Report of Salzburger On The Stono Rebellion

REPORT OF SALZBURGER ON THE STONO REBELLION[1]

[Friday, September 28, 1739.]  A man brought the news that the Negroes or Moorish slaves are not yet pacified but are roaming around in gangs in the Carolina forests and that ten of them had come as far the border of this country just two days ago.  In answer to the request of the inhabitants of Savannah to use Moorish slaves for their work, the Lord trustees have given the simple negative answer that they will never permit a single Black to come into the country, for which they have sufficient grounds that aim at the happiness of the subjects. Mr. Oglethorpe told us here that the misfortune with the Negro rebellion had begun on the day of the Lord, which these slaves must desecrate with work and in other ways at the desire, command, and compulsion of their masters and that we could recognize a jus talionis in it. I, however, ponder the fact that the mill in Old Ebenezer was also ruined by a flood on Sunday and that the work that was done then through necessity by the servants did no good.

Source:  Detailed Report on the Salzburger Emigants Who Settled in America…Edited by Samuel Urlsperger, vol. 6, 1739, trans. And ed. George Fenwick Jones and Renate Wilson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981), p. 226.


[1] This brief account from a “Daily Register” (diary), was written by Johann Martin Bolizius.  The Salzburgers were a group of about two hundred German Protestants, who had been exiled from Salzburg in 1731, and who founded the town of Ebenezer in the religiously tolerant colony.