Thornton argues that the 1739 rising in South Carolina becomes legible once the participants' African past is taken seriously. Historians had already invoked African backgrounds to explain rice growing, folk medicine, language and religion in the low country, but had left the colony's largest slave revolt out of that reckoning.

Most captives shipped through Kabinda in the decades before 1739 probably came from Kongo, and Kongo was no blank to Europeans. A Kongolese wrote in Portuguese as early as 1491, schools stood in every provincial capital, and a creole Portuguese served as the language of trade across west-central Africa -- which helps explain how Spanish offers of freedom in Florida could reach these rebels and be understood.

Forty-four years of civil war after 1665 also meant that some of those sold had been soldiers. Carolina had closed militia service to slaves by that decade, while African armies were taking up the flintlock in exactly these years.