The Negro Act of 1740

On May 10, 1740, South Carolina's assembly passed "An Act for the better Ordering and Governing Negroes and other Slaves in this Province," its answer to the Stono Rebellion eight months earlier. William Bull, the lieutenant governor who had fled the Stono marchers on the Pon Pon road, signed it into law. The rebels had recruited by drumbeat, and the assembly wrote that fear into Section XXXVI, which barred enslaved people from "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." Any slaveholder who permitted drumming paid a ten-pound fine. The often-repeated claim that drumming carried the death penalty is false; the act reserved death for insurrection, murder, poisoning, and arson. The clause was borrowed, not invented. Barbados had banned drums in nearly identical words in 1688, Jamaica and St. Kitts followed, and Georgia copied South Carolina's version in 1755. Virginia and North Carolina never banned instruments, and New Orleans confined drumming to Congo Square rather than outlawing it. The act reached far beyond music. It barred enslaved people from learning to write, earning money, keeping livestock or boats, traveling without passes, or gathering in groups. Made perpetual in 1783, it stayed the foundation of South Carolina slave law until 1865. The drum ban worked, and it didn't. Mentions of drums fade from the colonial record after 1740, but rhythm moved where the law couldn't follow: into clapping, stomping, patting juba, and the ring shout, where a broomstick beat the floor in place of a drumhead. Coastal Georgians interviewed in the 1930s still remembered funeral drums. The drums outlasted the law.