ANONYMOUS LETTER TO MR. BOONE IN LONDON (JUNE 24, 1720)1
I am now to acquaint you that very lately we have had a very wicked and barbarous plott of the designe of the negroes rising with a designe to destroy all the white people in the country and then to take the town [Charles Town] in full body but it pleased God it was discovered and many of them taken prisoners and some burnt some hang’d and some banish’d.
I think it proper for you to tell Mr. Percivall at home that his slaves was the principal rogues and ’tis my opinion his only way will be to sell them out singly or else I am doubtful his interest in slaves will come to little for want of strict management, [since] work does not agree with them. 14 of them are now at the Savanna towne and sent for white and Indians and will be executed as soon as they come down[.] [T]hey thought to gett to [St.] Augustine and would have got a creek fellow to have been their pylott but the Savanna garrison tooke the negroes up half starved and the Creeke Indians would not join them or be their pylott.
1 Anonymous Letter to Mr. Boone in London (June 24, 1720). In Herbert Aptheker, Negro Slave Revolts, 50th anniversary ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1993), p. 175. From the Public Records of South Carolina, vol. 8, pp. 24-27.
