Jemmy was leading them towards the then-Spanish territory of Florida, where he had heard slaves could live as free men. The men would not make it to Florida. They wouldn’t even come close. Jemmy and his men made just 15 miles.
The men marched from the store to a house belonging to a white man named Godfrey. They burned the house to the ground and killed Godfrey and his family. When the slaves arrived at the home of a man called Lemy they killed him and his family. They did spare a man named Wallace, who owned a tavern. He was considered a kind slave owner. But every other home they passed they torched.
As Jemmy and his group made their way south-west, more slaves joined the Stono rebellion. Their number had swelled to about 100 men before they were spotted, by chance, by South Carolina’s lieutenant governor, William Bull who rounded up a militia, and they confronted the slaves in the middle of a field near the Edisto river, a winding stretch of water that meets the Atlantic Ocean 50 miles north of the South Carolina-Georgia border. A battle ensued. The slaves fought bravely, but they were outnumbered and their opponents were better armed. The majority of the rebels were slaughtered. Some were taken back to plantations and returned to slavery. About 30 escaped, but were later rounded up and killed.The plantation owners mounted some of the slaves’ heads on sticks along the main road, as a warning to others.
There were uprisings over the next two years, although historians are divided on how much they were inspired by Stono. None were on the same scale, and none were successful. Slavery continued in the North American colonies, and continued when the US became an independent country in 1776. It would be 1865 – more than 120 years after the uprising in Stono.
The largest rebellion of the time may have been doomed, but over the next 100 years more men sought their own version of liberty. Eighty-three years after Jemmy and his men attempted their revolt, Denmark Vesey, a former slave himself, was planning his own large-scale Charleston rebellion. Around 1800, when he was in his early 30s, Vesey had won $1,500 in a cash lottery. He used some of the money to buy his freedom from his owner, and hoped to use the rest to secure his wife’s freedom, but her owner refused to sell her.
Over the next 20 years Vesey, who had been born into slavery in the then-Danish colony of St Thomas, built up a carpentry business and became a prominent figure in the emerging African Methodist Episcopal church – the church Dylann Roof would target two centuries later. Vesey maintained friendships with enslaved men, and became increasingly determined to change the state of affairs in South Carolina.
“He’s a man who by that time period was in his 50s, mid-50s. He’s an old man,” said Curtis Franks, museum curator at the Avery Research Center for African American history and culture in Charleston. “It was this heightened sense of urgency because of where he was in his life to do what he could do to bring about an end to the institution of slavery.”
In 1821 Vesey and other churchgoers began to plan a revolt. By some accounts thousands of men were prepared to join the cause, both in the city and out into the countryside – even as far as the Stono river where their predecessors had assembled nearly a century earlier. The men planned to attack an arsenal facility in downtown Charleston on 14 July 1822, seize weapons, then commandeer ships and sail to Haiti, where slaves had overthrown French colonialists two decades earlier. Had they made it, Vesey and his companions would have been able to live freely on the island, a thousand miles south-east. They didn’t make it. The plot was exposed days before they were due to strike. After a brief trial Vesey and 34 others were hanged, 38 more were deported.
Franks was part of a group of people who wanted to erect a statue of Vesey in Charleston. He saw it as an important counterpoint to the existing monuments that glorify Confederate politicians and leaders. The group got the backing of some members of the Charleston city council, which at the time was evenly split between black and white people, and of the city’s mayor. Nevertheless, it took almost 15 years for Franks and the others to get their memorial to Vesey and his would-be rebellion. They faced opposition in the press, Franks said, and on talk radio. Opponents vilified Vesey as a terrorist – ignoring the hypocrisy of the memorials to people who initiated a civil war – and one proposed site was blocked after residents protested.
There are more than 700 monuments to the Confederacy in the US, the majority in the south. Including park and school names, street and bridge names and public holidays, the Southern Poverty Law Center says there are more than 1,500 “symbols of the Confederacy” in public spaces across the country. The struggle to erect monuments and memorials to those enslaved – or who fought enslavement – proves just as difficult as the fight to remove those Confederate symbols.
Today the only marker of the failed rebellion is a small sign by the side of US Highway 17, just past the Stono river. It is not easy to spot. There is no place to stop. The marker was erected in 2006.
It is almost 300 years since Jemmy and his rebels briefly broke free, and almost 200 years since Denmark Vesey was executed for trying to help others do the same. But the fight for liberty in this country has still not been won.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/24/stono-rebellion-slave-uprising-commemoration-monuments-confederate
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