5 - Rebellion at the Workhouse

Summary

As Nicholas approached the third year of his imprisonment, he had had enough. On July 13, 1849, when the slave broker John M. Gilchrest went to retrieve an enslaved woman (possibly Nicholas’s wife) from the workhouse, Nicholas and several slaves kept Gilchrest from taking her. The workhouse officers, with the assistance of city guardsmen, went to subdue Nicholas, who had been left unrestrained in the workhouse yard. When they attempted to restrain Nicholas, several slaves came to his aid. The authorities raised the alarm and some civilians went to the Guard House to retrieve guns meant for slave insurrections. Nicholas led thirty-five slaves out of the workhouse and into the streets of Charleston. Most of them were captured with the first couple of days, but a handful were able to remain at large for eleven days. Nicholas and the two enslaved men who assisted him most were sentenced and executed within a week of the incident, their bodies donated to the medical school for dissection. Many more slaves went before the court and were sentenced to confinement and torture in the workhouse.