Forgetting Denmark Vesey; Or, Oliver Stone Meets Richard Wade

Douglas R. Egerton

BY all accounts, George Wilson was a decent and pious man. A "dark mulatto of large frame," Wilson was known around Charleston, South Carolina, as a hardworking blacksmith and a man so faithful to his master, Major John Wilson, that he was not only permitted to hire out "at his trade" but also to live away from the major's Broad Street home. Unfortunately for both Wilson and the city's enslaved community, he was also a close friend with Rolla Bennett, the governor's domestic slave. On Sunday, June 9, 1822, Bennett informed Wilson of a plan to seize the city. A devout Christian who believed that God required him to love his master, George begged Rolla "to let it alone" and wept when Bennett refused. Five days later, a distraught George broke the news to his master and five days after that, he testified against his old friend. As recompense, the state purchased and liberated him. But as the years passed, George became increasingly distressed by his actions, and in an attempt to disassociate himself from his troubled past he began to call himself George Watkins. By March 1848, George found he could no longer live with himself. He lost his reason and died shortly thereafter, reputedly an act of suicide.1	1
George, evidently, need not have bothered. According to Michael P. Johnson, the only conspiracy at hand was hatched by a small number of magistrates, who fooled everybody, including Wilson, into thinking that the slaves planned to capture Charleston and that Rolla had spoken to him of a slave conspiracy. In this interpretation--not so much an update as an extension of Richard C. Wade's much-battered 1964 thesis --Denmark Vesey was merely a passive "fall guy" and his soldiers but "victims of an insurrection conspiracy conjured into being in 1822" (p. 971) by five or six politicians bent on closing the city's African Methodist Episcopal Church.2	2
Early on, Johnson takes the three authors discussed in his review essay (as well as the larger profession) to task for not taking more seriously Wade's theory that the conspiracy was nothing more than angry "loose talk" on the part of black Charlestonians. Indeed, Wade's view has been so widely rejected that most scholars who have written about Vesey in the past two decades--from Norrece T. Jones and Margaret Washington to Stanley Harrold and Marcus Rediker--rarely even bother to cite Wade's article, and with good reason. Wade's thesis was informed by the flawed notion that urban slaves, enjoying the relative freedom of southern towns, would not risk their quasi-liberty by banding together with men like Denmark Vesey. To that, the late John Lofton had an obvious response: "Revolutionary movements have usually been led and widely supported," he wrote, "not by the most deprived class but by those who were better off" and so "wanted to remove remaining vestiges of tyranny precisely because they could visualize and appreciate the advantages of freedom."3	. . .