The Edge of Empire - The Road South

American Political History · Dec 4, 2022 · 17m

Before dawn on September 9th, 1739, a man named Jemmy led twenty enslaved Africans against a store on the Stono River, took the guns off its shelves, and turned south for Spanish Florida and the freedom the King of Spain had promised any slave who could reach it. It was the largest slave revolt in the mainland colonies, and it would be answered by the harshest slave code they had yet written. This episode follows the road the Stono rebels were marching down: south to Fort Mose, the first free black town in what is now the United States, built the year before by people who had made the same…