When the Stono Rebellion is mentioned today it is most often, unexpectedly, in the context of American musical history. Recall that business of the drums—after the fugitives had “halted” in the field, they started “beating drums to draw more Negroes to them.” They were not drumming randomly or playing in the belief that the mere noise of the drums would bring more slaves running. They were broadcasting code. Familiarity with the technique of what more than a century later came to be called “telegraphic drumming” was (and is) common in multiple regions of Africa. Drummers belonging to various cultures there have long been able to send fairly complex messages over vast distances by employing different percussive rhythms. An essay in the December 1928 issue of Opportunity magazine (a “Journal of Negro Life” that grew out of the Harlem Renaissance and became one of the most influential African-American publications of the first half of the twentieth century) discussed this phenomenon. “Africa has had for centuries a radio system of its own,” wrote the author, Nana Amoah III, an African statesman who had traveled to the United States and visited black communities (and who was, at home in present-day Ghana, the chief of the Fante tribe). “A simple system of course,” he continued, “but quite efficient—The Drum.” He explained that in parts of Africa, a man “sits astride” a particular kind of drum and “beats it with two sticks or a stick and the palm of his hand to produce sounds like the Morse Code. State drummers like telegraph clerks are trained. The position is hereditary and every member [who] belongs to a particular family in a state is trained.”
The colonial authorities in South Carolina had realized that something like this was going on, in connection with the insurrection of 1739. And Stono was not the first occasion on which music and dancing had gone hand-in-hand with insurrection in the white colonial mind. Nearly a decade earlier, in 1730 (this according to a 1756 article in the London Magazine), a large group of slaves had gathered “at a certain place in the neighbourhood of Charles-Town, under pretence of a solemn dancing-bout, from whence they were to rush all at once into the town.” After invading the city they would “massacre all the white men in the town and . . . spread the destruction thro’ all the plantations in the country.” The code required that “all due care be taken to restrain . . . the using or keeping of drums, horns, or other loud instruments, which may call together or give sign or notice to one another of their wicked designs and purposes . . . ”
It is not clear to what extent this rule was enforced, or enforceable. Perhaps most slave owners in the eighteenth century would have agreed with a later, nineteenth-century South Carolina judge, the Hon. J. B. O’Neall, who in the early 1850s (in an essay inserted into J. D. B. De Bow’s Industrial Resources, Etc., of the Southern and Western States) referred to the drum ban as “one under which most masters will be liable, whether they will or not. Who can keep his slaves from blowing horns or using other loud instruments?” O’Neall declared that “the sooner it is expunged from the statute book the better,” but that section of the act remained technically in effect until the end of the Civil War. There must have been a span of time, however, if only in the period immediately following the Stono Rebellion, when drums were prohibited and taken away from the slaves. There was a generation, perhaps, that grew up without them, and then the strength of that old drum tradition was weakened.