Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt

By: Smith, Mark M.

Book Overview

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 Primary documents-including some works previously unpublished and largely unknown even to specialists-offer accounts of the violence, discussions of Stono's impact on white sensibilities, and public records relating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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1570036055
• ISBN13: 9781570036057
• Release Date: November 2005
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Length: 152 Pages
• Weight: 0.83 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 7.3" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

Splendid Historiographical Account of the 1739 Stono Uprising

Mark M. Smith has given us a splendid account of the 1739 Slave Revolt in the Charleston, South Carolina area. Rather than simply giving us his interpretation of this important, yet not widely studied event, Smith gives us the opportunity to look at some of the key documents relating to the uprising and then provides the reader with four separate essays to show different interpretations of the documents. The essays Smith presents are written by well recognized historians, including one by Smith himself, and vary in analysis - we see such concepts forwarded as the idea that the rebelling slaves were mainly ex-military, that these male slaves revolted because they were pushed into agricultural work that they saw as "women's work", and that the slaves revolved on September 9, 1739 because of the religious significance of the date. All told, this book will make an exceptionally useful case study of this revolt, and the presentation of the material makes it a most valuable addition to the field of historiography and training of future historians in how documents may be interpreted differently to come up with the "real" picture of what happened in the past.

Finally an accurate account!

The author has taken his time to present all sides of this important event in South Carolina history. By taking a dispassionate look at the contemporary accounts as well as later oral histories he allows one to make up his or her own mind as the the true events. I found no evidence of any political slant. Not a novel for light reading, but easy to read. Makes a case as a good text, not only in the realm of black history, but in how one event can be looked at from numerous eyes. Gives one a perspective on how the history we come to accept can be changed and minipulated depending on ones desires and point of view. Highly recommend this in any student of South Carolina or black histories library.

You are There!

This little book is a must read for anyone interested in colonial American, Southern, or African American history. Mark Smith has assembled an incredible collection of original documents [some never before published] that describe the largest slave revolt in 18th century Amercia. There are also several essays by modern historians discussing the significance of the Stono Rebellian and its aftermath. And, believe it or not, they are just as interesting as the primary documents. Smith's, in particular, is very thought-provoking.