Book Review

The last monograph on the Denmark Vesey slave conspiracy appeared just as the civil rights movement ignited an explosion in African American history (John Lofton, Insurrection in South Carolina, 1964). It is remarkable that scholars have taken so long to reexamine the Vesey revolt from atop the mountain of black history scholarship that has accumulated in the subsequent three decades. They seem to be making up for lost time, however, for 1999 saw the publication of not one, not two, but three book-length histories of the revolt. In many ways the best of the new treatments is the one that is not under review here: Edward A. Pearson's 164-page introduction to his Designs against Charleston: The Trial Record of the Denmark Vesey Slave Conspiracy of 1822 (1999). But Douglas R. Egerton and David Robertson have also produced gripping accounts of the uprising.	1
Robertson, a poet, novelist, and biographer, is the better writer—indeed, his prose calls to mind another southern author whose courtroom dramas expose complex conspiracies, John Grisham. Yet Egerton has produced the better book. By a long shot, it is more accurate and more deeply researched. Most important, although He Shall Go Out Free is only 228 pages long, it reads almost like a life-and-times. Egerton not only describes Vesey's conspiracy but uses it as a window into the world that produced it.	2
Worlds, rather, and in his subtitle Egerton sensibly refers not to the life but to the "lives of Denmark Vesey." Vesey may have been born in Africa. He spent his early youth on St. Thomas, one of the Danish Virgin Islands. In 1781 he was carried to Saint Domingue (now Haiti) by the slave ship captain Joseph Vesey. The young man, now called Telemaque, spent only a year in the lethal sugarcane fields before being repurchased by Vesey—apparently at his own instigation. When Captain Vesey settled down in Charleston, South Carolina, the young slave settled with him.	3
In 1799, Telemaque's life took a remarkable turn. He won the Charleston lottery. The $1,500 jackpot allowed him to purchase himself from Captain Vesey's mistress and establish his own carpentry business. Egerton and Robertson show that, while most black Charlestonians who obtained their freedom in the early decades of the nineteenth century identified with their former owners (who were frequently their fathers), Vesey cast his lot with the enslaved population. One reason was that his wife and children were still enslaved, as were most of his friends. Another was that free blacks suffered many of the same liabilities as the enslaved.	4
One of the greatest of those liabilities, as both authors assert, was religious. After one too many insults from their white fellow parishioners, black Charlestonians founded their own "African Church," but it was subjected to constant harassment. It is no surprise, then, that the church became the cockpit of Vesey's plot; half of the men convicted of conspiracy in 1822 had worshiped there.	5
In what is probably his most important contribution, Egerton affirms that the theology of Christians such as Vesey, a class leader at the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, was compatible with the ideas that men like Gullah Jack "the Conjurer" Pritchard had brought with them from Africa. Other Vesey historians, including Robertson, have portrayed Vesey and Gullah Jack as unlikely collaborators. Egerton, however, emphasizes that, while white Protestant ministers inveighed against magic and southern white preachers used the New Testament to justify slavery, "Old Testament tales melded easily with Africa's sacred legends." True, Gullah Jack assured potential recruits that the crab claws he gave them would protect them from the slaveholders' bullets, but Pritchard also worshiped with Vesey at the AME church.	. . .