British Enslavement

In English Carolina, enslaved Africans were forced into labor with no legal standing and few rights, working on indigo plantations, as lumbermen and cattlemen, producing materials for shipbuilding, and clearing land. Unlike slaves in Spanish Florida, they had no recourse to legal and religious protections, were not allowed to marry, and could not hold property. By the early 1700s, slaves in the Carolinas far outnumbered their English overseers and lived in an unstable frontier society marked by constant Indian raids and growing conflict between the Spanish and English. Despite constant vigilance, torture, and public executions, many people from Congo and Angola fled enslavement for the promise of freedom in Spanish Florida, while their kinsmen who remained behind eventually developed the Gulla and Geechee cultures in Anglo areas. The most significant colonial slave rebellion took place in 1739 in Stono, South Carolina, when on September 9 a group of "Angolan" slaves, more likely from Congo, revolted, killed more than 20 English colonists, sacked and burned homes, and headed toward St. Augustine. During what was called a "drunken dance," more likely a Congo war practice, Carolina governor William Bull and his militia attacked, and the survivors fought on for another week toward St. Augustine until a larger English militia caught and killed most of them; some escaped, and if any reached St. Augustine, they would have been sheltered at Mose.

St. Augustine, Florida · United States