Episode Details

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 walk and lived — and led by Francisco Menéndez, a man who had escaped Carolina in the Yamasee War and come back as the Spanish crown’s sworn enemy. And it follows the same fear north, to the New York panic of 1741, where a city burned thirteen of its own at the stake chasing a Spanish plot that may never have existed. A continent of masters, and the people they could not stop watching.