1740s

South Carolina formalized the slave patrol system after Stono — organized white men with legal authority to police enslaved movement, search quarters, and punish violations. Historians widely regard these patrols as the direct institutional predecessor of modern American policing.

In the wake of the Stono Rebellion, South Carolina formalized the slave patrol system — organized groups of white men with legal authority to police enslaved movement, search quarters, and punish violations. Similar systems existed in Virginia and other colonies. These patrols are widely regarded by historians as the direct institutional predecessor of modern American policing, embedding racial surveillance into law enforcement from its origins.

After a series of fires in New York City, colonial authorities arrested hundreds of Black and white people suspected of planning an insurrection. In trials driven by panic and the testimony of a teenage indentured servant, Mary Burton, 13 Black men were burned at the stake, 17 were hanged, and approximately 70 were transported to Caribbean slavery. Historians debate whether a real conspiracy existed.

In response to the Stono Rebellion, South Carolina passed the Negro Act of 1740, one of the most restrictive slave codes in colonial America. It prohibited enslaved people from growing their own food, earning money, learning to read, or assembling in groups. It also imposed a 10-year moratorium on importing enslaved Africans. The Act remained foundational to South Carolina law into the Civil War era.

Response to the Stono Rebellion, this act prohibited enslaved people from growing food, earning money, learning to read, or assembling. It imposed a 10-year moratorium on African imports and remained foundational to South Carolina law into the Civil War era.

In the immediate aftermath of the 1739 Stono Rebellion, South Carolina dramatically expanded the powers of its slave patrol system through the comprehensive Negro Act of 1740. Patrols were enlarged in size and given broader authority to stop, search, and punish any enslaved person found without a written pass. Plantation owners were required to maintain specified patrol responsibilities. The act also prohibited enslaved people from assembling in groups, learning to write, earning their own money, or growing their own food to sell. The 1740 patrol expansion created one of the most comprehensive systems of racialized surveillance in the colonial world and served as a model for patrol legislation in other colonies. South Carolina by 1740 had a Black majority — roughly two-thirds of the population — making this expansion of coercive control a direct response to the demographic reality that enslaved people outnumbered white colonists.

Beginning in March 1741, a series of fires in New York City — starting with Fort George on March 18, followed by fires across the city — triggered a citywide panic. Authorities arrested John Hughson, a tavern keeper whose establishment was frequented by sailors and enslaved people. A sixteen-year-old Irish indentured servant named Mary Burton, arrested on theft charges, was promised a reward of £100 and began providing testimony about an alleged conspiracy of enslaved people and poor whites to burn the city, kill the white men, seize white women, and install a new king. Burton's testimony repeatedly expanded only under pressure, and she later told neighbors that 'there was no plot.' Nevertheless, New York authorities executed 13 enslaved people by burning at the stake, 17 by hanging, executed 4 white people, and transported approximately 70 enslaved people to the Caribbean. The victims included Caesar, a Black man hanged despite weak evidence, and John Ury, a Latin teacher accused of being a Catholic priest fomenting rebellion. Contemporary historians largely conclude the conspiracy existed primarily in the minds of authorities seeking to explain the fires and reassert racial control over a city in which approximately 1,700 Black people lived alongside 7,000 whites.

Enslaved Africans aboard the British slave ship Jolly Bachelor staged an uprising during the Middle Passage. The revolt was documented in insurance and admiralty records. Shipboard insurrections were far more common than typically acknowledged — historians estimate that a significant uprising occurred on roughly one in ten slave voyages during the peak of the trade.

Beginning around 1740 and reaching full commercial force by 1745, indigo cultivation became South Carolina's second most valuable export after rice, producing roughly one-third of the colony's total export value before the Revolutionary War. The commercial success is conventionally attributed to Eliza Lucas (later Pinckney), who at age 18 began experimenting with Caribbean indigo strains on her family's Wappoo Plantation outside Charleston. But the actual cultivation, harvest, and processing knowledge was held by enslaved workers — many of them from regions of West Africa where indigo had long been cultivated and used as dye. Enslaved people performed every labor-intensive step: planting, weeding, harvesting, steeping the plants in fermentation vats, beating the liquid to oxidize it, drawing off the water, pressing and drying the blue dye cakes. The toxic fermentation process exposed enslaved workers to noxious fumes. The indigo boom accelerated slave imports into South Carolina through the 1740s and 1750s.

New Jersey Quaker John Woolman began traveling to slaveholding Quaker meetings across the colonies in the 1740s, personally appealing to enslavers to free their captives. His campaign, alongside Anthony Benezet's writings, gradually moved the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting toward an abolition position it would formally adopt in 1776. Woolman's moral witness was the earliest sustained individual anti-slavery campaign in American history.

New Jersey Quaker John Woolman began traveling to slaveholding Quaker meetings across the colonies, personally appealing to enslavers to free their captives. His campaign gradually moved the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting toward abolition, formally adopted in 1776.

Between 1745 and 1775, the Virginia Gazette published hundreds of advertisements from enslavers seeking the return of enslaved people who had fled. These advertisements constitute an inadvertent archive of slavery's violence. Physical descriptions routinely catalogued whipping scars ('has scars on his back from whipping'), branding marks, iron collar abrasions around the neck, missing fingers from cotton gin accidents, and cut marks from axes. Advertisements describe enslaved people 'easily frightened by the whip,' indicating conditioned trauma responses. Many describe African-born enslaved people with ritual scarification — facial markings from specific ethnic groups in West and Central Africa — providing evidence of the ongoing importation of Africans through the mid-18th century. The ads also reveal resistance: enslaved people who spoke multiple languages, who claimed to be free, who had trades enabling them to pass as free workers, and who had relatives in other colonies or towns whom enslavers guessed they were seeking.

Between 1745 and 1775, the Virginia Gazette published hundreds of advertisements from enslavers seeking the return of enslaved people who had fled. These advertisements constitute an inadvertent archive of slavery's violence. Physical descriptions routinely catalogued whipping scars, branding marks, iron collar abrasions around the neck, missing fingers from cotton gin accidents, and cut marks from axes. Advertisements describe enslaved people 'easily frightened by the whip,' indicating conditioned trauma responses. Many describe African-born enslaved people with ritual facial scarification from specific West African ethnic groups, providing evidence of the ongoing importation of Africans. The ads also reveal resistance: enslaved people who spoke multiple languages, who claimed to be free, who had trades enabling them to pass as free workers, and who had relatives in other towns whom enslavers guessed they were seeking.

George Whitefield, the most famous preacher of the Great Awakening who drew enormous crowds of both Black and white listeners across the colonies, was simultaneously a slave owner and an active lobbyist to legalize slavery in Georgia. In 1747-1748, Whitefield wrote letters to Georgia's trustees arguing that the colony could not succeed economically without enslaved labor and pressing for the repeal of Georgia's ban on slavery. He purchased a plantation in South Carolina and owned enslaved workers. Whitefield's theology insisted on the spiritual equality of all people before God — he preached to enslaved Africans and his accessible style resonated powerfully — while his economic behavior and political advocacy reinforced the slave system. His position exemplified the accommodation evangelical Protestantism made with slavery in the American South, providing a template for the religious defense of slavery that would dominate Southern churches for the next century.

George Whitefield, the most famous preacher of the Great Awakening who drew enormous crowds of both Black and white listeners across the colonies, was simultaneously a slave owner and an active lobbyist to legalize slavery in Georgia. In 1747-1748, Whitefield wrote letters to Georgia's trustees arguing that the colony could not succeed economically without enslaved labor and pressing for the repeal of Georgia's ban on slavery. He purchased a plantation in South Carolina and owned enslaved workers. Whitefield's theology insisted on the spiritual equality of all people before God — he preached to enslaved Africans and free Black people, and his emotional, accessible style of worship resonated powerfully — while his economic behavior and political advocacy reinforced the slave system. His position exemplified the accommodation evangelical Protestantism made with slavery in the American South, providing a template for the religious defense of slavery that would dominate Southern churches for the next century.

After the Stono Rebellion, South Carolina passes a sweeping slave code restricting movement, assembly, earning, learning to read — even drumming.

A wave of fires sparks panic and the execution of dozens of enslaved and poor New Yorkers.