Teaching Slave Resistance with Archival Sources: The Charleston Workhouse Rebellion of 1849

On July 13, 1849, a slave named Nicholas Kelly and two accomplices armed with sledge hammers and pick axes led an attack on the police and their jailers at the Charleston slave workhouse. The three men helped dozens of their fellow slaves escape the workhouse and into the streets of Charleston. Nicholas’s astonishing attempt to escape was a singular event: it was the largest work house slave rebellion in United States history. The ramifications of the breakout were felt far and wide. Kelly’s daring bid for freedom was the most important slave rebellion to occur in South Carolina since the attempted Denmark Vesey Insurrection in 1822. The white slaveholding aristocracy effectively silenced the incident, referring to it as a minor insubordination. The conservative Charleston newspapers did their part, preferring to downplay the rebellion. Consequently, historians have contributed to the silencing of the event, opting for a literal interpretation of the newspaper press. In the end, the few historians that have written about the rebellion have missed material contained in the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina, the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina, and the Special Collections Library at the College of Charleston. In this teaching session, I demonstrate the importance of the rebellion while revealing documents unearthed at all of the above listed archives, effectively connecting the dots. Ultimately, the documents depict the ways slaves resisted their masters and the brutality of slavery.