebellions, only the Nat

     South Carolina was one of the only states in which the black slaves and abolitionists outnumbered their oppressors. Denmark Vesey’s slave revolt consisted

Beginning on September 9,1739, the Stono Rebellion was one of the largest slave uprisings in colonial America (Stono's Rebellion). It was the first known slave revolt in the continent of North America in 1739 (Slave Rebellions). Though it was one of the largest slave revolts in colonial America, it was still unsuccessful, but because it was so large, it had several effect on America and its government.

In 1676 a group of poor farmers rebelled against the government and William Berkley a royal governor in Jamestown Virginia. Poor colonists had to settle outside of the English Colony and into the frontier where the Natives had control. When indentured servants were set free they also had nowhere to live except for the land on the frontier and use that land to start farms and their lives. This created a problem because the poor farmers that were settling in the frontier were being attacked by the Natives because there was no protection passed Jamestown and it was dangerous because the Natives had control over all that land. The farmers were killing some Natives but this was against the rules because they had to keep the

Stono Rebellion: Was a Rebellion against Slavery, it was the largest slave uprising in the British New World With 21 whites dead and 44 blacks killed.

Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 was the first rebellion in the colonies and it largely resulted in the hardening of racial lines with slavery. The plantation owners and farmers now saw it as a dangerous asset to have white indentured servants as workers and also saw having slaves as a much higher profit. By the establishment of the Virginia colony and its use of producing the tobacco cash crop, boatloads of slaves were brought to work and profit the upper class plantation owners. What became known as the Middle Passage became nothing more to the white upper-class than profit and population increase. At the end of the seventeenth century, it was established that 40,000 people lived in Virginia however the number of slaves brought to the colony was unknown.

In the early 18th century, South Carolina experienced a boom in their rice industry. This caused a shift from a frontier to a plantation economy, affecting the quality of life of slaves. Their tasks switched from farming, hunting, fishing, and raising cattle, to being trapped in the rice fields. The slaves felt much resent for this extremely difficult, straining work. In the 1730s, there was an outbreak of many slave conspiracies in the West Indies, especially in the Bahamas and Antigua. Furthermore, many runaway slaves from South Carolina had made their way down to Florida, where Spain offered them freedom. This inspired slaves to fight for their freedom. As a result of the Stono Rebellion, slaveowners came to fear their slaves and the threat of future uprisings. Because of this fear, The Slave Code of South Carolina of 1740 was created. This code greatly limited rights of the slaves living in the region.

Slave revolts normally happened outside of the plantation system and in large cities were the slaves were able to act more freely. It’s estimated there were at least 250 slave rebellions in America before slavery was abolished in 1865.Most tales of what happened during those rebellions could be bias seen as they were written by whites rather than by the slaves that started the revolt. Since African American slaves accounted for more than one-third of the population in the 18th century, slave rebellions were a large source of fear for white Americans in the south.

As a result of being outnumbered, slave owners feared rebellions which would remove them from their position of power. This fear is largely to blame for the especially hard conditions for slaves in the colony of Saint Domingue. On the majority of plantations for example slaves were forbidden to meet with other slaves, and harsh overseers were employed to make sure that the slaves cooperated.

On September 1739, a group of South Carolina slaves, most of them recently arrived from kongo where some had appeared to be soldiers, where they had taken a store containing which had a number of weapons at the town of stono. They would use “beating drums to attract followers, the armed band marched southward toward Florida, burning houses and barns, killing whites they encountered, and shouting liberty.”(144). This rebellion took the lives of more than two dozen whites and as many as 200 slaves. Many slaves managed to reach Florida, where in 1740 they were armed by the Spanish to help repel an attack on St. Augustine by a force from