The South Carolina General Assembly's passage of the 1740 Slave Code came less than a year after the Stono Rebellion, an uprising of enslaved workers, which explains the speed with which the code was passed and the strictness of its laws. With an enslaved majority by 1708 that increased annually, the white inhabitants of South Carolina grew increasingly anxious about the possibility of an uprising by those held in bondage. This trepidation became a deeply unsettling reality in the late summer of 1739, when twenty enslaved Africans, under the leadership of a literate enslaved person named Jemmy, took up arms and departed from the Stono River. They made their way south for Spanish Florida, where the promise of freedom awaited them, guaranteed by the colony's government. Jemmy's exodus grew to nearly eighty participants and killed over twenty whites before being intercepted at the Edisto River by members of the South Carolina militia. Some of Jemmy's followers escaped and continued for three more miles before another militia detachment caught up with them and brought the escape to an end. In the immediate aftermath of the revolt, most of those captured were executed to send a clear message to any enslaved persons with similar ambitions. The survivors were sold to work on plantations in the West Indies.