AP® United States History · Unit 2 · Topic 2.6
Resistance and Culture Under Slavery
Enslaved people in colonial British America resisted slavery constantly through small daily acts and occasional open revolt, while also building new languages, music, and faiths out of African fragments and American conditions.
Resistance to slavery took two forms, and they cost very differently. Covert resistance meant slowing work, breaking tools, faking illness, poisoning food, or running away for days at a time. It was constant, low-risk, and hard for enslavers to prove or punish as rebellion. Overt resistance meant open revolt, and it was rare because the risk was enormous: colonies maintained militias, slave codes, and brutal public executions specifically to make large uprisings unsurvivable. The rarity of revolt is not evidence of acceptance. It is evidence that enslaved people made a constant, clear-eyed calculation about which forms of resistance they could survive.
The Stono Rebellion of September 1739, near Charleston, South Carolina, shows what overt resistance looked like and what it cost. roughly twenty enslaved people, some recently arrived from Kongo, seized weapons from a store, killed several colonists, and marched south toward Spanish Florida, where freedom had been promised to escapees. They gathered more recruits as they went, beating drums and calling for others to join. A colonial militia caught and crushed the group within a day. South Carolina's response was the Negro Act of 1740, tightening slave codes further. Stono reveals both the desire for freedom and the overwhelming force arrayed against pursuing it openly.
Out of this same pressure came culture. Stripped of specific languages, kin networks, and religious practices, enslaved communities did not simply lose their heritage; they rebuilt it. Creole languages blended African grammar with European vocabulary. Spirituals and call-and-response work songs carried African musical structure. Christian worship absorbed African rhythms and beliefs, becoming something new. This cultural creation sits beside resistance as another way enslaved people refused to be erased, and it connects forward to how these communities would sustain identity and solidarity through centuries of bondage.
Key terms
- Covert resistance
- Low-risk, everyday acts of defiance such as slowdowns, sabotage, or feigned illness that were hard to punish as rebellion.
- Overt resistance
- Open, organized defiance such as armed revolt or mass escape, which was rare because colonial militias suppressed it violently.
- Stono Rebellion
- An armed uprising of enslaved people in South Carolina in 1739 who marched toward Spanish Florida seeking freedom before being crushed by the militia.
- Creole language
- A new language that forms by blending the grammar and vocabulary of different languages in close contact, as enslaved Africans and Europeans did.
- Slave codes
- Colonial laws restricting enslaved people's movement, assembly, literacy, and rights, often tightened after revolts or resistance.
Watch it explained
- How it worksHow do covert and overt resistance differ in what they cost and what they can win?
- How it worksWalk me through the Stono Rebellion of 1739 from the first march to the militia's response.
- Common mistakeWhy isn't the rarity of large revolts evidence that enslaved people accepted slavery?
- Going furtherWhat changes about resistance in a place where enslaved people are the local majority?
Check yourself
End of topic.