Book Review

As leader of one of the most important slave rebellions in antebellum America, Denmark Vesey has come to symbolize a turning point in American race relations. William Freehling pointed out some time ago that Vesey's conspiracy in 1822 demonstrated that enslaved African Americans either would revolt against the most permissive forms of servitude or would regard greater repression as a spur to revolution. The past year was a banner one for Vesey scholarship: two biographies and, here, Edward A. Pearson's meticulous editing of the trial transcripts and printed record. Pearson has divided his book into a nearly book-length introduction followed by a complete trial transcript and useful appendices, which include a detailed chronology of events, biographies of the participants, and ancillary documents about Vesey and his followers.	1
Pearson's introduction looks at the trial record as a "hidden transcript," in the phrase of James Scott. Then, Pearson uncovers much primary documentation on the early years of Vesey and his ideological evolution. Among the influences on the young Vesey was the Old Testament, with its emphasis on the rise and revenge of an offended people, along with the radical thoughts percolating around the Caribbean during Vesey's youth.	2
Especially good is Pearson's evocation of the seafaring world, which taught Vesey degrees of equality and the possibilities of freedom by self-emancipation. Pearson's approach is closest to the Atlantic culture paradigm developed by Julius Scott and Paul Gilroy. Once situated in Charleston, Vesey used these worldly skills to recruit an army of insurrection. He was able to do so because of the strength of Charleston's black community. In a city where slavery and the international slave trade reigned supreme, free and enslaved Africans constructed community around church, work, and the streets, while benefiting from revitalized African ethnic identities within secret and public societies. Pearson is particularly good at identifying the multiple strands of the personalities of Vesey and Charleston's black community. Pearson carefully delineates the importance of each skein. For example, a thorough discussion of slave hiring, by which masters extracted cash from slaves by consigning them temporarily to an employer, demonstrates how blacks used this system to garner moments of liberty and by coincidence interacted with free laborers. Slave hiring, sometimes done on a daily basis, created real police problems for Charleston authorities and enabled Vesey to hide his plans while recruiting followers. His discussion of slave hiring is but one of many such topics that Pearson handles thoroughly. In this manner, Pearson uses a multifaceted approach to explain Vesey's ideological development and to show how his conspiracy was possible in Charleston's social and economic order. This approach differs from the most recent explanation, made by Michael A. Gomez, that Vesey, though the embodiment of African-European cultural confluence, realized that his plans could not work because of the divisiveness of African ethnicity and so elevated a single status--that of blackness, of descent from Africa. Pearson's argument, while noting the importance of African identity and rituals, emphasizes Atlantic culture. He emphasizes, in particular, the important influence on Vesey of the success of the revolution in Saint Domingue, which resulted in the creation of Haiti, the hemisphere's first black republic. This choice allows Pearson to conduct nearly all of his analysis within the context of European economics, law, and culture, as opposed to a deeper investigation of black society, as may be found in Gomez's book.	3
Pearson's presentation of the immediate contexts of the conspiracy is excellent. He details how South Carolina's slave masters brutally suppressed the conspiracy once it became known. Pearson uses testimony from the trial record to uncover Vesey's ideological motivations, much as the introduction had used historical context and ancillary evidence to unpack his development. Pearson is also very good in his portrayal of key ally, gullah Jack, and his command of magical protections against musket balls, beliefs that could be found on the Atlantic sea lanes, but which came heavily from Kongo traditions. Pearson also raises the use of Gullah language as a means to communicate plans and as a revitalization movement. Here, Pearson comes very close to Gomez's argument about the importance of African cultural reinvention. Interestingly, Pearson moves very far from Philip Morgan's view, espoused in his Slave Counterpoint, that Africans in late eighteenth-century South Carolina were much too divided ethnically to combat enslavement.	4
Pearson is also very good in his discussion of the manifestations of the conspiracy. As Pearson demonstrates early and late in the introduction, Vesey's defiance became a focus of black folklore. Whites responded with the controversial Negro Seaman's Act of 1823, which required that any visiting free black sailors be confined in jail while in Charleston. Though declared unconstitutional, the law was an early manifestation of Carolinians' devotion to states rights. After that, whites adopted strict-construction principles about federal actions concerning slaves and servitude. Outside of the law, vigilantes sought to form militias to patrol the countryside. Either way white Carolinians tried to construct barriers against black revolutionary ideology.	5
Pearson's production of the transcript of the conspiracy trial is flawless. It is printed in modern fonts and replete with innumerable annotations identifying participants, quotes from the Bible, key black churches, and explanations of obscure references. A chronology of events and a very clear list identifying all the participants and their fates follow the record itself. Pearson then includes documents such as post-revolutionary laws on free blacks, slave hiring advertisements, petitions by free blacks to the assembly, and a large bundle of newspaper articles around the time of the conspiracy itself. A very full bibliography rounds out this impressive volume. The result is the best edition ever done of primary documents relating to an American slave revolt.	6
Graham Russell Hodges Colgate University

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