Plausible Stories and Varnished Truths

James Sidbury

MICHAEL P. Johnson's essay can be read as a powerful indictment of more than the specific books that he set out to review or even of the broad scope of scholarship on the Denmark Vesey Conspiracy.1 He painstakingly reconstructs the history of the sources that tell all that we know about Vesey while asserting that most historians who have written about Vesey have eschewed such a reconstruction in favor of the "more convenient printed testimony" (p. 920). This raises important questions about the role of faith in scholarly research. He convincingly if implicitly argues that the political predispositions of those writing about Vesey have contributed to a collective disinclination to question the reliability of even the most troublesome sources so long as those sources told the right story. This point is unlikely to apply only to the scholarship on Vesey. He details an extensive pattern of what we today might call prosecutorial misconduct in order to explode the notion that the testimony given in the conspiracy inquiries might be considered the "unvarnished truth" (p. 953). His demonstration that one cannot credibly believe that witnesses "told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" (p. 949) because "the court's power inflected every word that appeared in the transcripts" (p. 942) applies to differing extents to all court testimony. In each of these cases Johnson's work suggests that for all of our current supposed sophistication regarding the complexities of textual production and consumption, too many of us hesitate to perform the tedious traditional practices of source criticism that are the hallmark of good historical work. All of this would probably stand as an uncontroversial call for greater scholarly caution were it not for the conclusions that he reaches: that the Denmark Vesey Conspiracy was, in fact, a conspiracy against Vesey rather than one led by him and that the seemingly rich window that the trial records open on enslaved Americans' desire for freedom is actually a mirror reflecting white paranoia rather than revealing black activism.

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Johnson's commitment to restoring the integrity of the Vesey records produces utterly convincing results. His catalogue of errors in Edward Pearson's transcription and arrangement of the trial records appears to be devastating, both to the book itself and to less diligent reviewers, like me, who failed to subject it to so rigorous an examination.2 It is worth noting, however, that even after his forthcoming edition of the transcripts appears, only those with easy access to the archives in Columbia or to the funds necessary to travel there will be able to make independent judgments about which version of the record is superior. Most may not find that a difficult call to make in this case, but it does serve as a cautionary reminder of the dark side of one of the recent boons to scholarship: the rapid proliferation of primary sources in print and, especially, on the Internet. There are, for example, numerous recent editions of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African, and significant substantive differences exist among them.3 Anyone working extensively with Equiano's narrative is, of course, responsible for doing the work necessary to determine which edition should be used, but historians make occasional use of far too many sources to subject each to such intensive inquiry. Johnson's essay underscores the degree to which we operate on faith and the dangers that we court in doing so. Those dangers can only grow exponentially with the rich but largely unpoliced explosion of scanned source material that has been posted on the world wide web.

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