Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators

Michael P. Johnson

IN the pantheon of rebels against slavery in the United States, Denmark Vesey stands exalted. Historians celebrate this free black carpenter who organized slaves to emancipate themselves in 1822 by setting fire to the city of Charleston, South Carolina, slaying all whites, and sailing off to the black republic of Haiti. A free man who identified with slaves, a black man who claimed the human rights monopolized by whites, an urban artisan who prepared to lead an army of rural field hands, a man of African descent who built a coalition of native Africans and country-born creoles, a religious man who melded the Christianity of Europe with the spiritual consciousness of Africa, a diasporic man inspired by the black Atlantic's legacy of rebellion and sovereignty, a radical man who wielded the ideals of the Age of Revolution against white oppression and hypocrisy, a militant man who scorned compromise and relished redemptive killing, a brave man unintimidated by the long odds against liberation, a loyal man who refused to name his co-conspirators when informants betrayed his scheme at the last minute, a stoic man who died on the gallows without giving his executioners the satisfaction of remorse or confession--Denmark Vesey was a bold insurrectionist determined to free his people or die trying.

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This heroic interpretation of Vesey and his co-conspirators seemed more or less reasonable to me in December 1999 when I accepted the Quarterly's invitation to review three new books about the Vesey conspiracy. 1 In subsequent months, as the project veered in entirely unanticipated directions, I came to believe that historians have been wrong about the conspiracy. In the pages that follow, I explain why and point toward an alternative account. In general, I argue that almost all historians have failed to exercise due caution in reading the testimony of witnesses recorded by the conspiracy court, thereby becoming unwitting co-conspirators with the court in the making of the Vesey conspiracy; that the court, for its own reasons, colluded with a handful of intimidated witnesses to collect testimony about an insurrection that, in fact, was not about to happen; that Denmark Vesey and the other men sentenced to hang or to be sold into exile were not guilty of organizing an insurrection; that, rather than revealing a portrait of thwarted insurrection, witnesses' testimony discloses glimpses of ways that reading and rumors transmuted white orthodoxies into black heresies.

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