First, they marched to the Stono Bridge and broke into Hutchenson’s store, which they robbed of guns and ammunition. The two white storekeepers were beheaded. Then they continued south, breaking into homes, executing the white families they found, and adding dozens of additional enslaved people to their ranks. At least twenty-three white Carolinians were left dead. The rebels are said to have acquired at least two drums, hoisted a flag, and indulged in defiant shouts of “Liberty!”
“Having found rum in some houses and drunk freely of it, they halted in an open field, and began to sing and dance, by way of triumph,” wrote Alexander Hewatt, a white Charleston pastor, in his account of the uprising.
But the rebels would never make it to St. Augustine. In fact, most died in that very field—descended upon by an armed local militia.
The white residents vowed to never let this happen again. The colony’s House of Assembly took steps to curtail the growing Black majority, implementing a ten-year moratorium on the importation of Black people and passing the Negro Act of 1740, which restricted the rights of enslaved people to assemble and educate themselves—undercutting the chances that future generations would discover the promise of freedom made by the Spanish to the South. For decades, white residents feared that some of the rebels, who had fled into the forest, would come back and again terrorize their towns.
The history we’ve been given recalls Stono—one of the bloodiest uprisings of enslaved people in the history of the land that would become America—as a cautionary tale, the story of the dangers of allowing Black men and women to dream of liberty. There’s nothing to suggest that the rebels at Stono were political visionaries, that they aspired to overthrow the system of enslavement and plunder in which they lived each day as victims. They most likely just wanted to escape.
Generations of American storytellers have found that, when it comes to tales of uprising and rebellion, banishment digests easier than recollection. But what do we lose when we refuse to sit with the truth? What do we gain when we allow the rebels at Stono to tell their own story, when we see them not as rebels but as revolutionaries? What if the uprising, the riot, is not a story of disorder but one of a fearless fight for freedom?
History has left us just one known account of the rebellion from a nonwhite perspective, as part of the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s. This is an interview with George Cato, purportedly a direct descendant—the great-great-grandson—of the rebellion’s leader, whose family had orally preserved the details of the insurrection for nearly two hundred years.
“I sho’ does come from dat old stock who had de misfortune to be slaves but who decided to be men, at one and de same,” Cato told his interviewer. “De first Cato slave we knows ’bout was plum willin to lay down his life for de right, as he see it.”
1744–1749
LUCY TERRY PRINCE
Nafissa Thompson-Spires
A ninety-six-year-old Black woman massages her spine for a moment, kneads her Achilles, lifts her skirt slightly, secures her booted ankles into the stirrups, and starts on a long trek, “over the Green Mountains,” to place flowers on the grave of her husband.
She has made the painful ride annually since 1794, and when she waves, a wry smile in her eyes, passersby remark, “Luce Bijah is still at it.” Twenty years before, they shook their heads, incredulous, as Lucy Terry Prince rode home from making a successful stand before the Vermont supreme court. And since the eighteenth century, they sang her song with a knowing in their recitation.
Much of the extant research about Terry Prince focuses on the significance of her literary contributions. Born into slavery around 1730 and taken to Deerfield, Massachusetts, from Rhode Island, Terry Prince composed the first known poetry by an African American. She is customarily situated alongside Phillis Wheatley—the first African American with a published poetry book (1773)—and Jupiter Hammon, the first published African American poet, author of the 1761 broadside An Evening Thought; Salvation by Christ With Penitential Cries.
Terry Prince’s “Bars Fight” remains the only known poetic work by its author and was preserved orally until its 1854 front-page regional print publication in the Springfield Daily Republican and later in Josiah Holland’s 1855 History of Western Massachusetts. The ballad recounts the eponymous incident when “King George’s War between England and France broke out in 1745, with the Abenaki Indians, who had been displaced from Massachusetts to northern New England and Canada, allying with the French.”
What I’m most interested in here, however, is not the poem itself but the spirit and power structures that produced—and protected—Lucy Terry Prince. She stood before major government officials and is memorialized as an artist, but much of her life—including whether she actually “wrote” the poem—is shrouded in mystique and urban legends.
Baptized in 1735, Lucy was possibly born on the African continent and brought to Rhode Island, where she was purchased by Ebenezer Wells and subsequently moved to Deerfield. Church records confirm that in 1756 she married Abijah Prince, a free man who had secured his freedom after his master’s death in 1749 and somehow purchased Lucy’s freedom as well. They settled in Northfield, where Prince held “some real estate rights” to “three divisions of the undivided land.” It is clear that the Terry Prince family, which soon included six children, was well known in their community. Neighbors called the brook bubbling through their property “Bijah’s Brook,” and their house “a place of resort for the young people of the ‘Street,’ ” their front porch a pulpit, a site “where folks were entertained and enlightened by recitations, music, and poetry.” Even if much of her mobility came through her husband, Terry Prince’s rhetorical cunning made her a respected and noted figure in her own right.
Terry Prince’s emancipation, freedom, and property already marked her as somewhat remarkable, and she made waves that could have ended in disaster in two different legal incidents. When in 1762 Bijah stood to inherit a hundred acres from a grantee in what is now Guilford, Vermont, Lucy and Bijah became entangled in an ongoing legal battle over this land with a white man who tried to claim it. As the case escalated through the 1790s, Lucy litigated before the Vermont supreme court, making her the first woman—and Black woman—to argue before the court and to win her case at that.
When liberal arts institution Williams College refused to admit her son Festus because of his race, Terry Prince advocated on his behalf during a three-hour argument. Her son was not admitted to the school, but we cannot understate the magnitude of Terry Prince’s argumentation and willingness to take on white individuals and institutions in the eighteenth-century United States. Although race was not yet the fixed construct that it is today, Terry Prince’s actions certainly could have compromised her and her family’s safety.