![]() ![]() By one of those dark coincidences history delights in, the Stono themselves are remembered principally (almost entirely) for having started an uprising against the colony. We call it the Stono Rebellion because it started in a plantation district (a “general area of settlement,” in one scholar’s suitably vague phrase) known as Stono, which had taken its name from the river that ran near it, the Stono River, which had taken its name from a Native American tribe, the Stono or Stonoe or Stonowe, who when Carolina was founded in 1663 were settled close to Charles Town. Historians call it the Stono Rebellion, but on the Southern Frontier they knew it as the Gullah War, or more plainly as the Insurrection of the Carolina Negroes. It happened right as the second epidemic was peaking, in September of 1739, and may have been timed to take advantage of the shaken condition in which the two years of disease had left the colonists. Also influential-its ripple effects make it probably the most important such revolt in Southern history. ![]() ![]() There was a fourth, a slave revolt, small in scale, but growing when it was terminated, and unsettlingly bold. But of the catastrophes that marked those months, none of these three was fated to leave the most lasting scar on the mind of the colony. N two and a half years’ time, between the spring of 1738 and the late fall of ’40, South Carolina endured two plagues-the first of smallpox, the second of yellow fever-and a Great Fire (“one of the worst in any city during the colonial period,” according to the scholar who has made the most careful study of the matter). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |