On May 6, 1720, “the negroes in South Carolina” murdered plantation supervisor Benjamin Cattle along with an unnamed white woman.22 An armed rebellion occurred again in August 1730 when enslaved Africans armed themselves one Sunday morning and “conspired to destroy all the whites.”23 Three more took place on the South Carolina rice coast in 1739, the most famous of which occurred not far from where the Draytons’ son John had just purchased the first of more than a hundred properties with the intergenerational wealth built from African labor. South Carolina’s 1712 slave codes were based on the
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