Twenty Enslaved Men Rise Up at the Stono River
The largest slave rebellion in Britain's mainland American colonies before the Revolution ends in beheadings and a harsher slave code
Quick facts
- Date
- September 9, 1739
- Location
- Stono River, South Carolina
- Leader
- Jemmy, described as Angolan
- Colonial response
- South Carolina Negro Act of 1740
What happened
Early on Sunday, September 9, 1739, a group the colonial record calls Angola Negroes, numbering about twenty and led by a man named Jemmy, gathered near the Stono River roughly twenty miles from Charleston, South Carolina. They broke into a store belonging to a Mr. Hutchenson, killed the two storekeepers they found there, and armed themselves with the guns and powder inside. Beating drums and calling out for liberty, the group marched south toward Spanish Florida, where a Spanish proclamation had promised freedom to enslaved people escaping British colonies, recruiting more enslaved people and burning houses as they went, sparing at least one enslaver known to treat enslaved people kindly. Colonial militia caught up with them that afternoon; more than twenty white colonists and roughly forty Black South Carolinians were killed before the uprising was suppressed, with surviving participants later tried and executed.
Why it matters
South Carolina's colonial assembly responded with the Negro Act of 1740, which barred enslaved people from growing their own food, assembling in groups, earning and keeping their own money, and learning to read, and imposed a temporary moratorium on new slave imports out of fear of further revolt. The rebellion is documented evidence that enslaved people organized armed resistance from the earliest years of American plantation slavery, not only after abolitionist movements emerged decades later.
How we know
Two contemporary 1739 accounts survive, one from an unnamed white colonial official and one oral history passed down through descendants of a rebellion leader named Cato, both preserved and published by the National Humanities Center; BlackPast.org's summary draws on the same colonial record and subsequent historical scholarship.
Sources
- National Humanities Center. Two Views of the Stono Slave Rebellion, South Carolina, 1739 · Primary source (author-declared)nationalhumanitiescenter.org · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match).
- BlackPast.org. Stono Rebellion (1739) · General sourceblackpast.org · Cited as a "reference" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Part of a timelineThe Atlantic Slave Trade29 events · Four centuries in which European traders forced an estimated 12.5 million Africans onto ships bound for the Americas, and the enslaved people, revolts, and abolitionists who fought it from the first crossing to the lastView all →