In Black Majority, Peter H. Wood argues that West African slaves impacted the development of South Carolina sharply; rather than exerting a minor influence on labor, West African slaves played a pivotal role in developing the colony's economy. He claims that specific skills localized in the black slave community enhanced the colony's economic prosperity and that slaves played and active role as the ultimate majority in that social and political structure. Moreover, argues Wood, not only would South Carolina's development have been difficult without slave labor; it would have been almost impossible without the know-how the slaves brought with them from West Africa. This paper focuses on the this knowledge and on the expanding role of slavery in the development of South Carolina from the inception of the colony to the period that directly precipitated the Stono Rebellion, when black initiative resulted in armed resistance against white oppressors.
The first Africans arrived on what would one day be America in the early 1500s, but didn't settle officially until their immigration from an overcrowded British colony settled in 1627 on Barbados, in the West Indies. By 1660 a group of proprietors approached the King of England with plans to capitalize on the migrations taking place between New England, Bermuda and Barbados. (13) The most vociferous initiative for colonization came from commercially saturated Barbados. (14) Of course, in order do develop this new territory, slave labor was essential. In fact, the British developers of the Carolina colony promised land for all those who brought slaves from Barbados. (16) But not all slaves were bound to slavery status: Wood observes that in the earlier development of the colony, the demarcation between "servitude and lifelong slavery" had not yet been made and that slaves enjoyed a relative autonomy. (14)
The first efforts on behalf of the Barbadians to colonize Carolina fail...