[Footnote 1:  Holland:  A Refutation of Calumnies, 63.]

In May, 1720, some Negroes in South Carolina were fairly well organized and killed a man named Benjamin Cattle, one white woman, and a little Negro boy.  They were pursued and twenty-three taken and six convicted.  Three of the latter were executed, the other three escaping.  In October, 1722, the Negroes near the mouth of the Rappahannock in Virginia undertook to kill the white people while the latter were assembled in church, but were discovered and put to flight.  On this occasion, as on most others, Sunday was the day chosen for the outbreak, the Negroes then being best able to get together.  In April, 1723, it was thought that some fires in Boston had been started by Negroes, and the selectmen recommended that if more than two Negroes were found “lurking together” on the streets they should be put in the house of correction.  In 1728 there was a well organized attempt in Savannah, then a place of three thousand white people and two thousand seven hundred Negroes.  The plan to kill all the white people failed because of disagreement as to the exact method; but the body of Negroes had to be, fired on more than once before it dispersed.  In 1730 there was in Williamsburg, Va., an insurrection that grew out of a report that Colonel Spotswood had orders from the king to free all baptized persons on his arrival; men from all the surrounding counties had to be called in before it could be put down.

The first open rebellion in South Carolina in which Negroes were “actually armed and embodied"[1] took place in 1730.  The plan was for each Negro to kill his master in the dead of night, then for all to assemble supposedly for a dancing-bout, rush upon the heart of the city, take possession of the arms, and kill any white man they saw.  The plot was discovered and the leaders executed.  In this same colony three formidable insurrections broke out within the one year 1739—­one in St. Paul’s Parish, one in St. John’s, and one in Charleston.  To some extent these seem to have been fomented by the Spaniards in the South, and in one of them six houses were burned and as many as twenty-five white people killed.  The Negroes were pursued and fourteen killed.  Within two days “twenty more were killed, and forty were taken, some of whom were shot, some hanged, and some gibbeted alive."[2] This “examplary punishment,” as Governor Gibbes called it, was by no means effective, for in the very next year, 1740, there broke out what might be considered the most formidable insurrection in the South in the whole colonial period.  A number of Negroes, having assembled at Stono, first surprised, and killed two young men in a warehouse, from which they then took guns and ammunition.[3] They then elected as captain one of their own number named Cato, whom they agreed to follow, and they marched towards the southwest, with drums beating and colors flying, like a disciplined company.  They entered the home of a man named Godfrey, and