African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion

John K. Thornton, “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion," American Historical Review 96:4 (1991): 1101-13.

This is an excellent article on the Stono Rebellion, especially if you are already familiar with it. I wasn't, so that involved some brief looking around to get more context. Here's some I quickly pulled from Wikipedia (that should introduce some controversy between me and the occasional visitor):

VERY brief Wikipedia download: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stono_Rebellion)
Where: South Carolina
When: 9 September, 1739
What: An enslaved man named Jemmy pulled together some other people, and using flags and drums, marched their way toward Spanish Florida, where it was known that former enslaved people might have refuge. Exact numbers are as of yet unclear, but 20-100 or so fought, and they picked up recruits along the way. The rebellion was put down and most were executed, not before they killed dozens of people. I believe they call it Stono because of the name of the bridge they crossed.
Why: People didn't like being enslaved. This should be unremarkable; however, there is often an implicit surprise in the texts I read about slavery as if they were saying, "Yes, but what's the real reason you revolted?"

PBS (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p284.html)
has some of the primary documents and a brief summary that adds a great deal to the above. Letters show how one enslaved man named Thomas Elliot was given a suit of clothes for his bravery in fighting off the rebels. This is an example of how people had to and did make calculations about their wellbeing in the long term vs. short term (much of the newer literature about enslaved people seems to work very hard to show that enslaved people were as rational as any other human being; this seems to be a reaction to the previous literature that seemed to imply the opposite).

In any case, the Thornton article is rich, so I suggest you read it, but what follows is my brief interpretation. The title of the article gives away what Dr. Thornton would like us to think about, and that is that the Rebellion's roots go back to the Kingdom of Kongo from 1680-1740 (1102). He cites several factors that may have supported the rebellion; the fact that many of the enslaved people would have likely come from the same area, spoken Portuguese, that they would have had a strong Christian tradition in Kongo, and that because their kingdom was strong, they were less likely to have been previously enslaved by others nearby. Some of them may have also been warriors already and possibly had access to firearms, so their ability to organize and fight may have been enhanced. Their tactics (brief attacks, relocate, attack again) are said to be consistent with fighting tactics in the kingdom of Kongo (1113).

The message in this article is clear; while historians of slavery look for transatlantic aspects in other areas of enslavement, there is a good deal of value in looking at the transatlantic aspects of rebellion. A study like this appears to me a general trend away from considering the plantation in a vacuum, which returns explanatory power to people from the Kingdom of Kongo as opposed to imagining their reality as solely a reaction to local events. The plantation "complex" is imagining slavery as an Atlantic and worldwide set of connections, but this article goes a step beyond that, showing how one might look at these accounts with a framework where the plantation is the periphery as opposed to the center.

Something I have been asked to think about in my coursework for this week is to analyze how slavery, race, and gender are tied together. In looking at this article, it would be interesting to know what women's roles in the Rebellion were. I have noticed so far that if a woman does something during this time period, it's treated as anomaly, as improbable as that seems. That anomaly, however, usually turns up as a sensation, so the fact that I have not yet read about women with respect to this Rebellion yet doesn't mean it isn't there, but it makes a good case for looking with more vigor.