Resistance and Rebellion: Slavery and the Colonies
Resistance, Not Passivity
It is tempting to picture enslaved Africans in the British colonies as objects of history — as people things were done to. The historical record shows the opposite. Enslaved people in eighteenth-century North America resisted bondage in many ways: through everyday acts of defiance, through running away, and on rare but striking occasions through open rebellion. Resistance happened across the colonies, north and south, and the laws that planters passed in response are themselves evidence of how seriously they took the threat. The Edexcel specification names two episodes — the Stono Rebellion of 1739 and the New York Conspiracy of 1741 — precisely because they show that enslaved people were political actors with histories of their own.
Enslaved people resisted in three main ways. Day-to-day: work slowdowns, sabotage, breaking tools. Escape: running away, including the route to Spanish Florida. Open rebellion: armed revolts such as Stono (1739) and the alleged New York Conspiracy (1741).
Everyday Resistance
Most resistance was small, individual and unrecorded by name. Enslaved people slowed their pace in the fields, broke tools, set fire to barns, feigned illness, and refused to work on Sundays despite plantation rules. Skilled enslaved labourers in towns negotiated harder for hire-out wages and used those wages to buy themselves a measure of independence. Many ran away. The colonial newspapers carried hundreds of advertisements for runaways, and the recapture of fugitives became a profession in itself, with paid slave-catchers and bounty schemes. None of these acts ended slavery, but together they meant that enslaved life was contested every day — and that owners knew it. Slave codes, the laws regulating the lives of enslaved people, became progressively harsher across the colonies in the early eighteenth century in response to this constant low-level resistance.
A common misconception is to treat enslaved Africans as passive victims of an abstract system. In fact the spec deliberately names the Stono Rebellion, the Spanish Florida route to freedom, and the post-Revolutionary Black Loyalists to make clear that resistance and political agency ran through the entire period. Higher-band answers reframe slavery as something enslaved people resisted, not just endured. The historian Gary Nash’s tradition of ‘history from below’ foregrounds working people, enslaved Africans and Indigenous nations as the unseen drivers of American change.
Spain’s Florida Route to Freedom
For enslaved people in the Carolinas, the closest thing to hope lay south. From 1693, Spain offered freedom to enslaved Africans who reached Spanish Florida and converted to Roman Catholicism. The policy was strategic: by undermining the British plantation system, Spain weakened a rival empire on its border. In 1738, the Spanish governor of Florida established Fort Mose, just north of St Augustine, as a free Black settlement — the first legally sanctioned free Black town in what would become the United States. News of Mose travelled along the rumour networks that bound enslaved communities together, and a steady trickle of freedom seekers crossed the Carolina–Florida border. Carolina planters in turn pressed their own colonial governments for tighter slave codes and more aggressive patrols. The Florida route was a strategic threat as well as a personal hope; it sat in the background of every Carolina slave-owner’s mind in the 1730s.
The Stono Rebellion (September 1739)
On Sunday 9 September 1739, around twenty enslaved Africans — many believed to come from the kingdom of Kongo and possibly with military backgrounds — gathered near the Stono River in South Carolina, around twenty miles south of Charleston. They broke into a store at Stono Bridge, took weapons and ammunition, killed the storekeepers, and began to march south, calling out ‘Liberty!’ under a banner. Their goal appears to have been Spanish Florida. As they moved, more enslaved people joined the rising; by the afternoon, around 100 were on the march, having burned several plantations and killed about twenty white settlers. A militia force commissioned by the colonial governor caught up with the rebels at Edisto River later that day; in the running fight that followed, around 30 to 40 of the rebels were killed and many of the rest captured and executed in the days afterwards. It was the largest enslaved revolt in colonial mainland North America before the American Revolution.
The Stono Rebellion broke out on 9 September 1739 in South Carolina. Around 100 enslaved people marched towards Spanish Florida, killing about 20 settlers before the militia stopped them. Carolina passed the harsher Negro Act of 1740 in response.
Stono’s Aftermath
The South Carolina assembly responded with the Negro Act of 1740, the harshest slave code yet seen in the British colonies. It banned enslaved people from gathering in groups, being taught to write, growing their own food, and earning money. It limited owners’ ability to free their enslaved workers, in case freedom became a cover for further unrest. It introduced a slave import duty designed to slow the African slave trade into the colony, on the assumption that newly arrived Africans were the most likely to rebel. None of this, of course, ended resistance — but it shows how seriously planters took the political threat that enslaved people posed. Stono also sharpened relations with Spain. Britain declared war on Spain six weeks later, in October 1739, and news that war was coming may have helped decide when the rebels moved.
The New York Conspiracy of 1741
Less than two years later, fear of an enslaved rising broke out in a very different setting. In March and April 1741, a series of fires swept through New York City, including one that damaged Fort George at the southern tip of Manhattan. New York at this point had one of the largest urban populations of enslaved Africans in the colonies, and rumours quickly spread that the fires were the work of a co-ordinated conspiracy of enslaved Africans and poor whites. A grand jury was convened, and over the spring and summer it took testimony from a young white indentured servant called Mary Burton. On her evidence, around 180 people were arrested, 20 of them white New Yorkers. Of those tried, around 30 were executed — many burned at the stake, others hanged — and around 70 enslaved people were transported out of the colony.
Historians remain divided on whether the New York Conspiracy was a real plot or a panic. Some — influenced by the comparison with the Salem witch trials — argue that the prosecutions were driven by fear, by the use of accusations to lower one’s own sentence, and by Burton’s expanding testimony. Others, drawing on later evidence about Atlantic radical networks linking enslaved people, sailors and white labourers, argue that some kind of resistance plot did exist, even if the legal proceedings exaggerated and distorted it. Either way, the trials are evidence of how anxious northern white New Yorkers were about the enslaved population in their midst — and a reminder that slavery was never just a Southern question.
Why This Matters
The Stono Rebellion and the New York Conspiracy together puncture two common misconceptions about colonial slavery: that enslaved people were passive, and that slavery was a purely Southern phenomenon. Both events also produced harsher slave codes that locked the institution in still more tightly — a pattern that returns again and again in the history of slavery, in which acts of resistance lead in the short term to fiercer repression. When the colonies eventually fight Britain in the 1770s, enslaved Africans will use the disorder of war to seize freedom for themselves; the resistance traditions visible in 1739 and 1741 are not isolated outbursts but the continuing political life of an unfree people.