In July 1849, Charleston’s Workhouse, a city-run prison for enslaved Africans, erupted in a desperate, violent revolt. It was here, in a place designed to crush every ounce of freedom, that Nicholas Kelly led an uprising that became one of the most significant acts of collective resistance in South Carolina after the Stono rebellion of 1739 and the Denmark Vesey conspiracy of 1822.
Located on Magazine Street in downtown Charleston, the Charleston Workhouse was both a prison and a slave market. Enslavers brought Black people there to be punished or sold and paid the city a fee for the torture inflicted on their victims. Guards carried out brutal public floggings, locked enslaved Africans in cells, or forced them to walk the massive workhouse treadmill, a corn grinding device that operated like a giant stepping wheel. Victims were stripped naked and driven to exhaustion or injury as punishment.
The rebellion’s central figure was Nicholas Kelly, born enslaved in 1822 or 1823 in the St Andrews District near Charleston. At the age of eight, Nicholas was hired out to William Kelly, an Irish American builder from Philadelphia who trained him as a plasterer and later purchased him outright.
He later lived and worked in New Orleans, where he gained a reputation for skill and independence. He believed he had started paying toward an agreed price for his freedom, but when he was taken back to Charleston in 1847, that promise was denied.
Not long after his return, Nicholas struck a city guard and a police officer who tried to search him. He was then arrested and first sentenced to death, but after a retrial he was convicted on lesser charges and given three years in the Charleston Workhouse.
Inside the Workhouse, Nicholas worked as a cook and overseer and used his intimidating presence to secure unusual freedom of movement. Guards allowed him to roam the grounds. Many white officials saw him as hard to control and dangerous, and they believed he acted like he had rights an enslaved person wasn’t supposed to claim.
The uprising began on the morning of July 13, 1849, when a local slave trader arrived to seize an enslaved woman believed to be Nicholas’s sister. He claimed he wanted to take her for medical treatment, though he was likely planning to sell her. Nicholas and several others stood in his way and attacked the trader’s enslaved assistant when he tried to drag the woman off. The trader quickly fled.
Nicholas quickly rallied the enslaved workers, drawing them into the courtyard where they armed themselves with whatever tools they could find, sledge handles, axes, pickaxes, hammers, and other tools. Their show of unity and determination alarmed the authorities, prompting a senior city official to rush to the Workhouse in an attempt to regain control.
By mid-afternoon, the Workhouse keeper and several guards moved in to seize Nicholas, but he resisted, and roughly twenty enslaved men rushed forward to defend him. The courtyard exploded into a fierce struggle, leaving several white guards and officials badly wounded. Seizing the moment, the rebels smashed through the gates and poured into the streets of Charleston. Thirty-seven enslaved Africans scattered in different directions, each desperately searching for a path to freedom.
The city of Charleston responded very swiftly. Patrols, militia, and armed civilians flooded the streets. Almost all the escapees were quickly recaptured, and the rebellion was violently crushed.
Nicholas Kelly and two other men (George Holmes, and John Toomer), identified as leaders of the rebellion, were swiftly tried, sentenced, and publicly hanged for injuring three white men. Their bodies were denied a proper burial.
Instead, following a common practice in the antebellum South for executed enslaved or free Black people convicted of serious crimes, their bodies were given to the Medical College of South Carolina (now part of the Medical University of South Carolina) to be dissected by medical students.
Six men managed to remain free after the initial manhunt, forcing the governor to issue a reward for their capture. Eventually, all six were caught, tried, and convicted of riot and insubordination, then subjected to flogging and sentenced to solitary confinement.
The enslavers of Nicholas Kelly, George Holmes, and John Toomer later filed a lawsuit against the Charleston city council, claiming that mismanagement of the Workhouse had created the conditions that allowed the rebellion to occur, which ultimately led to the execution of their enslaved properties. The courts, however, dismissed their claims, finding no legal responsibility on the part of the city.
Despite the dismissal, the rebellion prompted the city to take action. A special committee blamed the uprising on poor discipline inside the Workhouse. The council ordered the Workhouse closed and approved the construction of a new one. They also supported creating a more formal police force to control Black residents, replacing the older City Guard structure.
While the rebellion was quickly suppressed, its significance is profound. Most slave uprisings in U.S. history occurred on plantations or across rural regions. The Charleston Workhouse Rebellion was different, it took place in the heart of a city, inside a fortified institution specifically designed to imprison people.
Historians recognize this event as the largest documented rebellion originating inside a workhouse in the United States, and also the second largest slave uprising in South Carolina after the Stono Rebellion. The rebellion forced the city to tighten security, expand patrols, and rethink how enslaved people were disciplined, but even these measures could not erase the fact that enslaved Africans continually resisted, even in the most extreme conditions.
On July 13, 2022, the Charleston city council and Mayor John Tecklenburg installed a commemorative plaque on the now empty Magazine Street lot where the Workhouse once stood. The plaque recounts the uprising led by Nicholas Kelly and recognizes the enslaved men and women who resisted the violence of Charleston’s slave system.
Sources:
https://www.southcarolinapublicradio.org/sc-news/2022-07-31/charleston-puts-up-plaque-where-slaves-were-beaten-punished?_amp=true
https://charlestonmag.com/features/bid_for_freedom_remembering_the_workhouse_rebellion_of_1849
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/897109
