Reading Evidence

Michael P. Johnson

THE Denmark Vesey slave conspiracy grew out of readings and rumors among both whites and blacks, I argued in "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators."1 The members of the Charleston Court of Magistrates and Freeholders who executed Vesey and thirty-four other black men claimed that the conspiracy involved stealthy recruitment of rebels, long lists of committed insurrectionists, stockpiles of deadly weapons, cunning military organization, meticulous tactical planning, and a collective determination to burn the city, slay the whites, and sail away to the free shores of Haiti. Nearly all historians of the subject have endorsed the court's conclusions. Both the court and latter-day historians based these claims on uncritical readings of the testimony of intimidated and coerced witnesses who told the court what it wanted to hear: that an insurrectionary Armageddon had been narrowly averted by the vigilance of officials who preempted the uprising with a formidable mobilization of militia. In collaboration with cooperative black witnesses, the court crafted a conspiracy against Vesey and the other convicted men, in my view. Historians have abetted the court's conspiracy by incautious readings of the witnesses' testimony and the court's Official Report. The result has been that the court's reading of the Vesey conspiracy has prevailed since 1822. That reading, I tried to show, falsified court procedures and testimony, turned a deaf ear to what witnesses really said (at least what was recorded in the manuscript court records), and certainly did not reflect the views of the alleged conspirators--the men convicted, executed, and exiled--almost all of whom either entered not guilty pleas or, like Vesey, said nothing whatever.

1

Several commentators defend the court's reading of the testimony as authoritative and compelling. Robert L. Paquette asserts that no single reading by the court existed, that the individual magistrates and freeholders who sat in judgment of the conspirators held different views that I conflated into an arbitrary analytical construct, the court. I pointed out in my essay that eight men comprised the court during June and July and seven more during the abbreviated August trials.2 These men were not simple freeholders called to civic duty from humble shops and households. Instead, they were wealthy, powerful slaveowners. Freeholder Nathaniel Heyward, for example, owned upward of 1,000 slaves.3 Heyward and the others recorded their views of the Vesey conspiracy in the manuscript court transcript and in the Official Report, where they routinely referred to themselves as the court. By employing such a term, I adopted their self-identification rather than imposing a collectivity upon them. No evidence suggests that individual magistrates or freeholders dissented from or even quibbled about the court's deliberations.

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