Yes, Lord, I Know the Road: A Documentary History of African Americans in South Carolina, 1526–2008

By J. Brent Morris

The first comprehensive history of African Americans in the Palmetto State, spanning five centuries.

From the first North American slave rebellion near the mouth of the Pee Dee River in the early sixteenth century to the 2008 state Democratic primary victory of Barack Obama, award-winning historian J. Brent Morris examines the unique struggles and triumphs of African Americans in South Carolina.

Following an engaging introduction, Morris brings together a wide variety of annotated primary-source documents—personal narratives, government reports, statutes, newspaper articles, and speeches—to highlight the significant people, events, social and political movements, and ideas that have shaped black life in South Carolina and beyond. In their own words, anonymous and notable African Americans, such as Charlotte Forten, David Walker, and Jesse Jackson, describe the social and economic subjugation caused by more than three hundred years of slavery, the revolution wrought by the American Civil War and Reconstruction, and the post-Reconstruction civil rights struggle that runs to the present.

Many of these source documents are previously unpublished; others have been long out of print. Morris proposes that reading the narrative-sources black Carolinians left behind brings life and relevancy to the past that will spark new public conversations, inspire fresh questions, and encourage historians to pursue innovative scholarly work.

“For everyone interested in South Carolina history Yes, Lord, I Know the Road is a book that has long been needed. Thanks to the judicious selection of documents and thoughtful introductory material, Brent Morris has produced a very readable book on a complex and often contentious topic. It is an invaluable addition to South Carolina historiography—and to my bookshelf.” —Walter Edgar, author of South Carolina: A History

“At last, we have a concise document book tracing one of the most troubled and inspiring paths in American history. Exploring this long, rutted road, we meet brave souls who stood tall—Boston King, Robert Smalls, Septima Clark. Morris’s varied collection will spark readers to dig deeper and learn more.” —Peter H. Wood, Duke University, author of Black Majority and Strange New Land

“This thoughtfully curated documentary history of Afro-Carolinians spans five centuries with important, vivid, and compelling accounts of South Carolina’s twisted, stony road of anguish and achievement, oppression and hope. An informative introduction and concise headnotes provide historical context and make the book accessible to all students of South Carolina history.” —Michael Johnson, Academy Professor of History Emeritus, Johns Hopkins University

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781611177329

Book preview

YES, LORD, I KNOW THE ROAD

Yes, Lord,

I KNOW THE ROAD

A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY OF

AFRICAN AMERICANS IN

SOUTH CAROLINA

1526–2008

■

Edited by J. BRENT MORRIS

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS

© 2017 University of South Carolina

Published by the University of South Carolina Press

Columbia, South Carolina 29208

www.sc.edu/uscpress

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Morris, J. Brent, editor.

Title: Yes, Lord, I know the road : a documentary history of African Americans in South Carolina, 1526–2008 / edited by J. Brent Morris.

Description: Columbia, South Carolina : University of South Carolina Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016047778 (print) | LCCN 2016049459 (ebook) | ISBN 9781611177305 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781611177312 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781611177329 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: African Americans—South Carolina—History—Sources. Classification: LCC E185.93.S7 Y47 2017 (print) | LCC E185.93.S7 (ebook) | DDC 975.7/00496073—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016047778

Front cover photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress

"Sheep, sheep, do you know the road?

Yes, Lord, I know the road.

Sheep, sheep, do you know the road?

Yes my Lord, I know the road …"

Sea Islands spiritual

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FOREWORD

Daniel C. Littlefield

PREFACE AND EDITORIAL NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction

CHAPTER 1. The people commonly called Negroes: Becoming African Americans in South Carolina

CHAPTER 2. De bless fa true, dem wa da wok haad: The Development of South Carolina’s Slave Society

CHAPTER 3. A jubilee of freedom: Liberty and Emancipation in South Carolina

CHAPTER 4. All men are born free and equal: The Era of Reconstruction

CHAPTER 5. Each tomorrow will find us farther than today: Black Life in the New South

CHAPTER 6. We Shall Overcome: The African American Revolution in the Palmetto State

CHAPTER 7. Common ground: A New Generation of Black South Carolinians

NOTES

INDEX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Slave runaway advertisement

Slave sale advertisement

The Old Plantation

Robert Smalls and the CSS Planter

Marching On!—The Fifty-fifth Massachusetts

Colored Regiment singing John Brown’s March in the streets of Charleston

Law diploma of Richard Henry Greener

Teaching the Freedmen

Emancipation Day (c. 1905)

Hoeing rice in South Carolina

A Southern baptism, Aiken, South Carolina

World War II South Carolina soldier

I. D. Newman being sworn in by Mike Daniel

Congressman James E. Clyburn

FOREWORD

This documentary narrative of African Americans in South Carolina covers the broad sweep of the state’s history from early Spanish explorations to the modern political and social activities of people of African descent. It promises to be a boon for students, teachers, and the general public interested in the unique background of a small, complex, and fascinating region. The documents are extraordinary and well chosen. They reveal, for example, that less than thirty-five years after Christopher Columbus’s first voyage, Spanish explorers incited here perhaps the earliest rebellion of enslaved Africans on the North American coast and one of the earliest anywhere in the New World. They contradict any notion that armed resistance was practically unknown among peoples brought unwillingly to labor for Europeans in North America (in contrast to what is conceded for enslaved Africans elsewhere in America) or that the northern mainland was in any way exempt from the prevailing cultural, political, and social currents that affected the meeting of black and white people everywhere during their settlement in America and during and after the development of plantation economies. There was cooperation and conflict, personal affection and abiding antagonism. No other time or place offers better examples of these commonalities than South Carolina, particularly during the colonial period. Here captive south-central Africans staged the largest slave rebellion in England’s continental colonies, featuring a prominent ethnic dimension, and here planters evinced a more open toleration for interracial dalliance than is often acknowledged for the English main. But the intriguing features of this province did not end when it rejected British hegemony. Whether in religion or revolution, this small state offers extraordinary illustrations of African American agency (to evoke a convenient term too easily used) that discredits the idea that African peoples lacked intelligence or initiative and leads to the suggestion that those in South Carolina may have had a disproportionate influence on American society and culture in relationship to the size of the region where they lived. The state was distinctive in the dimension of its African population and in the nature of its African-influenced culture. Moreover, these features extended beyond the colonial period and continue to affect Carolina culture and society in the modern age. There are examples here of the context within which African Americans operated as well as the communities they formed and the activities they adopted to overcome their obstacles.

Professor Morris provides a solid introduction that puts these documents into perspective. Whether considering abortive Spanish settlements, English colonial developments, the Lowcountry’s differentiated labor system, the various staples cultivated, or the tragedy of war and the shortcomings of Reconstruction, he judiciously fills gaps between the documents. One advantage of his outlook is that he does not treat this story in a vacuum but situates the state and the African Americans who inhabit it within a larger Atlantic world and the national scene. He notes the regime of white supremacy and its collapse, the civil rights movement, the ways in which South Carolina handled desegregation and the reasons behind that policy, the return of African Americans to political influence, and events in the twenty-first century during the Age of Obama. Indeed, his essay is an admirable recounting in capsule form of African Americans in South Carolina’s history and is a useful short reference. Students as well as the public will find here a handy tool for their edification.

DANIEL C. LITTLEFIELD

PREFACE AND EDITORIAL NOTES

African Americans were among the first pioneers in the land that eventually became South Carolina, and for most of the nearly five centuries that followed their arrival, men, women, and children of African descent have been a majority of the population there. Until relatively recently, however, their history—their vital role in the development of the colony, state, and nation—has either been misrepresented or neglected entirely. Fortunately, historians writing during and after the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century have devoted considerable attention to the dynamic story of black South Carolinians. Copious and often brilliant scholarship has highlighted African American history and culture in the state from the sixteenth through the twenty-first centuries in local, regional, national, and global contexts.

Still, this flurry of scholarly activity has not produced a comprehensive synthetic history of African Americans and South Carolina. This work is not intended to satisfy that need, although it is the first substantial overview of that story. Nor does it endeavor to evaluate the diverse historiography of the past few decades. Rather, Yes, Lord, I Know the Road offers, within the limits of approximately 100,000 words, a synopsis of five centuries of rich history to guide scholars until someone takes on the monumental challenge of producing that long-awaited monograph. In the introduction, details are sacrificed for the sake of concision, and much that truly deserves extended analysis is by necessity wrapped into broad generalizations. However, this book’s most valuable section, the eighty edited documents and images that constitute the bulk of the work, are the true substance of the story. They are, as Herbert Aptheker wrote in the introduction to one of his many documentary readers, the words of participants, of eye-witnesses. These are the words of the very great and the very obscure; these are the words of the mass. This is how they felt; this is what they saw; this is what they wanted.

This book invites readers to work with these component pieces of history and consider how they inform the bigger story. Reading narrative alongside the sources black Carolinians left behind brings life and relevancy to the past. We more fully empathize with the enslaved woman working in the muck of a rice field as the summer sun beats down on her back and mosquitoes swarm about her head. We appreciate the determination of a maroon, defiant and diligent, setting up his camp deep in a swamp. We hear the cadence of a Gullah sermon, the percussive echo of clapping, and the counter-clockwise shuffling of feet. We feel the bright spotlights front and center at a national political convention. Many of these source documents are previously unpublished; many others have been long out of print. It is my hope that the collection will spark new conversations, inspire fresh questions, and point new ways for historians to pursue innovative scholarly work.

The documents are presented in seven chapters, roughly chronologically, beginning with the first slave rebellion in North America in 1526 near the mouth of the Pee Dee River. Documents then chronicle the first few generations of black South Carolinians and trace the complex transformation of Africans into African Americans through the Stono Rebellion of 1739. Following that, the material highlights the implications of a growing black majority and the passage of a harsh new slave code, the negotiated terrain between African Americans and whites within the South Carolina plantation regime, and the development of a unique African American culture through the late antebellum period.

Freedom in early South Carolina was a luxury few African Americans enjoyed. Nearly 400,000 others who first experienced freedom during and after the Civil War joined those few in the revolutionary era of Reconstruction and contributed to the sources presented for that period. The aftermath of Reconstruction in South Carolina and the arrival and solid establishment of the Jim Crow era in the New South are examined, as well as the service of black soldiers in World War I and World War II, their eventual return to a continuing hostile state, and the counterpoint between Jim Crow and the budding civil rights movement in the Palmetto State. As W.E.B. Du Bois put it, South Carolina’s African American veterans returned from fighting, and, importantly, they returned fighting. They were not alone.

Next, documentation demonstrates the black community’s pushback as it sowed the seeds of destruction for Jim Crow in South Carolina. Not content to simply bring down a body of discriminatory state laws, South Carolina African Americans also joined in the blossoming national civil rights movement and played a vital role in the revolutionary redefinition of America. The records show that the racial landscape of South Carolina from the late 1970s on had little in common with that of just a generation earlier. Racism had not disappeared in the Palmetto State, but the foundations of a truly open society were clearly evident. By 2008, as Barack Obama swept through South Carolina on the way to the White House, he did not see a white South Carolina or a black South Carolina, just a South Carolina composed of individuals who were learning to deal with one another simply as people, not members of races.¹

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The documents in this book have been selected primarily on the basis of considerations of historical significance and typicality. A great effort has also been made to choose documents that illustrate the rich diversity of the African American experience in South Carolina. African American sources have been privileged, although documents produced by others are included when their content speaks to or significantly and directly affected African American life. Some documents are reprinted in their entirety, although most have been extracted and edited for length. In all cases, the basic essence of the content, context, general structure, and author’s intent have been preserved. Where it is not obvious from the numbering of sections or chapters, ellipses […] have been used to indicate omissions. Although the intention has been to present the documents as coherent entries, in the case of some of the longer sources, some detail and at times entire topics have been sacrificed for the sake of space. In every case, citations to the full works are provided. Text in square brackets indicates new editorial information or slight modifications to preserve continuity. Explanatory footnotes are generally limited to providing sufficient information to place the documents within their context or to identify relevant individuals and issues that might not be familiar to readers.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book had its origins with the first courses I ever taught, in my first job out of graduate school. In planning my classes in U.S., African American, and South Carolina history, I attempted to personalize the syllabi as much as possible for my students. Since most of them were South Carolina natives, I sought to pique their interest by emphasizing the role of their state in whichever larger story I was telling. Indeed, very often I needed to make no extra effort, since the Palmetto State has always figured prominently in America’s history. This was especially the case in dealing with the state’s African American past. When my search for a good primary source reader proved futile, I went into the archives and library stacks and collected hundreds of documents to complement my lectures and course reading assignments with the voices of South Carolina African Americans from every historical period.

This book, in a much-condensed form, is the result. The process of taking the materials, writing a long introduction, and developing it all into a book to be published by a major university press took much longer than I ever imagined it would. In the process, I accumulated countless debts. My first debt is to my students, without whom this project would have never existed. I am also thankful to the staffs of several libraries and manuscript collections for their help in identify new sources, tracking down obscure publications, and navigating miles of microfilm and countless boxes of documents: the South Caroliniana Library, Division of Rare Books and Special Collections, the Coleman Koresh Law Library, and the Thomas Cooper Library, at the University of South Carolina in Columbia; the South Carolina Historical Society; the South Carolina Department of Archives and History; the Avery Research Center at the College of Charleston; the Beaufort County Library; the Richland County Public Library; and the Heritage Library Foundation of Hilton Head Island. The interlibrary loan departments at the University of South Carolina Aiken and the University of South Carolina Beaufort proved that there was no book they could not track down and get into my hands. I also could not have completed this work without the generous financial support of the Sea Islands Institute and Faculty Development Committee at USCB.

For special reprint permissions, I thank the Alan Paton Center and Struggle Archives; the American Bible Society; and Congressman James Clyburn. I also thank the Crisis Publishing Company, which publishes the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, for allowing me to use material first published in the December 1927, September 1946, and August–September 1963 issues of The Crisis. Thanks are also due Nikky Finney, the South Carolina Historical Society, the South Caroliniana Library, Tracy S. Bailey, the University of North Carolina Press, the University of South Carolina Library Political Collections, and the University of South Carolina Press.

Friends, family, and colleagues across the country visited libraries when I could not, suggested new places for me to look, and helped me interpret what I found. Ed Baptsit, Lou Benfonte, Mary Lou Brewton, Emory Campbell, Mari Crabtree, Alexia Helsley, Mac James, Chip Landrum, Dan Littlefield, Maggi Morehouse, Larry Rowland, Steve Wise, and Peter Wood freely offered their help, their time, and enthusiasm for my project. Benjamin Nelson performed masterfully as my Spanish translator. My administrators at USCB—especially Jane Upshaw, Al Panu, Gordon Haist, Lynn McGee, and Babet Villena-Alvarez—were cheerleaders at every step along the way. My great friend and mentor Walter Edgar planted the seed for this book in my mind nearly two decades ago and has been constant and more than generous with his support ever since.

And, as always, Kim and Daegan—the time I’ve spent on this book is all time I’ve borrowed from you. Thank you for your generosity, your support, and your love.

Introduction

The first people of African descent to occupy the territory that would eventually become South Carolina were brought as slaves by the Spanish explorer Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón on an expedition that landed near present-day Port Royal in the summer of 1526.¹ From its inception, however, Ayllón’s colony seemed doomed to fail, and, following the conquistador’s death in October of that year, a group of settlers mounted a coup, jailed his successor, and began to severely mistreat the slaves and the local indigenous population. Each group, in turn, retaliated. After the Natives killed a number of the colonists, the slaves rose up, set fire to the village, and mounted what would be the first slave rebellion in North America. Bloodied, starving, and despondent, the Spanish survivors returned to their base in the Caribbean and abandoned the first European colony in what is now the United States.²

The history of men and women of African descent in South Carolina therefore began with a powerful demonstration of agency and with determination to be free. Indeed, the rebels of the Ayllón expedition were the first people of African descent to set foot on the ground that would eventually become the United States, and thus African American history was born on the Carolina coast in blood and fire.³ The flame of communal self-reliance sparked in the Lowcountry would continue to burn for another five centuries. From the early sixteenth century, African American men and women would be a driving force in South Carolina’s and America’s history. When Hernando de Soto marched through the territory in 1540, his retinue included several African slaves. One of these Spanish-speaking Africans, named Gomez, fled with a royal Indian prisoner back to the town of Cofitachequi (near present-day Camden). There, they held communication as husband and wife.⁴ More Africans would accompany Spanish and French explorers over the next century, but even though the Spanish Crown granted conquistadores permission to settle parts of the region with fifty Africans, no Europeans were able to sustain a settlement in the area until the English succeeded in doing so in 1670.⁵

The English, though, were more active in the Caribbean in the seventeenth century. In the 1620s, English explorers established the colonies of St. Christopher, Nevis, and Barbados. Once sugarcane was introduced from Brazil in the 1640s, Barbados quickly became the cultural, social, and economic model for the rest of the English West Indies and, later, for South Carolina.⁶ Major planters, spurred by an insatiable demand for sugar worldwide that sent the price of land soaring, squeezed out smaller ones, and the Brazilian model of African slavery quickly supplanted white indentured servitude as the laboring engine that lined the pockets of the upper echelons of a highly stratified social structure.⁷

Less than two decades after the introduction of sugar cultivation, African slaves outnumbered white colonists on the island. This rapid introduction of so many Africans made the maintenance of order by the shrinking white minority of vital importance. Accordingly, in 1661 Barbadian officials carefully drafted an act for the better order and governing of Negroes. This document explicitly laid out the proper roles and legally acceptable behavior of both masters and slaves, and it would be amended from time to time as circumstances demanded. Emigrants who had been squeezed out by owners of large plantations and who were therefore unable to pursue the opportunities for riches in Barbados took both the spirit and the text of its slave code with them to other developing English colonies.⁸ Indeed, as the historian Jack P. Greene writes, South Carolina and the Lower South culture that developed out of those small beginnings was as much the offspring of Barbados as was Jamaica or the other English Caribbean colonies.⁹

John Colleton, a Royalist exile in Barbados, observed the constant outmigration of whites from the island with a keen eye toward his own gain. After the Restoration, in 1660, King Charles II rewarded Colleton and a small group of colleagues for their loyalty to the Crown with a charter, issued in March 1663, for the colony of Carolina, encompassing all the territory between Virginia and Florida.¹⁰ In 1669 these eight Lords Proprietors drafted what they intended to be the governmental framework for the new colony, the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. Though it was never adopted by the Carolina Assembly, many of its provisions were in fact implemented in practice, and its language was largely responsible for the rapid settlement of Carolina that followed its drafting and circulation. The document’s terms offered policies of relative religious tolerance, liberal terms for citizenship, generous headrights (including an allowance for each slave imported), low property qualifications for office holding and the franchise, and honorific titles for elites, provisions that were attractive to immigrants from all walks of life.¹¹ In addition, the grant to every freeman of the absolute power and authority over his negro slaves suggested that those who sought to replicate the highly successful plantation world of the West Indies would not be disappointed.¹²

In the first two decades of the new colony’s existence, more than half the white settlers who arrived in Carolina were from Barbados, and many of these colonists brought along African slaves.¹³ Often, these slave owners held a somewhat paternalistic view of the bondsmen of their household, and this relatively close relation between master and slave on the frontier significantly shaped the early development of institutionalized bondage in Carolina. Still, as the number of slaves increased, their presence conjured the same dread of slave revolt in masters’ minds as had obtained in the Caribbean, especially after slave unrest and rebellion began to plague the West Indies late in the seventeenth century.¹⁴ In 1703 Carolina officials sought to check the importation of potentially troublesome slaves by placing a higher import duty on Caribbean bondsmen than on those brought directly from Africa.¹⁵

Still, the African trade ultimately provided most of the enslaved men and women brought to colonial South Carolina. The most likely destination in British North America for slaves taken from Africa was Charles Towne (renamed Charleston after the American Revolution), South Carolina.¹⁶ Carolina merchants made handsome fortunes serving as American factors for the African trade. Successful slave traders understood that white purchasers had a well-formed notion of what they wanted in a slave. Indeed, a slave’s country of origin and skill set most often determined his or her desirability and price at auction. White Carolinians demonstrated a well-developed knowledge of African geography and ethnicity in making their slave selections. Early on (and in contrast with masters from other British North American colonies), they believed they had identified certain appearances and tribal markings, skills, personality traits, and other qualities as indicative of the bondsman’s place of origin. South Carolinians preferred Gambians (from Senegambia and the Windward Coast) and Gold Coast Coromantees over all others because of their supposed propensity for hard work and their knowledge of rice cultivation, and, though market forces were often stronger than Carolina purchasers’ ability to always have their first preference, slaves from these preferr’d areas made up nearly half of all African imports.¹⁷ Toward the end of the eighteenth century, South Carolinians demonstrated an even more refined understanding of their slave purchases, changing their slave demands from broad geographic identifiers to more specific ethnic identifications.¹⁸

Europeans tapped into a long-established slave trade among Africans that had an enormous geographic reach across the continent. Those captives who were not retained by their host society or channeled into the trans-Saharan trade to the north were transferred to barracoons (slave pens) along the west coast for purchase by European traders. Their journeys to the point of embarkation sometimes took as long as four months by foot, and loss of life from capture to barracoon averaged between 10 and 15 percent. Depending on the location, captives of many different ethnicities often found themselves thrown together to await export to an unknown world.¹⁹

The Middle Passage from Africa to America was a time of unfathomable physical and psychological suffering for those who experienced it—as many as 15 million men, women, and children who crossed the Atlantic only to find more horrors as slaves in the Americas. The intensity of shared suffering onboard slave ships provided diverse survivors with a new way of perceiving themselves, a reorientation of identity in which ethnicity was gradually replaced by race as a criterion for community inclusion. This reevaluation of self was an early and fundamental stage of African American ethnogenesis.²⁰ Traders imported approximately 365,000 slaves into the North American colonies (later states) from the 1600s to 1807, the last year the trade was legal. Of these, probably 150,000 (approximately 43 percent) entered through South Carolina to feed the insatiable demand for bound laborers.²¹

Despite the economic benefits enjoyed by slaveholders, the burgeoning black population struck a note of fear in the minds of many whites. Officials made several attempts to stem the population imbalance, though none was fully successful.²² Yet it was not just the sheer numbers of African slaves that alarmed white Carolinians but their insolent and mischievous demeanors.²³ Slaves’ defiance could take many forms. Isolated acts of day-to-day resistance could include slowing work, feigning illness, breaking tools, or sabotaging production. More serious and direct forms of defiance included running away, committing arson, poisoning, and engaging in outright rebellion.²⁴ The fact that Carolina’s African population was also relatively well armed (hundreds of black men had been authorized in 1704 to serve as militiamen in colonial and Indian conflicts) was also unsettling to the free population.²⁵

Continuing reports of slave unrest in the Caribbean and Virginia and an armed rebellion in New York in 1712 raised the level of anxiety in South Carolina. That year, the colony finally enacted a comprehensive slave code, borrowing, in places nearly verbatim, a 1688 Barbadian statute that was a slightly altered version of the island’s original 1661 slave code.²⁶ When the Carolina colony revised the slave code in 1712, officials copied the preamble to the Barbados statute, maintaining that Africans were of such barbarous, wild, savage natures that they were ungovernable under laws and customs designed for more civilized white citizens, and, as such, they must be restrained from committing the disorders, rapines, and inhumanity to which they are naturally prone and inclined. The Carolina Act for the Better Governing and Ordering of Negroes and Slaves defined slaves as chattel and echoed the Fundamental Constitutions in granting a master the right to discipline them in any way he saw fit. This Act became the prototype for other American colonies as they codified chattel slavery.²⁷

Interestingly, South Carolina masters often honored the letter of the law in the breach. Slaves were regularly granted passes to move freely between plantations, travel to the Charles Towne market, even do so armed.²⁸ However, the continued rise of the black population heightened the sense of unease among the free population. The governor’s report to the Proprietors in 1708 alerted them to a startling demographic shift in the past half-decade: though the number of white Carolinians had increased by 7 percent, the black population had grown at more than five times that rate. This had produced a slim, though unmistakable, black majority. By 1720 ever-increasing African imports and a 5 percent natural rate of increase (which far exceeded that of white settlers) had produced a black population that outnumbered whites by two to one. In some districts, such as Goose Creek and St. James Santee, the ratio was closer to four to one.²⁹

Many whites feared that black armies in the fields could too easily become armies of rebellion, and the not-unreasonable apprehension of revolt was ever present. Many rumors of conspiracy were undoubtedly the product of white paranoia, but some had a basis in fact, although none of the planned rebellions over the next two decades materialized due to divided leadership and small numbers of participants. In 1739, however, the numbers of runaways had noticeably increased, and some of these reached St. Augustine, where they were greeted with great honours by the welcoming Spanish. Coupling these events with news of slave unrest in the Caribbean, Carolinians sensed something more definite afoot. To discourage a feared insurrection, officials in Charles Towne publicly executed two slaves being held on suspicion of conspiracy to rebel and displayed their dead bodies as reminders of the costs of insubordination.³⁰ In case that message was not properly received, the Commons House passed legislation requiring all white males to carry weapons when they attended church on Sundays, the day when whites were least able to directly supervise their slaves and thus the most likely day for an uprising.³¹

Despite their best attempts to avoid a deadly surprise, South Carolinians were stunned in September 1739 by the onslaught of the Stono Rebellion, the largest slave revolt in British North American history. Twenty Angolan slaves attacked a store at Stono (near Charles Towne), seized weapons, and, leaving a path of destruction in their wake, marched south toward freedom in Spanish Florida. Beating drums along the way, they welcomed other slaves who rushed to join them, and their numbers swelled to approximately a hundred by the second day.

However, in an unlikely coincidence, the rebels encountered Lieutenant Governor William Bull, who was returning to Charles Towne from his Sheldon plantation over the same road. Bull narrowly escaped, and he raced to Charles Towne and rallied the militia to hunt down the rebels. The two groups first collided midway between Beaufort and Charles Towne, and skirmishes over the next week resulted in the killing of approximately sixty rebels and the capture of dozens more. Still, white Carolinians continued on their war footing since two-thirds of the rebels remained at large. Every white male traveled with a firearm, armed guards stood watch at ferry crossings, and officials hired Native American allies to hunt down fugitives. Nearly the entire business of the state ground to a halt while white Carolinians dealt with the rebellion. Within a week, as many as sixty more rebels were found and executed and decapitated, their heads placed on pikes as warnings to future subversives.³²

Even after the ruthless defeat of the Stono rebels, white Carolinians’ fears were not put to rest. Some whites fled the Lowcountry altogether, especially when rumors of yet another rebellion circulated in December. A few months later, a slave named Peter betrayed another plot that involved as many as two hundred slaves who were rising to attack and burn Charles Towne. Again, ghastly public executions meant to awe the black majority did little to reassure the rebels’ white captors. Skittish whites suspected slave arsonists in the great fire that burned nearly a third of Charles Towne in the fall of 1740.³³

The Stono rebels’ ultimate goal, of course, was to permanently escape bondage, and many other slaves successfully made good their escapes during this period. As the South Carolina slave population increased in the eighteenth century, the number of runaways grew as well. The historian Daniel Littlefield estimates that approximately one-fifth of 1 percent of all Carolina slaves fled their bonds in the decades immediately following