Conspiracy and Credibility:
Look Who's Talking, about What—Law Talk and Loose Talk

Thomas J. Davis

REVOLTS and rumors of revolt were an important part of the experience and institution that came to be known as American Negro slavery. Contemporaries outside the ambit of the immediate threat, and certainly those who came later in time, often have expressed doubt about the shape and substance of slave revolts, especially when something less than the bloody scheme most feared actually occurred--which was almost always. Even Nat Turner's Revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831, the deadliest of slave uprisings in the United States or its colonial predecessors, left many doubting what upstart blacks had intended to do in full.1	1
Of rumored rebellions few stand more prominent in what historian Michael P. Johnson has designated "the pantheon of rebels against slavery" (p. 915) than Denmark Vesey's plot in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1821 and 1822. Prosecution resulted in thirty-five black men executed at the gallows and forty sentenced to exile. Whether what the authorities charged in punishing the convicted was wholly complete and correct troubled contemporaries near and far, as well as those who have looked back on the events through the lens of history.2	2
As often in such cases, opinion has ranged from the grandest of conspiracies in scope and strategy to the position Johnson has taken in arguing that the "so-called Vesey Conspiracy" was "an insurrection that, in fact, was not about to happen; that Denmark Vesey and the other men sentenced to hang or be sold into exile were not guilty of organizing an insurrection; that, rather than revealing a portrait of thwarted insurrection, witnesses' testimony discloses glimpses of ways that reading and rumors transmuted white orthodoxies into black heresies" (p. 916).3	3
Johnson quotes with approval historian Richard C. Wade's dismissive conclusion that the Vesey affair was "probably never more than loose talk by aggrieved and embittered men" (p. 920). That goes directly to a persistent problem in historians' evaluating slave conspiracies and sometimes other conspiracies, too: a fundamental misunderstanding of conspiracy, at least in regard to law.4	4
A primary goal of the Anglo-American law of conspiracy aimed exactly to suppress "loose talk by aggrieved and embittered men." Speech was not free in the 1700s and 1800s, if ever. Anglo-American law prohibited speaking in specified ways; it recognized speech as a dangerous form of action that, if unrestrained, threatened social order.5	5
The legal test of conspiracy was not whether the accused would have succeeded at whatever their alleged "loose talk" suggested or even whether they actually would have undertaken all their alleged "loose talk" suggested. The test was whether they talked as alleged. The talk, the verbal agreement itself, constituted the crime of conspiracy.6	. . .