Forum

The Making of a Slave Conspiracy, part 2

FROM the very moment in spring 1822 that the Charleston (South Carolina) Court of Magistrates and Freeholders launched its prosecution of what has come to be known as the "Vesey Conspiracy," its actions have been controversial. Prominent members of the local elite criticized its proceedings as a violation of basic justice and challenged accusations against specific slaves. Theirs proved to be a minority voice. Despite the protests, the court kept its course, grimly determined to punish the conspirators, whose violent rebellion had supposedly been stopped by vigilant white authorities. Historians have largely accepted their verdict, with occasional dissents. In the October 2001 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly, Michael P. Johnson revisits the case and repeats these doubts in an extensive essay-review of three recent studies of the Vesey affair.1 Through a painstaking analysis of the manuscript and printed records of the court proceedings, Johnson not only revives the questions raised by contemporary critics but also claims to expose the behind-the-scenes actions of the secret tribunal. In his reading of the archive, the Charleston court created a false impression that it had conducted fair trials in a search for the objective truth. Far from it, Johnson argues. The court extracted the testimony it desired from slaves who were intimidated or induced into talking as the authorities wished. The result of that effort, the Official Report on which historians have since relied for accounts of the Vesey Conspiracy, is indeed evidence of a conspiracy--not of free blacks and slaves led by Denmark Vesey to win their freedom but of implacable magistrates bent on a bloodthirsty mission to uphold white power in a slave society at all costs.

. . .