pledges or flee to British refuges in Florida. But for decades South Carolina’s militia had been designed primarily to suppress slave revolts. After the bloody Stono Uprising of 1739 left scores of blacks and whites dead, white men were required to carry weapons to church on Sunday and plantations had to employ at least one white for every ten blacks in servitude. Slaves now outnumbered whites in South Carolina, 104,000 to 70,000, despite efforts to curb chattel imports, and the vast majority lived in the low country along the Atlantic seaboard. British encouragement of slave defections and
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