Remembering The Charleston Workhouse Rebellion of 1849

This month, lovers of liberty can mark Independence Day on July 4, and the Fall of the Bastille in Paris on July 14. But the Charleston Workhouse Rebellion of July 13, 1849, also merits remembering.  
Nicholas Kelly, born locally circa 1822, had been jailed at the Workhouse (no longer standing) on Magazine Street for behavior his enslaver deemed unsuitable. He had worked as a plasterer, been sent to and retrieved from New Orleans, and according to some accounts, been cheated out of the money he had paid to his enslaver to gain freedom for himself and his family. Imprisoned for months, Kelly physically intervened when an incarcerated woman he knew, or was related to, was to be removed.
Nicholas Kelly and two accomplices armed with sledgehammers 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 workhouse 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. 
Workhouse staff retreated, called in the mayor, and later, the city guard, and St. Michael’s bells began to ring in warning. More than 30 enslaved men escaped out of the gates with Kelly. An uprising of that magnitude had never happened before in the city or the South. 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 response, a white mob nearly destroyed the nearby Calvary Episcopal Church, which was being built on the corner of Beaufain and Wilson streets to accommodate a predominantly Black congregation. Today, the church stands on Line Street, a partner in the Episcopal Diocese’s racial justice and reconciliation movement.
Kelly and most of his band were caught quickly and arrested; all the escapees were recaptured within a few weeks. On the day following the rebellion, the 60th anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, Kelly was sentenced to death, and other leaders were hanged soon thereafter.
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.