What exactly triggered the Stono Rebellion is not clear. Many slaves knew that small groups of runaways had made their way from South Carolina to Florida, where they had been given freedom and land.

It was also a period of rising expectations as far as the Africans were concerned, repression as far as the whites were concerned, and rebellion. Stono was sort of part of a continuum. There was ...

Peter Hutchins Wood is the author of Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974), which has been described as one of the most influential books on ...