![]() They were headed towards Spanish Florida because the Spanish promised freedom and land to British slaves that escaped. Led by an Angolan slave named Jemmy, a group of twenty slaves organized on the banks of the Stono River. The Stono Rebellion, sometimes called Cato’s Conspiracy or Cato’s Rebellion, was a slave rebellion that began in South Carolina while it was still a British Colony. The Negro Act of South Carolina, or South Carolina’s Slave Code of 1739 was enacted in response to the Stono Rebellion of 1739. ![]() In the last article I discussed how the law created American chattel slavery and perpetuated a slave based caste system. In this next section we now turn to the laws during slavery. Specifically, I want to examine two legal documents: The Negro Act of South Carolina and the Dred Scott ruling. I chose these documents because of what they offered substantively and chronologically they serve as bookends to the laws during slavery. The Negro Act arose in 1739 during the earlier portion of slavery and the Dred Scott ruling was decided in 1857, only a few years prior to the civil war and the end of slavery.Īs we examine these documents, we will again detect similar themes we saw in Part II of this series. The laws further dehumanized slaves and we see the irony of how whites used the law to repress the freedom of slaves, while espousing notions of freedom in their fight against Britain. In other words, the law was a sword and shield protecting whites while striking blacks. This was certainly the case in the Negro Act. ![]() (Part III in Series “The History of Black Rights in America”) ![]()
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