| On September 9, 1739, a group of slaves armed themselves by breaking into a storehouse near the Stono River south of Charles Town, South Carolina. They burned houses, killed colonists, recruited other slaves to join them, and marched toward Spanish Florida where they expected to find freedom. One report of the incident claims the rebels were overheard shouting, "Liberty!" By mid-afternoon the rebellion had been crushed and many rebels executed. Shortly thereafter, South Carolina enacted a comprehensive legal code that placed strict controls over the ability of slaves to communicate with one another. The Stono Rebellion and its aftermath serve as a touchstone for this exploration of human rights discourse in early American literature. Building upon the many historical analyses of this rebellion, I suggest a relationship between the rebels shouts of "Liberty!" and the discourse of natural or human rights in the literary acts of African Americans. More often than not, human rights scholars and policy makers cite figures of the European Enlightenment as default sources for contemporary human rights. Certainly the Enlightenment fostered a human rights agenda, but its shortcomings---the abuse of the rights of women, children, and indigenous peoples, as well as the Atlantic slave trade---sullied this agenda. Therefore, this project suggests ways of altering and enriching our understanding of the origins of contemporary human rights discourse. John Locke's philosophy of natural rights and his ambiguous political and economic ties to the colony of South Carolina, serve as a starting point for an analysis of manifestations of eighteenth century human rights discourse in the work of Benjamin Lay, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and others. I offer a close reading of the rebellion and its legal repercussions followed by an examination of representations of human rights discourse in early African American prose (Olaudah Equiano, Prince Hall, Omar ibn Said) and fiction (Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany). Finally, I assess the intertextual challenge to this discourse offered by the Charleston School and the competing plantation traditions of Thomas Nelson Page and Edmund Quincy. |
