Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators
by Michael P. Johnson

 

Witnesses often contradicted themselves and each other. From the loose jumble of testimony, the court crafted a coherent narrative of a skillfully planned insurrection. 132 While the liabilities of the testimony in the transcript provide ample grounds to doubt the veracity of the witnesses, can the testimony nonetheless sustain a credible narrative of a black insurrection aborted at the last moment? The inconsistencies among the witnesses and between them and the court's official narrative open fissures that disclose counter-narratives buried in the testimony beneath strata of confession and collusion. As Carlo Ginzburg has written, "texts have leaks" that can reveal insights unintended by their creators. 133 In this case, the court knew there was an insurrection conspiracy and colluded with cooperative witnesses to uproot it. But the witnesses said both more and less than the court intended. In a sense, to recast Winston Churchill's famous World War II remark, witnesses accompanied their confessional lies with a bodyguard of truth. 134 Deciphering the transcript requires identifying the lie-shielding truth that leaked through the cracks between witnesses' words and the court's foregone conclusions. Consider four features of the alleged plan of insurrection: timing, leaders, guns, and plantation slaves. 135 According to the Official Report, city authorities first learned on Friday evening, June 14, that the insurrection was set to break out at midnight on Sunday, June 16. 136 This information came from one slave, George Wilson, who told his master about the impending attack. 137 Acting quickly, authorities mobilized the militia and patrols. "On the night appointed for the attack," the court explained, "the insurgents found a very strong guard on duty, and by 10 o'clock the whole town was surrounded by the most vigilant patrols." 138 The intimidating and noisy deployment of armed men communicated to everybody in the city--whether or not they were insurgents--that something momentous was expected to happen on Sunday night. James Hamilton, Jr., reported that white Charlestonians felt "deep interest and distressing anxiety" on Sunday night when "there was necessarily much excitement, and among the female part of our community much alarm." 139

Most likely, the mobilization that excited and distressed white citizens, male and female, also communicated to the black men who later became witnesses when the uprising was expected to occur. The court's questions probably also prompted witnesses to focus on Sunday night. The court, after all, sought confirmation that the preemptive military mobilization was judicious and decisive. In June, every witness who specified the time for the outbreak of the insurrection put it on Sunday night; none mentioned the date June 16. During July, witnesses routinely referred to June 16 as the date for the burning and killing to start. 140 July witnesses' crisp recall of the date, compared to June witnesses' references to Sunday or Sunday week, is strong evidence that the court's questions produced both testimonial convergence about when the conspirators planned to attack and reassuring confirmation of white authorities' prescience. After June, much of the testimony regarding when the insurrection was scheduled to occur focused not on plans made before June 16--the first conspiracy--but on a plot hatched after June 29, when the court announced that Vesey and five other convicted conspirators would be hanged on July 2. This second conspiracy, according to the court, moved from idea to near implementation in three days. The outbreak was set to erupt on July 2 in order to rescue the condemned men from the gallows. 141 Again, the court's questions and the mnemonic of six black men suspended from nooses presumably helped July witnesses clearly recall July 2 as the date for the second alleged uprising. Even after the July 2 executions occurred without protest or opposition, Gullah Jack Pritchard and others conspired to launch a third uprising, according to the court, this time on July 6. That plan was aborted by Gullah Jack's arrest on July 5 and his execution a week later. 142

In all the court sessions, only one witness, Perault Strohecker, claimed (once) that he had actually showed up at the appointed time and place, ready to start an insurrection. According to Strohecker, a meeting of conspirators on June 29 resolved to "raise and make a rescue" of the men scheduled to be hanged on July 2. They agreed to meet early on July 1 at a certain place to seize arms for the uprising. Strohecker said he "did go there at day light, but no one else came." It did not trouble the court that no other witness ever claimed to be present at a conspirators' rendezvous--whatever the alleged date, time, and place--ready to attack. The court's single piece of testimony from a conspirator who claimed to be poised to strike pointed out that bold talk and solemn agreements did not translate into insurrectionary action, a message the court did not want to hear. 143 In retrospect, white officials appear to have done more to set the timing of the three alleged insurrections than the accused conspirators did. If, for example, June 16 really was the initial launch date for the insurrection, then the behavior of Denmark Vesey is difficult to understand.

As a free man, Vesey could leave Charleston at any time. But he stayed in the city twenty-three days after the first arrest, six days after the military mobilization and purported postponement of the scheduled uprising, four days after the start of the court sessions and after the arrest of fifteen men, until he was finally picked up on June 22. 144 If there was no launch date, Vesey's decision to stay in Charleston would make more sense. Since he had lived safely in the city for nearly forty years, why should he flee now if he had nothing to answer for? Would a real insurrectionist leader patiently await a doomed fate or would he flee to conspire another day? The first sentence of the court's official narrative identifies Denmark Vesey as "the head of this conspiracy." Vesey, the court declared, was the person "from whom all orders emanated." 145 Vesey's leadership received ample documentation from witness William Paul, who told the court that he heard "Denmark Vesey was the Chiefest man & more concerned than any one else." But testimony about Vesey's leadership was far from unanimous. Yorrick Cross claimed that Gullah Jack was "the head man." George Vanderhorst agreed, testifying that Gullah "Jack stood at the front of all, that is he was the head man." 146 According to Billy Bulkley, Gullah Jack and Robert Robertson "were the principal men." 147 Richard Lucas testified that Batteau Bennett "was one at the head." Cross claimed that Harry Haig told him "the head man . . . was a white man, but he would not tell me what was the white man's name." "As far as I know," Jesse Blackwood said, "I believe Vesey and Monday Gell were the Chief men." Blackwood's testimony was reinforced by John Enslow. 148 Gell emphasized on the contrary that "Vesey bro't all of us into it." Like every other witness, Gell named somebody other than himself as the head man. As the court's champion superstar witness, Gell had a strong interest in claiming to be a subordinate reluctantly induced by Vesey to join. 149

To a considerable extent, the court shared Gell's interest in elevating Vesey to the head and relegating Gell to a knowledgeable lieutenant. 150 No other witness testified in such detail against so many defendants. The court seems to have considered Gell not simply more talkative but also better informed than any other witness--implicitly nominating him as the chief man. But if Gell was as responsible for the plot as he was for the testimony, how could the court refuse to execute him? Gell offered a neat answer to the leadership question in his second confession. Gell explained that "Vesey said he would appoint his leaders and places of meeting about one week before the 16th of June, but the meeting for this purpose was prevented by the Capture of some of the principals before that period." In other words, Gell said that Vesey never got around to appointing his lieutenants. A major problem with this assertion is that only William Paul, whom nobody considered a principal, was under arrest about a week before June 16. Peter Poyas and Mingo Harth had been apprehended at the end of May, but they were quickly released after convincing authorities they knew nothing. 151 Gell's statement served his own and the court's interests by making Vesey the mastermind of the conspiracy, but it is unconvincing on its face.

Jesse Blackwood testified that Gell acted more the leader than the follower. Blackwood claimed that on June 16 he "met Charles Drayton at Veseys who said that the business was postponed, Vesey asked Charles how he knew the business was postponed--Charles said Ned Bennett and Monday Gell told him so--But said Vesey how could they know it was postponed, as they have not seen me--says Charles, they said they had seen you and you had told them so." 152 Blackwood's testimony exemplifies the witnesses' tangled account of conspiratorial leadership that the court straightened into a clear story of Vesey, the leader, and his many followers. The court marveled at the attention Vesey and his subordinates devoted "to the most minute particulars" in preparing for the uprising. 153 Although guns hardly qualified as a minute particular, it is instructive to consider the conspirators' plans to obtain firearms. For the most part, black Charlestonians did not possess guns and had little experience with them. In his first confession, Monday Gell said that he did not "hear any thing about arms being in possession of the blacks." Gell later testified that Bacchus Hammett planned to get five hundred muskets from his master's store and bring them to Vesey's on the night of June 16. 154 Hammett claimed that, instead of 500 muskets, he took a pistol and sword from his master and delivered it to Denmark Vesey at the last minute, "on Sunday night the 16th June." Yorrick Cross said that Charles Drayton "had prepared for himself a Gun & a sword," that Gullah Jack told him he had arms "aplenty" just outside the city limits, and that Peter Poyas avowed that "a white man would purchase Guns and Powder for them." 155 In addition to such piecemeal preparations, the insurrectionists planned to obtain firearms by storming the city's arsenals, guard houses, and stores. Robert Harth reported that Peter Poyas said rural slaves "will bring down their, hoes and axes, &c," but Harth objected, "that wont do to fight with here." Poyas explained that the captured arsenals would "supply the Country people with arms." 156 Poyas told Harth, "after we have taken the Arsenals & Guard houses, then we will set the town on fire in different places & as the whites come out we will slay them."

157 Both the court and the witnesses found it difficult to imagine an insurrection without guns. But slaves' lack of familiarity with guns did not bode well for their effective use. Billy Bulkley told the court that one day before June 16, when he and six other conspirators met, "a pistol was exhibited, and every one tried to fire it but no one could discharge it" except one man. 158 Bulkley explained that "those in whose hands it could not go off were considered as safe," an inauspicious qualification for a successful insurrectionist. The court, however, had no difficulty imagining that conspirators who, according to Bulkley, could not fire a pistol would successfully gun down white people with the weapons captured from the city's arsenals. All six of the men at the meeting with Bulkley were hanged; Bulkley, a star witness, was not.

 

In spite of all the testimony, the court could not find any guns secreted away by the conspirators. The Official Report observes, "To presume that the Insurgents had no arms because none were seized, would be drawing an inference in direct opposition to the whole of the evidence." 159 In other words, the court chose to believe its own preconceived conclusion, suitably buttressed by cooperative witnesses, that the insurrectionists had prepared themselves with guns that disappeared. Plantation slaves promised to make up in numbers what the city's insurrectionists lacked in firepower. Witnesses differed considerably about just how many rural slaves had joined the conspiracy. William Paul said Peter Poyas "had a list with 9,000 names upon it." 160 Frank Ferguson reported that Gullah Jack "had spoken to 6,600 persons [in the country] who had agreed to join." Both Joe LaRoche and George Wilson testified that 4,000 men would come from James Island alone. William Colcock said "a Brother told him that 500 men were making up." John Enslow "heard that they [the conspirators] were trying all round the Country to Georgetown, Santee & around to Combahee &c to get people." Monday Gell testified that Frank Ferguson had recruited "4 Plantations of people."

Charles Drayton declared that Jimmy Clement had engaged "2 or 3 men" from the country. Whatever the exact number, Ferguson claimed that Denmark Vesey assured him that "great numbers would come from all about and it [the uprising] must succeed, as so many were engaged in it." 161 The court acknowledged that "the numbers actually engaged in the plot, must be altogether conjectural." The testimony disclosed enough, however, "to satisfy every reasonable mind, that considerable numbers were involved" and that many would come from the "country around Charleston." The court believed that "sufficient evidence" of the large number of conspirators was "the plan of attack, which embraced so many points to be assailed at the same instant." 162 To assemble a black army from the countryside and arrange for it to march into Charleston at the appointed hour required coordination between the urban vanguard and the plantation masses. The rural slaves who stood ready to swarm into the city needed to be told that the moment of truth had arrived, that the uprising would start at midnight on June 16. Jesse Blackwood testified that Vesey appointed him to convey this crucial message.

According to Blackwood, at 1 p. m. on Saturday, June 15, Vesey gave him two dollars to hire a horse to go into the country and alert two men on one plantation. Blackwood agreed to go but told Vesey, "I dont know the way." Frank Ferguson, who had recruited the two plantation slaves, gave Blackwood directions and twenty-five cents. Adam Ferguson tossed in another quarter. Armed with directions and $2.50 to rent a horse, Blackwood "promised to go that night" on a path he had never traveled to a plantation he had never visited to tell two men he had never met to call down the shock troops of insurrection from the countryside. On this weak link the insurrection depended for rural reinforcements, according to witnesses. Worse for the prospects of the uprising, Blackwood claimed he never went anyplace. On Sunday, June 16, Blackwood testified, "I told Vesey I had started, but that the Patrol turned me back--In fact I had not started and only told him so to deceive him." 163

No black army of plantation slaves materialized in Charleston on the night of June 16 or any other night. According to Governor Bennett, the "perfect tranquillity which every where prevailed [in the surrounding countryside] was the strongest evidence of their having no participation, with the disaffected of the Metropoplis." Bennett censured Vesey for entrusting such a vital mission to Blackwood. Vesey's "incapacity" for leadership was "strikingly exemplified" by the selection of Blackwood, Bennett declared. "This boy is represented as extremely simple, and assures him [Vesey] that he neither knows the place or the people; yet Vesey enjoins the duty, and as an outfit supplied him with two Dollars: he is to travel a distance of twenty-two miles from the City, and without any evidence of his mission, to deliver a message to two persons, who are at his bidding to assemble the males of four plantations and march them to the City, by 12 o'clock that night; the suspicion to be excited by this movement, or the vigilance of Patrols, form no part of his care.

At 11 o'clock on Sunday morning, the boy is seen in the streets of Charleston, alleging to one that he did not intend to go, and to another that the Patrols were too strict. But it does not appear, that Vesey subsequently evinced the slightest solicitude for his success." Bennett concluded that "it is scarcely possible to imagine" a plot "more crude or imperfect." 164 The court, however, had no difficulty imagining that the preemptive military mobilization in the city had prevented the plantation army from massing and joining the urban conspirators. The court believed that the actions of white officials--not the inaction of Blackwood, the casual neglect of Vesey, or the nonexistence of rural conspirators--saved the city from catastrophe. The court declared that "it was distinctly in proof, that but for those military demonstrations, the effort [of insurrection] would unquestionably have been made." 165

Witnesses reinforced the court's convictions with repeated testimony that all hell was about to break loose until whites flourished their impressive display of military might. By invoking the military mobilization, witnesses reassured the court that white vigilance prevented black insurrection. The intimidating mobilization also allowed witnesses to persuade the court that vague and contradictory testimony about timing, leaders, guns, and rural allies described a genuine plot of insurrection, a plot armed whites not only foiled but also made invisible. To the court, the mobilization explained the inconvenient invisibility of insurrectionary planning, preparation, and action. In retrospect, neither the court nor the witnesses provided credible evidence that a black insurrection was about to break out in Charleston on or about June 16. 166 If white officials had not deployed the militia and beefed up patrols, it is virtually certain, according to the available evidence, that no insurrection would have occurred. To a credulous court determined to defend its honor, the cooperative witnesses provided more than enough evidence to execute thirty-five black men and exile thirty-seven others for "an attempt to raise an insurrection." 167 But even if historians refuse to accede to the court's credulity, the testimony remains meaningful, although not always as highlighted in previous accounts.

 

The first words of the first witness at the first court session characterized most of the subsequent testimony: "I have heard something about an Insurrection of the blacks." 168 Witnesses told the court what they heard--what some person told them or what a third party reported that some person said. Under pressure from the court to tell a tale of thwarted insurrection, witnesses recalled who said what about when, where, and why. As Billy Bulkley testified, "Will Bee told Peter Ward who mentioned it to me that all the Draymen without exception would be light horse men." 169 When witnesses searched their memories, they did not need to invent incriminating statements de novo. They could, and evidently did, report rumors they had heard. Rumors transmitted on the black grapevine supplied the basic substrate of information that witnesses drew on for their testimony. Take the rumor that Denmark Vesey said the slaves were free. On the second day of the June court sessions, pet witness Joe LaRoche testified that Rolla Bennett told him that, at a conspirators' meeting Bennett had attended a few weeks earlier, "'twas said that some white men said our Legislature had set them [slaves] free & our [white] people here would not let us be so." 170

Later in his testimony, LaRoche recalled an encounter with Denmark Vesey about a month earlier, when Vesey said "that the Legislature had made us free." A few days later, Frank Ferguson and Rolla Bennett also attributed this rumor to Vesey. Ferguson told the court that Vesey said he had instructed Peter Poyas and Ned Bennett "to go about & tell the blacks that they were free & must rise and fight for themselves." According to Rolla Bennett, "On one occasion he [Vesey] asked me what news--I told him none--He replied we are made free, but the White people here won't let us be so--and the only way is to raise up & fight the Whites." 171 According to the Official Report, this testimony demonstrates that Vesey manipulated his followers "by distorting" speeches made "in Congress . . . opposed to the admission of Missouri into the Union, perhaps garbled and misrepresented," and persuaded them "that Congress had actually declared them free, and that they were held in bondage contrary to the laws of the land." 172 Historians have agreed with the court's reading. Pearson, for example, declares that Vesey "did mislead his followers," that he "appears to have deliberately distorted the result of the Missouri debates for consumption by his followers, circulating rumors that the compromise promised them freedom." 173

 

In Evidence, no witness used the words "Congress" or "Missouri" to describe what Vesey said to them or to anybody else. Nor do those words appear anywhere in the transcript testimony of LaRoche, Bennett, or Ferguson. The words appear only twice in the transcript, both times in testimony about Monday Gell, not Vesey. On July 16, William Colcock testified "that when he went so often to Mondays it was to hear what was going on in Congress, as we the Blacks expected that Congress was going to set us free and as what was going on was printed in all the papers, so that every body black as well as white might read it (he alluded to the Missouri question . . .)." 174 On the last day of the July sessions, Jacob Stagg stated "that Monday read daily the papers and told him that Congress was going to set them free--alluding to the Missouri question." 175 According to the transcript, both Colcock and Stagg used the word "Congress" and referred to blacks' expectation that it would set them free, not that it had already set them free. Both witnesses "alluded" to Missouri, raising the question of whether they actually spoke that word or whether the clerk or the court assumed that Missouri must be what Colcock and Stagg had in mind.

LaRoche's testimony in the Official Report proves that the court listened creatively. According to the transcript, LaRoche said Vesey told him "that the Legislature had made us free." In the Official Report version of this testimony, the court substituted the word "Congress" for "the Legislature." 176 Similarly, the Official Report substitutes "Congress" for "our Legislature" in LaRoche's testimony that Rolla Bennett told him that "'twas said that some white men said our Legislature had set them [slaves] free & our [white] people here would not let us be so." Perhaps these substitutions simply grew out of the court's accurate knowledge that the South Carolina legislature had not emancipated slaves. The court probably reasoned that, since neither "the" nor "our" could possibly refer to the South Carolina legislature, the witnesses must have referred to Congress. This line of reasoning also located the source of ideas "inflaming the minds of the colored population of this state" among meddling antislavery northerners. 177 Newspaper reports about the 1821 South Carolina legislature suggest that the source of the inflammatory ideas was closer to home, that the court and subsequent historians--deafened by accurate knowledge about state law--failed to hear what the witnesses said. Instead of listening to testimony exclusively through a filter of knowledge about what the state legislature was actually doing, why not ask whether there was any way a person like Denmark Vesey could get the idea "that the Legislature had made us free"? 178

Vesey could read. He probably read Charleston newspapers and derived information from them about the state legislature and other matters. Imagine what Vesey might have thought about the first sentences in the Charleston Courier's first report of news from the 1821 South Carolina legislature: "Several petitions having been already presented for leave to emancipate slaves, the Senate has appointed a special committee on the subject, consisting of five, with authority to report by bill. This committee will probably be joined by one of the House on the same subject." 179 How might Vesey have interpreted the Courier's next notice of legislative activity on this subject, eleven days later: "The Legislature at their last session, passed a Law, whereby they changed the mode of emancipating slaves. It is believed they intended to do more, and before the session terminates they will be required to say what they did intend. In the Senate a bill has been reported to emancipate the slaves whose owners have petitioned, on security being given that they shall leave the State. The whole number applied for is less than 45, and consists chiefly of women and children." 180 What meaning might Vesey have derived from the final piece of news from the legislature: "On the subject of Emancipation an act will probably pass--permitting emancipation in cases where contracts for that purpose had been entered into previous to December last, and to restrain it in all other cases." 181

Could news that "on the subject of Emancipation an act will probably pass" have caused Vesey to believe "that the Legislature had made us free"? If so, what might Vesey think when no further news of this electrifying development appeared in the newspaper? News reports about the adjournment of the legislature included no mention of an emancipation act. 182 Could Vesey have concluded that an emancipation act had passed as predicted, but that the news was being deliberately suppressed, that a conspiracy of self-interested silence prevailed among Charleston whites? Could the news coupled with the ensuing silence have caused Vesey to tell Rolla Bennett, "We are made free, but the White people here won't let us be so--and the only way is to raise up & fight the Whites"? 183 If Vesey or other black Charlestonians who could read interpreted news reports in this way, they were wrong on the facts. In 1820, the South Carolina legislature prohibited masters from manumitting their slaves, stating unambiguously "that no slave shall hereafter be emancipated but by act of the Legislature." 184 The "petitions . . . to emancipate slaves" mentioned in the Courier's first report from the 1821 legislature referred to entreaties from individual masters in response to the 1820 law, requesting an act of the legislature permitting them to manumit one or more specific slaves. 185

Although the 1821 legislature discussed changing the 1820 law, none of the proposed revisions passed. The Courier's news reports from the 1821 legislature never made a clear distinction between the manumission of one or two slaves and the emancipation of all or most slaves. The brief reports assumed an audience of well-informed white people familiar with the provisions of the 1820 law and the narrowly limited meaning of news that an emancipation act was expected to pass. The news reports did not assume an audience of intensely curious black readers, although as William Colcock testified, "what was going on was printed in all the papers, so that every body black as well as white might read it." 186 Black readers were far less likely to know the provisions of the 1820 law and therefore to understand the benign context of the otherwise astonishing news from the 1821 legislature. But even if Vesey knew the provisions of the 1820 law, it is still possible he read the news that "on the subject of Emancipation an act will probably pass" as an announcement that the legislature was about to take the very action required by the 1820 law. If Vesey did believe the state legislature had freed the slaves, it would lend credence to Monday Gell's testimony that "the first time I heard of the intended Insurrection was about last Christmas from Denmark Vesey, who called at my Shop and informed me of it." 187

Regardless of who initiated the conversation, Gell's statement that it occurred in late December 1821 hints that the amazing news from the recently adjourned legislature may have prompted the discussion. That news, instead of the congressional debates about Missouri, which had occurred more than a year earlier, could help explain why black Charlestonians began to talk frequently and earnestly about their freedom in the spring of 1822. Whatever Vesey told his friends about the legislature metamorphosed in the passage from his lips to their ears and in the endless oral-aural shuttle on the black grapevine. 188 Jacob Stagg's testimony that "Monday read daily the papers and told him that Congress was going to set them free" revealed the common link between reader and rumor. Witnesses who testified about conspirators' anticipated help from Santo Domingo disclosed the metamorphosis of reading into rumors. Detailed reports about Haiti routinely appeared in the Charleston Courier. Merchants in the city took a lively interest in the nation's markets, white refugees welcomed news from their former home, and slaveholders kept an eye on the course of events in the nation built by revolutionary slaves. Charleston's black readers also watched for news from Haiti. 189 Monday Gell testified that Saby Gaillard "took out one day [before June 16] out of his pocket . . . a piece of news paper & asked me to read it--I did so at my Shop & afterwards he asked me if I had read it--I said yes--'twas about Boyers battles in St Domingo against the Spaniards." 190 In mid-April 1822, the Courier published a lengthy account of the occupation of Spanish Santo Domingo by thousands of soldiers under the command of Haiti's president, Jean Pierre Boyer. 191

The story capped a series of articles dating back to November 1820, when the news first reached Charleston of the "bloody civil war . . . raging in various parts of the Island" that resulted in Boyer's successful overthrow of Henri Christophe. 192 Subsequent notices reported that the new government would "prevent vessels from coming to this Island from any State or place where negroes and people of colour [are] held in slavery," that Boyer sailed into Port-au-Prince with "an army of 16,000 men," that in the midst of the unrest refugees flocked to a United States warship that "saved the whites from the horrors of a massacre," that Boyer ruthlessly suppressed an attempted coup by "a brave and generous officer . . . said to be a good friend to the whites," that "7000 men had marched to the city of St. Domingo . . . and the whole island was completely in possession of the blacks," and that Spaniards mounted an expedition "for the overthrow of that sable government," but the expedition failed. 193 In Charleston, black readers probably wondered what would happen if Boyer and his black army sailed into their city's harbor. According to Monday Gell, the news from Santo Domingo moved Saby Galliard to boast that "if he had men he could do the same as Boyer & that he could whip 10 [white] men himself." Gell also claimed that Vesey wrote a letter inviting Boyer to "assist us." But when news skipped from readers to rumors it could be entirely transformed. Joe LaRoche told the court that "Vesey told me that a large army from St. Domingo & Africa were coming to help us & that we must not stand with our hands in the pocket." Rolla Bennett reported, according to LaRoche, "that St Domingo & Africa would come over & cut up the white people, if we only made the motion here first." 194

Robert Harth testified that Peter Poyas said, "have you not heard that on the 4th July the Whites are going to create a false alarm of fire & every black that comes out will be killed in order to thin them--Do you think they would be so barbarous said I [Harth]--yes said he [Poyas] I do--I fear they have some knowledge of an army from St Domingo & they would be right to do it to prevent us from joining that army if it should march towards this land." 195 This rumor inverted the court's narrative of black insurrection: whites would give the fire alarm and kill blacks rather than vice versa. But how could such a rumor arise? Although Charleston's slaves and free people of color understood white brutality all too well, why would they credit a rumor that the city's whites would kill blacks indiscriminately? In their classic study of rumor, Gordon W. Allport and Leo Postman pointed out, "Rumor travels when events have importance in the lives of individuals and when the news received about them is either lacking or subjectively ambiguous." 196 Rumors that the South Carolina legislature had freed slaves, that a black army was sailing from Haiti to help blacks defend their liberty, and that whites planned to kill blacks could hardly have been more important in the lives of individual black Charlestonians. A source of ambiguous news about whites killing blacks is suggested by Allport and Postman's observation that, as a rumor passes from person to person, details are sheared off and "it tends to grow shorter, more concise, more easily grasped and told." 197 While the 1821 South Carolina legislature discussed revising the 1820 prohibition of manumission, it also debated and ultimately passed a law making it a capital crime for a white person to murder a slave. Such a reform had been advocated for more than a year in articles prominently featured in the Charleston Courier. In his message to the 1820 legislature, Governor John Geddes argued that "the rules of reason, Justice, and religion require" that the "barbarous deed" of a white person murdering a slave should receive "the same" punishment as any other murder. 198

Eleven months later, "Beccaria" urged the 1821 legislature to adopt such a measure, since "it cannot be believed that the wise ordinance of Heaven had special regard to color or complexion" in providing for the punishment of an "abandoned villain, who wantonly sports with the life of his fellow creature." 199 Readers could learn about the 1821 legislature's response to such appeals in the Courier's notice that "a Bill was likely to pass prescribing the punishment of death for the murder of a slave." 200 A few days later the Courier reported, "In relation to the Penal Code, several very important alterations will probably prevail. The murder of a slave is to be punished by death." On Christmas day, the Courier explained that the new law provided that "murder in the first degree, on the body of a slave, is to be punished with death, without the benefit of Clergy; Manslaughter, $500, fine, and six months imprisonment." 201 What might it take for news that whites who murdered slaves were subject to the death penalty to become a rumor that whites intended to kill blacks? Would it take more than a black reader reporting the news to a friend who in turn repeated a shortened version such as, "I hear whites are talking about killing blacks"? That may have been the source of the rumor that surfaced in Robert Harth's testimony to the court. More generally, black readers like Denmark Vesey and Monday Gell may well have been the sources of this and other rumors eventually voiced by witnesses in court. According to the transcript, witnesses came to Monday Gell's harness-making shop to hear the latest news and talk about its meaning. Gell testified that "the first time" William Palmer came to his shop "he asked for the news paper." Yorrick Cross reported that as he was leaving Gell's shop, Gell "said when you want to hear the news come here." Gell told the court, "every day there were numbers in my Shop on this business [insurrection]." 202

Altogether, witnesses named fifty-seven slaves and free men of color who talked with Gell about the uprising. In large measure, the court rounded up, convicted, and executed or exiled members of Gell's reading and discussion group. Three-fourths of the men hanged and two-thirds of those exiled had discussed the uprising with Gell, according to the transcript. 203 Since Gell himself provided the testimony--corroborated by other pet and star witnesses--that placed these men in his shop talking insurrection, the court vicariously eavesdropped on those conversations and believed they were a plot to set fire to the city and kill the whites. But was the court interpreting the testimony correctly? Or was it participating in the cycle of rumor by listening to the shocking talk circulating among black Charlestonians and amplifying it into "the most horrible catastrophe" that had ever threatened South Carolina? 204 If black men discussed the news, were they plotting to slaughter whites? If they talked about insurrection, were they joining it? If they speculated about an uprising, were they preparing for it? Not according to Caesar Smith, one of the few defendants who testified in his own behalf. John Enslow, Charles Drayton, and Gell named Smith as one of those who stopped by Gell's shop to talk. "He was always willing to join, there is no one more so," Gell said, adding, "He was as zealous as myself--He was at my shop often." Smith's entire defense was "that he had frequent conversations on this subject with the witnesses but denied he had joined." 205

Unpersuaded by Smith's distinction, the court sent him to the gallows. Rather than evidence of insurrection, witnesses' testimony documented the heresies widespread among black Charlestonians: that blacks hated both slavery and whites, that slaves should be free, that blacks should be equal to whites. The authority of the Bible undergirded these heresies. Witnesses linked Vesey with the Bible much as they associated Gell with the newspaper. 206 William Paul told the court that Vesey "studies the Bible a great deal and tries to prove from it that [Slavery and] bondage is against the Bible." Rolla Bennett testified that Vesey, at a meeting at his house, "was the first to rise up & speak & he read to us from the Bible how the Children of Israel were delivered out of Egypt from bondage." 207 Other defendants were also identified as Bible readers. Charles Drayton declared that "once at Veseys at a meeting about this business--[Jack] Glenn there quoted Scripture to prove he would not be condemned for raising against the whites--he read a chapter out of the Bible." 208 Historians of medieval and early modern Europe have observed the concomitant spread of reading and heresy among lay people, beginning in the twelfth century. 209 Heresy, of course, existed long before literacy diffused beyond learned elites. Before the twelfth century, heresy was associated with illiteracy. 210 Literate elites had exclusive access to authoritative texts, allowing them to define orthodoxy. Important developments such as the insertion of spaces between written words beginning in the ninth century made it possible for reading to shift over the next few centuries from spoken to silent, from mouth to eye, from public to private. 211

The growing intimacy between text and reader had profound political as well as devotional consequences. In private, silent readers cultivated unorthodox and even subversive ideas that literate elites labeled heresy. 212 A chasm of time, space, and historical experience separates the literate heretics of medieval and early modern Europe from Denmark Vesey and other black readers in Charleston. 213 But like heretical readers centuries earlier, Vesey and other literate African Americans lived amid a community of nonreaders. 214 Although all illiterate Charlestonians participated in an oral culture, like early nineteenth-century city-dwellers everywhere they encountered words every day in shop signs, crumpled newspapers in the street, posters slapped on walls, and currency exchanged from hand to hand. 215 People who could not read, both black and white, knew that written words had powers accessible to those who could decipher them. Vesey and other black readers, like heretics of earlier times, challenged moral and political orthodoxies by giving nonliterate black listeners heterodox readings of authoritative words. 216 South Carolina legislators understood the dangers of subversive readings in a slave society. The 1820 law prohibiting manumission provided severe penalties for any white person or free person of color "convicted of having, directly or indirectly, circulated or brought within this State, any written or printed paper, with intent to disturb the peace or security of the same, in relation to the slaves of the people of this State." 217

The legislators failed to imagine that their own "written or printed" words could invite disturbing heresies by circulating among black readers and listeners in Charleston. Religious heresies promulgated by the African church, white Charlestonians believed, justified the suspicion that, as William Paul testified Mingo Harth told him, "all those belonging to the African Church are engaged in the insurrection from the Country to the town." 218 The liabilities of the testimony in the court transcript make it impossible to be certain about what Vesey said or believed. But the outlines of the heresies he and others circulated are visible in witnesses' attempts to exculpate themselves by embracing conventional orthodoxies. Pet witness Joe LaRoche told the court that he refused Rolla Bennett's entreaties to join because "God says we must not kill. . . . our parents for generations back had been slaves & we had better be contented." LaRoche explained, "I felt that it was a bad thing to disclose what a bosom friend [Rolla Bennett] had confided, that it was wicked to betray him--but when I thought on the other hand that by doing so I would save so many lives & prevent the horrible acts in contemplation that 'twas overbalanced, & my duty was to inform." Pet witness Robert Harth assured the court that he struck a similar balance when Peter Poyas asked him to join. Harth testified, "About 1st June I saw in the public papers a statement that the white people were going to build Missionary Houses for the Blacks, which I carried & showed to Peter & said to him you see the good they are going to do for us." 219

Star witness Frank Ferguson claimed that "Vesey said the negroes were leading such an abominable life, they ought to rise--I said I was living well--he said tho' I was, others were not, and that 'twas such fools as I that were in their way, and would not help them." George Vanderhorst told the court that the conspirators were bent on killing blacks who refused to embrace their heresies: "I have heard it said all about the streets generally, I cant name any one in particular, that whoever is the white man's friend God help them, by which I understood that they would be killed." Smart Anderson confessed that when he "asked him [Denmark Vesey] if you were going to kill the women and Children--Denmark answered what was the use of killing the louse and leaving the nit--Smart said my god what a Sin." 220 By these self-exculpatory statements, witnesses tried to assure the court that they saw the world right side up, that is, white side up. Vesey, witnesses claimed, refused to embrace that orthodoxy. According to Benjamin Ford, "a white Lad about 15 or 16 years of age," Vesey did not confine his heresies to private conversations with his black friends. Ford testified "that Denmark Vesey frequently came into our Shop, which is near his house & always complained of the hardships of the blacks--he said the laws were very rigid & strict & that the blacks had not their rights, that every one had his time & that his would come round too--his general conversation was about religion, which he would apply to Slavery, as for instance, he would speak of the creation of the world in which he would say all men had equal rights, blacks as well as whites &c. all his religious remarks were mingled with Slavery." The court observed that Vesey "sought every opportunity of entering into conversations with white persons when they could be overheard by negroes near by, especially in grog shops; during which conversation he would artfully introduce some bold remark on slavery." 221 Perhaps Vesey's intransigent flaunting of his heresies made him a target for whites' suspicion and black witnesses' incrimination. Instead of an insurrectionist, perhaps Vesey was a fall guy for both the court and the witnesses who repeatedly testified against him.

According to the Official Report (but not the transcript), Vesey told the court that "as his situation in life had been such that he could have had no inducement to join in such an attempt, the charge against him must be false; and he attributed it to the great hatred which he alledged the blacks had against him." Perhaps Vesey spoke truths many whites and blacks preferred to suppress because they lived in a world brutally hostile to the heresy of racial equality. 222 Suppressed heresy-- "don't ask, don't tell"--could be tolerated by both whites and blacks. Expressed heresy became intolerable, frightening whites and subjecting blacks to the harsh strictures of white suspicion and vigilance. Vesey, it appears, was the victim of a conspiracy of collusion between the white court and its cooperative black witnesses, both eager for their own reasons to pay homage to the enduring power of white supremacy. Unanswered questions about Vesey and his co-conspirators abound. 223 But this much is clear: Vesey and the other condemned black men were victims of an insurrection conspiracy conjured into being in 1822 by the court, its cooperative black witnesses, and its numerous white supporters and kept alive ever since by historians eager to accept the court's judgments while rejecting its morality. Surely it is time to pay attention to the "not guilty" pleas of almost all the men who went to the gallows, to their near silence in the court records, to their refusal to name names in order to save themselves. These men were heroes not because they were about to launch an insurrection but because they risked and accepted death rather than collaborate with the conspiratorial court and its cooperative witnesses. Surely it is time to read the court's Official Report and the witnesses' testimony with the skepticism they richly deserve and to respect the integrity of a past that sometimes confounds the reassuring expectations generated by our present-day convictions about the evil of slavery and the legitimacy of blacks' claims to freedom and justice. Surely it is time to bring the court's conspiracy against Denmark Vesey and other black Charlestonians to an end.

 

Further Reading

 

For previous scholarship on the Vesey conspiracy, see Archibald Henry Grimké, Right on the Scaffold, or, The Martyrs of 1822 (Washington, D. C., 1901); Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, "The Slave Labor Problem in the Charleston District," Political Science Quarterly, 22 (1907), 416­39, and American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime (New York, 1918), 477­79; Joseph C. Carroll, Slave Insurrections in the United States, 1800­1865 (Boston, 1938), 102­13; Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York, 1943), 268­76; Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York, 1956), 135; Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1959), 138­39; Richard C. Wade, "The Vesey Plot: A Reconsideration," Journal of Southern History, 30 (1964), 148­61, and Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820­1860 (New York, 1964), 228­41; John Lofton, Insurrection in South Carolina: The Turbulent World of Denmark Vesey (Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1964); William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816­1836 (New York, 1965), 51­63; Robert S. Starobin, ed., Denmark Vesey: The Slave Conspiracy of 1822, Great Lives Observed (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1970); John Oliver Killens, "Introduction," in Killens, ed., Trial Record of Denmark Vesey, vii-xxi; Marina Wikramanayake, A World in Shadow: The Free Black in Antebellum South Carolina (Columbia, S. C., 1973), 133­51; Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York, 1974), 270­71, 284­85; Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge, 1979), 44­50; John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, 5th ed. (New York, 1980), 154­55; Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York, 1981), 65­72; Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (New York, 1984), 37­42; Freehling, "Denmark Vesey's Peculiar Reality," in Robert H. Abzug and Stephen E. Maizlish, eds., New Perspectives on Race and Slavery in America: Essays in Honor of Kenneth M. Stampp (Lexington, Ky., 1986), 25­47; Margaret Washington Creel, "A Peculiar People": Slave Religion and Community-Culture among the Gullahs (New York, 1988), 150­66; Walter J. Fraser, Jr., Charleston! Charleston! The History of a Southern City (Columbia, S. C., 1989), 200­04; Norrece T. Jones, Jr., Born a Child of Freedom, Yet a Slave: Mechanisms of Control and Strategies of Resistance in Antebellum South Carolina (Hanover, N. H., 1990), 177­80, 185­86; Sterling Stuckey, "Remembering Denmark Vesey," in Going through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History (New York, 1994), 19­31; Freehling, "Denmark Vesey's Antipaternalist Reality," in The Reintegration of American History: Slavery and the Civil War (New York, 1994), 34­58; Bernard E. Powers, Jr., Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822­1885 (Fayetteville, Ark., 1994), 29­35; Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736­1831 (Urbana, 1994), 228­30; W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 192­99; Peter P. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (University Park, Pa., 1997), 22­62; Walter Edgar, South Carolina: A History (Columbia, S. C., 1998), 327­29; Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 362; Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000), 298­99; and Lois A. Walker and Susan R. Silverman, A Documented History of Gullah Jack Pritchard and the Denmark Vesey Slave Insurrection of 1822 (Lewiston, N. Y., 2000). 127

 

For more on the significance of rumor, see Tamotsu Shibutani, Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor (Indianapolis, 1966); Patrick B. Mullen, "Modern Legend and Rumor Theory," Journal of the Folklore Institute, 9 (1972), 95­109; Peter Lienhardt, "The Interpretation of Rumour," in John H. M. Beattie and R. Godfrey Lienhardt, eds., Studies in Social Anthropology: Essays in Memory of Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard by His Former Oxford Colleagues (Oxford, 1975), 105­31; Ralph L. Rosnow and Gary Alan Fine, Rumor and Gossip: The Social Psychology of Hearsay (New York, 1976); Fredrick Koenig, Rumor in the Marketplace: The Social Psychology of Commercial Hearsay (Dover, Mass., 1985); Luise White, "Between Gluckman and Foucault: Historicizing Rumour and Gossip," Social Dynamics, 20 (1994), 75­92. Important case studies of rumors include Leon Festinger et al., "A Study of a Rumor: Its Origin and Spread," Human Relations, 1 (1948), 464­86; Edgar Morin, Rumour in Orléans, trans. Peter Green (New York, 1971); R. Po-Chia Hsia, The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany (New Haven, 1988); Arlette Farge and Jacques Revel, The Vanishing Children of Paris: Rumor and Politics before the French Revolution, trans. Claudia Miéville (Cambridge, Mass., 1991); Alain Corbin, The Village of Cannibals: Rage and Murder in France, 1870, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1992); Hsia, Trent 1475: Stories of a Ritual Murder Trial (New Haven, 1992); Patricia A. Turner, "Ambivalent Patrons: The Role of Rumor and Contemporary Legends in African-American Consumer Decisions," Journal of American Folklore, 105 (1992), 424­41; Steven Hahn, "'Extravagant Expectations' of Freedom: Rumour, Political Struggle, and the Christmas Insurrection Scare of 1865 in the American South," Past and Present, No. 157 (1997), 122­58; and White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley, 2000). 128

 

For more on literacy in medieval and early modern Europe, see Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, 1983); Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, 1987); Alain Boureau, The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, ed. Chartier, trans. Cochrane (Princeton, 1989); Rosamond McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word (Cambridge, 1989); McKitterick, ed., The Uses of Literacy in Early Mediaeval Europe (Cambridge, 1990); Robert Darnton, "First Steps toward a History of Reading," in The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York, 1990), 154­87; Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, "'Studied for Action': How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy," Past and Present, No. 129 (1990), 30­78; M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066­1307, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1993); Ruth B. Bottigheimer, "Bible Reading, 'Bibles' and the Bible for Children in Early Modern Germany," Past and Present, No. 139 (1993), 66­89; Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, 1994); D. H. Green, Medieval Listening and Reading: The Primary Reception of German Literature, 800­1300 (Cambridge, 1994); Paul Saenger, Space between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford, 1997); James B. Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc (Ithaca, 1997); Grafton, Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers, Jerome Lectures, 20 (Ann Arbor, 1997); Matthew Innes, "Memory, Orality, and Literacy in an Early Medieval Society," Past and Present, No. 163 (1998), 3­36; and more generally, Harvey J. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society (Bloomington, Ind., 1987); Jack Goody, The Interface between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge, 1987); Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (New York, 1996); Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 1998); and Guglielmo Cavallo and Chartier, eds., A History of Reading in the West, trans. Cochrane (Amherst, Mass., 1999). 129 On reading in North America, see Kenneth A. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York, 1974); Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700­1865 (New York, 1989); William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780­1835 (Knoxville, 1989); David D. Hall, Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book (Amherst, Mass., 1996); Isabelle Lehuu, Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, 2000); Jennifer Tebbe, "Print and American Culture," American Quarterly, 32 (1980), 259­79; Joseph F. Kett and Patricia A. McClung, "Book Culture in Post-Revolutionary Virginia," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 94 (1984), 97­147; Farley Grubb, "Colonial Immigrant Literacy: An Economic Analysis of Pennsylvania-German Evidence, 1727­1775," Explorations in Economic History, 24 (1987), 63­76, and "Growth of Literacy in Colonial America: Longitudinal Patterns, Economic Models, and the Direction of Future Research," Social Science History, 14 (1990), 451­82; Graff, "Literacy, Libraries, Lives: New Social and Cultural Histories," Libraries and Culture, 26 (1991) 25­45; James L. Machor, "Fiction and Informed Reading in Early Nineteenth-Century America," Nineteenth-Century Literature, 97 (1992), 320­48; Thomas C. Leonard, "News at the Hearth: A Drama of Reading in Nineteenth-Century America," Proc. A. A. S., 102 (1993), 379­401; Hall, "Readers and Reading in America: Historical and Critical Perspectives," ibid., 103 (1994), 337­57; Robert A. Gross, "Reading Culture, Reading Books," ibid., 106 (1996), 59­78; Carl E. Garrigus, Jr., "The Reading Habits of Maryland's Planter Gentry, 1718­1747," Maryland Historical Magazine, 92 (1997), 36­53; George Boudreau, "'Highly Valuable & Extensively Useful': Community and Readership among the Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia Middling Sort," Pennsylvania History, 63 (1996), 302­29; Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, "Books, Reading, and the World of Goods in Antebellum New England," AQ, 48 (1996), 587­622; and Leon Jackson, "Jedidiah Morse and the Transformation of Print Culture in New England, 1784­1826," Early American Literature, 34 (1999), 2­31. 130

 

For more on the significance of reading and literacy, see Daniel P. Resnick and Lauren B. Resnick, "The Nature of Literacy: An Historical Explanation," Harvard Educational Review, 47 (1977), 370­85; Carmeleta L. Monteith, "Literacy Among the Cherokee in the Early Nineteenth Century," Journal of Cherokee Studies, 9 (1984), 56­75; Charles Joyner, "'If You Ain't Got Education': Slave Language and Slave Thought in Antebellum Charleston," in Michael O'Brien and David Moltke-Hansen, eds., Intellectual Life in Antebellum Charleston (Knoxville, 1986), 255­78; E. Jennifer Monaghan, "Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial New England," AQ, 40 (1988), 18­41, and "'She Loved to Read in Good Books': Literacy and the Indians of Martha's Vineyard, 1643­1725," History of Education Quarterly, 30 (1990), 493­521; David Jaffee, "The Village Enlightenment in New England, 1760­1820," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 47 (1990), 327­46; John U. Ogbu, "Minority Status and Literacy in Comparative Perspective," Daedalus, 119 (Spring 1990), 141­68; Daniel P. Resnick, "Historical Perspectives on Literacy and Schooling," ibid., 15­32; Edward W. Stevens, Jr., "Technology, Literacy, and Early Industrial Expansion in the United States," Hist. Education Q., 30 (1990), 523­44; Kathleen J. Bragdon, "Vernacular Literacy and Massachusett World View, 1650­1750," Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, Annual Proceedings, 16 (1991), 26­34; Thomas C. Leonard, "The Democratic Revolution and the News: Reading as Performance in the Early Republic," Valley Forge Journal, 5 (1991), 195­208; Gloria L. Main, "An Inquiry into When and Why Women Learned to Write in Colonial New England," Journal of Social History, 24 (1991), 579­89; Karen C. Chambers Dalton, "'The Alphabet is an Abolitionist': Literacy and African Americans in the Emancipation Era," Massachusetts Review, 32 (1992), 545­80; Ronald J. Zboray, "Reading Patterns in Antebellum America: Evidence in the Charge Records of the New York Society Library," Libraries and Culture, 26 (1991), 301­33; Frank Lambert, "'I Saw the Book Talk': Slave Readings of the First Great Awakening," Journal of Negro History, 77 (1992), 185­98; Barbara J. Little, "Explicit and Implicit Meanings in Material Culture and Print Culture," Historical Archaeology, 26:3 (1992), 85­94; Ann Laura Stoler, "'In Cold Blood': Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives," Representations, No. 37 (1992), 151­89; Jill Lepore, "Dead Men Tell No Tales: John Sassamon and the Fatal Consequences of Literacy," AQ, 46 (1994), 479­512; Rosalind Remer, "Preachers, Peddlers, and Publishers: Philadelphia's Backcountry Book Trade, 1800­1830," Journal of the Early Republic, 14 (1994), 497­522; Daniel J. Royer, "The Process of Literacy as Communal Involvement in the Narratives of Frederick Douglass," African American Review, 28 (1994), 363­74; Peter Wogan, "Perceptions of European Literacy in Early Contact Situations," Ethnohistory, 41 (1994), 407­29; Lindon Barrett, "African-American Slave Narratives: Literacy, the Body, Authority," Amer. Lit. Hist., 7 (1995), 415­42; David Paul Nord, "Religious Reading and Readers in Antebellum America," J. Early Republic, 15 (1995), 241­72; Lisa Sisco, "'Writing in the Spaces Left': Literacy as a Process of Becoming in the Narratives of Frederick Douglass," ATQ, N. S., 9 (1995), 195­227; Maureen Konkle, "Indian Literacy, U.S. Colonialism, and Literary Criticism," American Literature, 69 (1997), 457­86; John E. Murray, "Generation(s) of Human Capital: Literacy in American Families, 1830­1875," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 27 (1997), 413­35; Zboray and Zboray, "'Have You Read . . . ?': Real Readers and Their Responses in Antebellum Boston and Its Region," Nineteenth-Century Literature, 52 (1997), 139­70; Thomas Augst, "The Business of Reading in Nineteenth-Century America: The New York Mercantile Library," AQ, 50 (1998), 267­305; Paul Gutjahr, "The Golden Bible in the Bible's Golden Age: The Book of Mormon and Antebellum Print Culture," ATQ, N. S., 12 (1998), 275­93; Laura E. Donaldson, "Writing the Talking Stick: Alphabetic Literacy as Colonial Technology and Postcolonial Appropriation," American Indian Quarterly, 22 (1998), 46­62; and Bambi B. Schieffelin, "Introducing Kaluli Literacy: A Chronology of Influences," in Paul V. Kroskrity, ed., Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities (Santa Fe, 2000), 293­327. 131

 

Michael P. Johnson is professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University. He benefited from criticisms and suggestions of the following colleagues, who bear no responsibility for the views expressed here: Sara Berry, Carl Degler, Max Edelson, James Fearon, Lacy Ford, Carol Gluck, Jack Greene, Steven Hahn, John Higham, David Laitin, Donald Lamm, Charles Lesser, John Marshall, Dylan Penningroth, Jack Rakove, David Rankin, James Roark, James Sidbury, Ann Stoler, Joe Trotter, Steven Topik, William Twining, Jonathan Wiener, Kathryn Woolard, and, more generally, the denizens of the Johns Hopkins History Seminar. A fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, supported in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, provided an ideal intellectual environment for this project from its unexpected beginning to its provisional end.

 

 

 

Notes 1 Douglas R. Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey (Madison, 1999); David Robertson, Denmark Vesey (New York, 1999); Edward A. Pearson, ed., Designs against Charleston: The Trial Record of the Denmark Vesey Slave Conspiracy of 1822 (Chapel Hill, 1999). Page references for quotations from these works are given in parentheses in the text.

 

2 Lionel H. Kennedy, "Sentence on Denmark Vesey," in Kennedy and Thomas Parker, eds., An Official Report of the Trials of Sundry Negroes, Charged with an Attempt to Raise an Insurrection in the State of South Carolina: Preceded by an Introduction and Narrative; and, in an Appendix, A Report of the Trials of Four White Persons on Indictments for Attempting to Excite the Slaves to Insurrection (Charleston, 1822), 177 (hereafter cited as Official Report). A convenient reprint of the Official Report is John Oliver Killens, ed., The Trial Record of Denmark Vesey (Boston, 1970), though it is marred by typographical errors.

 

3 For examples of accounts that rely on the Official Report, see "Further Reading" at the end of this article.

 

4 [Higginson], "Denmark Vesey," Atlantic Monthly, 7 (1861), 728­44.

 

5 The quotations in this paragraph are from the biographical sketch of Vesey in the Official Report, 42­43, 177. The sketch first appeared in James Hamilton, Jr., An Account of the Late Intended Insurrection Among a Portion of the Blacks of This City (Charleston, 1822), 17 (hereafter cited as An Account). Although An Account does not clearly identify any source for this biographical information, Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free, 233, argues that it "could only have been supplied" to court authorities by Vesey's longtime owner, Captain Joseph Vesey, who still lived in Charleston at the time.

 

6 Although Pearson, ed., Designs against Charleston, 26, acknowledges that "no direct evidence links [Vesey] to voodoo ceremonies," he claims that "during his [Vesey's] sojourn on Saint Domingue, he possibly recognized the importance of supernatural forces and ritual for forging a sense of collectivity, enjoining people to silence, and sustaining an identity independent of slavery rooted in African tradition." These rather specific possibilities levitate above the absence of evidence about the perceptions of a 14-year-old slave boy.

 

7 Several pages later, Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free, 140, acknowledges Vesey's "sole known reference to the New Testament."

 

8 William W. Freehling, "Denmark Vesey's Antipaternalist Reality," in The Reintegration of American History: Slavery and the Civil War (New York, 1994), 47, highlights this testimony, arguing that it revealed both the conspirators' motives and the response of terrified whites: "Rolla [the accused defendant] raped with words."

 

9 Wade, "The Vesey Plot: A Reconsideration," Journal of Southern History, 30 (1964), 143­61. The two slaves were Bacchus Hammet, whose deposition is in the Benjamin Hammet Papers at the Duke University Library, and John Enslow, whose deposition is in the Henry Ravenal Papers at the South Carolina Historical Society. Transcriptions of both depositions are included in Pearson, ed., Designs against Charleston, 327­30, 336­37.

 

10 Wade, "Vesey Plot," 156.

 

11 Ibid, 150.

 

12 Egerton notes that "Wade's hypothesis" has been "effectively dismantled," a judgment that Pearson shares; Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free, 238; Pearson, ed., Designs against Charleston, 15. Robertson, Denmark Vesey, 95, is more guarded, observing, "Wade's categorical finding that the Vesey plot never existed was disproved in part by both white and black historians of the 1960s and 1970s. . . . Yet, his interpretation is not wholly disproved."

 

13 Freehling, "Denmark Vesey's Antipaternalist Reality," 45.

 

14 Ibid., 45­46. Freehling gives special emphasis to certain testimony regarding poisoning that, as he points out, the Official Report censors from the manuscript trial record. Freehling argues that "testimony that an individual domestic might slip poison into a household's water was too terrifying to be published"; ibid., 56.

 

15 Ibid., 46, 54­55.

 

16 Wade, "Vesey Plot," 160; Freehling, "Denmark Vesey's Antipaternalist Reality," 46.

 

17 Freehling, "Denmark Vesey's Antipaternalist Reality," 46.

 

18 Pearson, ed., Designs against Charleston, 165­282.

 

19 The manuscript transcripts are in Records of the General Assembly, Nov. 28, 1822, Governors' Messages, 1328, South Carolina Department of Archives and History (SCDAH), Columbia, South Carolina. "Document B House of Representatives" is an 87-page manuscript in folder 2 and is cited hereafter as "House"; "Evidence Document B" is a 113-page manuscript in folder 3 and is cited hereafter as "Evidence." I am indebted to the superb SCDAH staff for their help and cooperation, including permitting me to have simultaneous access to both original transcripts in order to read them side by side.

 

20 Each sheet is now professionally encased in acid-free paper. Whether the sheets were originally bound or loose is impossible to determine by simple visual examination. They are now separate sheets that show no obvious signs, such as holes for stitching along the edges, of having been bound. They may have been sliced from a bound volume, however, for purposes of preservation.

 

21 Pearson, ed., Designs against Charleston, 260­75; coverage of the August trials is therefore necessarily based on Evidence.
 

To Page 1 | To Page 3

TOP
comments and letters to comments@ipoaa.com