Trials and Errors:
Denmark Vesey and His Historians

Edward A. Pearson

IN 1964, Richard C. Wade ignited a historiographical controversy in the pages of the Journal of Southern History and in his monograph, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820–1860. Revising the standard interpretation about the plot organized by free black carpenter Denmark Vesey to destroy Charleston, South Carolina, in the summer of 1822, Wade concluded that it was "probably never more than loose talk by aggrieved and embittered men" rather than a full-blown effort to rebel against slavery. Not all historians accepted this new interpretation. A number of students of the antebellum South and its peculiar institution, including, among others, William W. Freehling in Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816–1836 and in his "Denmark Vesey's Antipaternalistic Reality," Eugene Genovese in Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, and Sterling Stuckey in Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America regard this episode as a genuine, but unsuccessful, attempt by a group of enslaved people to gain their freedom. Michael P. Johnson, in Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (co-authored with James L. Roark), never questioned the existence of the plot that Vesey and his associates organized. The recent publication of three books on this dramatic episode has not only rekindled interest in the efforts of Vesey and his associates to liberate themselves but has also inspired Johnson, who once accepted the majority opinion of Freehling et al., or as he now calls it "this heroic interpretation" (p. 915), to write a long and highly critical article on these works serving to reignite a debate that began more than thirty-five years ago. After many years in the interpretive wilderness, Richard Wade has now found an ally in Michael Johnson.1	1
The "unanticipated directions" (p. 915) taken by Johnson's scholarship as he labored through books that he appears to believe have very little to recommend them has resulted in a piece that effectively demolishes my transcription of the Vesey trial record, swiftly dismisses the conclusions drawn by Douglas R. Egerton, David Robertson, and myself, and seeks to posit an alternative hypothesis for the events that transpired in the courtroom in Charleston in the summer of 1822. In fact, Johnson's article should not be regarded as a review essay as such--commonly characterized by a balanced discussion of the arguments advanced, the issues illuminated or obscured, the questions answered and raised, along with some comments on the works' overall merits and failures--as his central premise is that these books are so flawed and their authors' interpretative and historical skills so limited and naive, that they have very little merit. In Johnson's eyes, such analytical shortsightedness has caused Egerton, Robertson, and myself (along with many other historians in the aforementioned volumes and those listed in Johnson's extensive footnotes) to have fallen simple-mindedly for the fraud that the court perpetrated on its unwitting victims more than a century and a half ago and to be in league with their devious machinations.2	2
While I cannot speak for the objectives of either Egerton or Robertson, the purpose of my book, Designs against Charleston, was twofold. It provided readers with a lengthy introductory essay that addressed the events surrounding the conspiracy of 1822 and illuminated the social and cultural worlds in which enslaved and free black Charlestonians lived in the early nineteenth century by discussing a range of topics, including the worlds of the workshop and the grog-shop and the place of religion. This essay also examined broader national and regional political and cultural currents that shaped the lives of black Charlestonians, particularly the debates over Missouri, the development of the abolition movement in the North, the Panic of 1819, and the continuing efforts by southern slaveholders to regulate and control the lives of their slaves. Second, it gave readers a series of primary documents, including a transcription of the trial record along with a miscellaneous selection of related materials such as newspaper accounts, private letters, petitions to the South Carolina Assembly, and grand jury presentments.	. . .