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Illustrated Episode · Volume II, chapter 22 · 9 September 1739

Drums beating, marching for liberty

Along a sandy pine-lined road a column of enslaved men in plain shirts and caps marches toward the viewer behind a bareheaded leader, two drummers and a raised pale banner, muskets on shoulders, smoke rising far behind them.
South Carolina, September 1739. Some sixty enslaved men march south on the Pon Pon road behind a captain named Jemmy, a banner raised and two drums beating, crying "Liberty." Their road leads to Spanish Florida, where the Crown has promised freedom to fugitives. Rothbard sees Stono as one front in a guerrilla war for freedom, and the colony answers with terror. Chapter 22 of Conceived in Liberty.

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Adapted from Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Mises Institute, 2011), CC BY 3.0.

What happened

Sunday, 9 September 1739, was the day the planters let the enslaved work for themselves. Near the Stono River, twenty miles southwest of Charleston, about twenty men led by a man called Jemmy broke into a store, killed the two shopkeepers and took the guns and powder. Then they turned south on the Pon Pon road, the road to Spanish Florida, where the Spanish Crown had promised freedom to any fugitive who reached St. Augustine. Near daybreak they passed Wallace's tavern and spared its keeper, a man known to be kind to his slaves. Rothbard has fifty or sixty more falling in behind them as they marched with drums beating and flags flying, crying "liberty" (CiL, p. 597). Lieutenant Governor William Bull, riding the same road, saw them and got away to raise the militia. Before the day was out the planters caught the band dancing in a field, routed it, and shot or hanged the captured. Rothbard puts Stono inside a longer guerrilla war for freedom: flight to Florida, masters assassinated, plots uncovered. The colony answered with hangings, a tariff on imported slaves, and a law for better food and clothing. A year later it hanged fifty more in Charleston, ten a day.

Sources

  1. Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2011 single-volume ed.), vol. II, ch. 22, 'Slavery in South Carolina', pp. 595-598. CC BY 3.0. Rothbard
  2. 'An Account of the Negroe Insurrection in South Carolina,' 1739 (by an unidentified white official; some scholars credit Gen. James Oglethorpe), in Allen D. Candler, ed., The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, vol. 22 pt. 2 (Atlanta, 1913), pp. 232-236; reprinted in Mark M. Smith, ed., Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (University of South Carolina Press, 2005); text as given by the National Humanities Center, 'Two Views of the Stono Slave Rebellion'. Primary source
  3. George Cato, WPA Federal Writers' Project interview (c. 1937), a great-great-grandson's family account of 'Cato', commander of the 1739 rising; printed by the National Humanities Center with Mark M. Smith's comment (Stono, p. 55). Read for the leader's name and literacy only; not used for scene facts. Secondary source
  4. 'Stono Rebellion', Wikipedia (accessed 2026-09-30), citing John K. Thornton on the rebels' Kongolese, Catholic and Portuguese-speaking origin and Mark M. Smith, ed., Stono (2005). Secondary source
  5. data/cil/registry/eras/southern-colonies-1710-1770.yaml, dress, arms and forbid entries for the Stono rebels of 1739 (sources in its notes: Revolutionary War Journal 'Colonial Slave Clothing'; Wikipedia 'Kongo textiles'; Wikipedia 'Stono Rebellion'). Secondary source