Some time after my last [letter] a number of negroes, about fifteen, belonging to a new plantation, . . . formed a design to withdraw from their master and to fix themselves in the fastnesses of the neighbouring mountains: they had found means to get into their possession some arms and ammunition, and they took along with them some provisions, their cloaths, bedding and working tools; but the Gentleman to whom they belonged with a party of men made such diligent pursuit after them, that he soon found them out in their settlement, a very obscure place among the mountains, where they had already begun to clear the ground, and obliged them after exchanging a shot or two by which one of the slaves was wounded, to surrender and return back, and so prevented for this time a design which might have proved as dangerous to this country, as is that of the negroes in the mountains of Jamaica to the inhabitants of that island. Tho’ this attempt has happily been defeated, it ought nevertheless to awaken us into some effectual measures for preventing the like hereafter, it being certain that a very small number of negroes once settled in those parts, would very soon be encreas’d by the accession of other runaways and prove dangerous neighbours to our frontier inhabitants.

Source: Lt. Gov. William Gooch to Board of Trade, June 29, 1729, Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and the West Indies, 1728–1729 (London, 1937), 414–15, in Paul G. E. Clemens, ed., The Colonial Era: A Documentary Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 135–36.