On September 9, 1739, a group of about twenty enslaved men broke into a store near the Stono River, twenty miles southwest of Charleston, South Carolina, took guns and powder and killed the two men running it. Others joined them. By nightfall two dozen white people were dead. Several houses were burning. The militia caught up with them the next day.
Jemmy started it. He could read, and some accounts call him Cato. The plan was not a general rising. The group was heading for St. Augustine in Spanish Florida, where the Spanish governor had been offering freedom and land to enslaved people who escaped from the British colonies and converted to Catholicism. They had a banner, drums and, according to one account, shouted "Liberty" as they went. That destination is what made the rebellion different from other conspiracies, and what made it especially alarming to the Carolina planters.
The militia killed a large number of the rebels on the spot and executed most of the rest. Estimates of the total run to roughly eighty enslaved people killed. Some escaped and stayed out for months.
South Carolina's answer was the Negro Act of 1740, and it is one of the more detailed pieces of legislation in colonial North America. It barred enslaved people from assembling, from travelling without a pass, from growing their own food, from earning money, from learning to read and write and from owning firearms. It set out how many white men had to be present when enslaved people worked, and it put a ten-year suspension on the importation of enslaved Africans through Charleston, on the theory that newly arrived people were harder to control.
The last provision did not last, and the trade resumed on a larger scale. But the hierarchy of the law, and the patrol system that enforced it, is what came out of the Stono rebellion and shaped South Carolina for the next 125 years.