Inconsistent Contextualism:
The Hermeneutics of Michael Johnson

David Robertson

BRING us the head of Denmark Vesey, and we'll bid it sing. Thus does Michael P. Johnson characterize the scholarship of Professors Pearson and Egerton and my own biography of Denmark Vesey. 1 Johnson avers that, by our having accepted uncritically the Official Report, we have reconstructed Vesey as the leader of a slave conspiracy that in fact never existed; by having exercised empiricism's "will to truth," we have falsely emplotted Vesey's life and unwittingly perpetuated the Charleston city judges' fictive version of the facts. 2 Johnson's critical observations, carried to their logical and rhetorical conclusions, present Denmark Vesey in our accounts as having been perceived by us as a type of black Orpheus and dismiss our scholarship as no more than irrational belief. After the execution of Vesey and the textual dismemberment of his historical existence, Johnson suggests, we three narrative historians have retrieved Vesey's head from the stream of time, and we have projected upon it our own voices, deluding ourselves that we hear him sing of liberty.	1
I approach Johnson's argument rhetorically because, despite its apparent contextuality, his review-essay frequently elides primary and secondary sources and depends for its conclusions upon a trope. Unquestionably, the intent of the Charleston authors of the Official Report was to present Vesey as metaphor--the black man as a beast; plainly, my intent, as evinced in the above paragraph and in my published biography, is to present Vesey as metonymy, representing in his person the larger conspiracy. Implicit in Johnson's account is a different trope: the synecdoche of Vesey as "fall guy" for a white Charleston intolerant of political and religious heretics. To this end, Johnson writes that "it is absurd to suppose that witnesses told the unvarnished truth" (pp. 971, 953).	2
I agree, although I am not in the habit of calling "absurd" those who happen not to agree totally with my conclusions. However, I do honor facts, and I wish below to point out representative instances of how Professor Johnson deletes or misconstrues facts in order to favor his thesis and inflate his own originality.	3
First, as to Johnson's historical methodology: Johnson does indeed present "a fresh view of the records," as Robert A. Gross enthusiastically wrote to me.3 Johnson privileges one archival manuscript of the Vesey investigation over the printed text of the Official Report largely because that manuscript, preserved by the South Carolina state government and labeled "Evidence: Document B," does not contain narratives later included in the printed report. This manuscript is die Quelle, "the source," or the bedrock Q manuscript of Johnson's argument. But is "Evidence: Document B" the Q manuscript of the Denmark Vesey trials? Johnson begs this question.	. . .