Jacobins of the Lowcountry:
The Vesey Plot on Trial

Robert L. Paquette

IN October 1820, Edwin Holland, editor of the Charleston, South Carolina, Times, joined with a handful of other elite Charlestonians to petition the state's house of representatives for the suppression of the "existing evil" of an independent black church near the city, whose congregants were allegedly under abolitionist influence.1 When municipal officials executed Denmark Vesey and other class leaders of that church two years later for masterminding a sophisticated plot to raise the slaves in and around Charleston in rebellion, Holland appeared vindicated. But he was also unsated. Before white panic about black revolt had fully dissipated in the lowcountry, he published a ringing defense of slavery that concluded with this thunderclap: "Let it never be forgotten, that our negroes are truely the Jacobins of the country; that they are the anarchists and the domestic enemy; the common enemy of civilized society, and the barbarians who would, IF THEY COULD, become the DESTROYERS of our race.'"2	1
Such forebodings caused Supreme Court Justice William Johnson also to worry about the future of his country. He and his brother-in-law, Governor Thomas Bennett, had emerged as Charleston's two most prominent critics of the official proceedings that had sentenced Vesey and thirty-four slaves to hang. Yes, Jacobinism threatened the land, thought Johnson, but it emanated from political firebrands like Holland, not from the ranks of South Carolina's slave majority, and he said so to Thomas Jefferson: "I fear nothing so much as the Effects of the persecuting Spirit that is abroad in this Place [Charleston]. Should it spread thro' the State & produce a systematic Policy founded on the ridiculous but prevalent Notion--that it is a struggle for Life or Death, [then] there are no Excesses that we may not look for--whatever be their Effect upon the Union."3	2
Michael P. Johnson contends that Justice Johnson came far closer to the truth about the Vesey plot than did Edwin Holland. Indeed, the persecuting spirit to which Justice Johnson alluded corrupted a judicial process that hanged innocent men, most of whom had pleaded not guilty at their arraignment. No slave insurrection impended in Charleston in 1822, argues Johnson. The court of magistrates and freeholders assembled to investigate the alleged plot became convinced early on of its reality, the dearth of hard evidence like weapons notwithstanding. The court, its integrity challenged in an intensifying dispute with Justice Johnson and Governor Bennett, continued to manufacture convictions out of the words of frightened, intimidated, and mistreated black witnesses to salve wounded honor and secure public legitimation of the proceedings.	3
Dissatisfaction with three recent books on the Vesey plot impelled Johnson into South Carolina's state archive, and on examination of the manuscript court transcripts he acquits the accused and indicts historians for embracing what he calls the "heroic interpretation" (p. 915) of Vesey, which over the last quarter century has come to predominate in the academy. The manuscript transcripts, Johnson points out, reveal suspicious silences, including not a peep from Vesey himself. They also suggest procedural inconsistencies from session to session and differ somewhat in organization and detail from the Official Report published in October by the court shortly after it had been dissolved.	. . .