The guards inflicted public floggings, confined enslaved victims to the stocks, or forced them to walk the treadmill, a huge corn-grinding device similar to a stepping machine.

[2] Less than two weeks after his return to Charleston, Nicholas resisted when a city guardsman and a police officer, both white men, tried to search him for money at Kelly's request.

Judge O'Neall of South Carolina's appellate court later observed that "Nicholas was known to be ungovernable, in a peculiar degree, turbulent and dangerous: being infected (or at least professing to be) by certain ideas of personal rights, inconsistent with his subjection as a slave.”[2] On the morning of July 13, 1849, a slave trader, John M. Gilchrist, went to the Charleston Workhouse to take custody of an unnamed enslaved woman, believed to have been Nicholas's sister.

[2] At Gilchrist's behest, Charleston mayor Thomas Leger Hutchinson visited the workhouse and urged the guards to regain control of the situation.

At about two o'clock, workhouse keeper James C. Norris, Mayor Hutchinson, and three white guards entered the courtyard and sought to seize Nicholas, who defended himself.

Eighteen freedom seekers were captured within 24 hours of the uprising, including Nicholas, who made it only one mile from the workhouse before rifle-toting militiamen forced him to surrender on Cannon's Bridge.

Nicholas's two lieutenants, George Holmes and John Toomer, went on trial on July 16 and were sentenced to death for "grievously wounding, maiming, and bruising" three white men.

Charged with riot and insubordination, all six freedom seekers were convicted and sentenced to flogging and solitary confinement in a July 30 trial.

[2] The enslavers of Nicholas Kelly, George Holmes, and John Toomer filed a civil suit against the Charleston city council for allegedly neglecting and mismanaging the workhouse, creating conditions for the rebellion.

The city council ordered an investigation into management of the workhouse, and a special committee report released in August blamed the revolt on the "great laxity of discipline" that had "prevailed for some time past."

Councilors passed a resolution ordering the closure of the workhouse and the construction of a new one, and endorsed a transition from the paramilitary City Guard to a dedicated police force tasked with tight control of the Black community.

Mayor Hutchinson persuaded the mob to disperse, and the city convened a special committee to determine the future of the church and of religious instruction of enslaved people and freedmen generally.

The Liberator, The North Star, National Intelligencer, Pennsylvania Freeman, New York Evening Post, and Boston Courier shared details of the revolt, denounced the show trials, and reported on the executions.

The uprising resulted in more restrictive policing of slavery, as white vigilance and safety committees formed throughout South Carolina, vowing to root out abolitionists and control the slave population.