Denmark Vesey

Dates Covered: 1822
ISBN: 067944288X
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Our Take

Antebellum Charleston was a dark, complex place. Its slave laws allowed whipping, branding, and the splitting of noses as punishments for slave surliness, yet free Africans were tolerated (they comprised roughly 6% of the city's population in 1800). Those of mixed African and European descent, interestingly, were embraced: European gentlemen attended balls they threw, one person of such lineage owned the finest hotel in town and enjoyed the governor of South Carolina's patronage, others founded a social club for the elite, still others purchased slaves of their own.

The city itself, host to these curious interactions, had been founded on a charter from Barbados which had promised 150 acres of land to every man who arrived on the colony, free or no. This created enormous incentive to import slaves, and by 1800 the slaves outnumbered the Europeans by more than three to one. You might be able to figure out what happened next, which is that a slave rebellion coalesced in 1822. However, it did so at the hand of a free man, one Denmark Vesey.

This rebellion is the subject of Denmark Vesey: The Buried History of America's Largest Slave Rebellion and the Man Who Let It by David Robertson. Robertson pulls out details of the insurrection and brings it to national attention in imitable, stolid prose; he puts forth the startling premise that Charleston officials had taken pains to eradicate all records of the attempted coup so slaves elsewhere wouldn't get any ideas. Given the comparative silence of contemporary publications on the matter, he's probably right: the Charleston Times didn't even publish any articles about it on the eve of the rebellion, or the next day. The Charleston Courier, also silent, finally put in a grotty six-line mention about the conspirators after arraignment. Robertson himself had to contend with finding a published account of the case wrested from the Carolinas by a Union soldier in 1862. The book has become rare, due to the efforts on the part of local judges to destroy the work. Locals also feared the account would fall into the hands of their slaves and foment still more rebellion (contrast this to the Roman method of handling insurrection, which was to crucify slaves in the open as a warning).

From this account, and a few key diaries, Robertson puts together a portrait of a rebellion leader as complex as the society he planned to upend. Denmark Vesey had, astonishingly, won the lottery at a tender age and purchased his own freedom. He was a successful carpenter and, prior to liberation, enjoyed the company of a fairly liberal master. On top of all this, the fiscally- and vocationally-stable Denmark Vesey was some sixty years of age when he put this together. And it was no chump change: some nine thousand slaves were involved. They planned to murder every person of European descent in the city of Charleston and sail off to Africa or Haiti; they were thwarted the day of the purported insurrection by a looselipped slave unwilling to join the conspiracy and the delayed departure of the man ordered to round up the forces from the countryside. Vesey, and eventually 34 other men, was killed for his efforts.

That Robertson manages to pull a book out of the slim accounts is pretty impressive. He does this by dipping into descriptions of Charleston itself and the racial disharmony and complexity therein, and this serves to strengthen the conflicting aspects and personal motivations in the narrative. How did Charleston morally reconcile supporting those of mixed descent and impugn slaves? What was Vesey thinking, having settled comfortably into free middle age? Given the rage felt by the slaves (one told his master he'd "kill you, rip open your belly, and throw your guts in your face."), how did it fall apart so easily?.

Robertson laments that no grand monuments are named after slave insurrectionists (you'll find no Nat Turner Boulevard in any American city) and then notes that the small memorial in Charleston is "protected against vandalism by heavy iron gates." When looking for Vesey's possible gravesite, Roberson, a white man in a black neighborhood, describes his unease, sweating in a white dress shirt and tie: "I decide to limit my walking around the project to an area within sight of two police cars." As such, he betrays the arms' length at which he holds this project. Throughout the book, we found that Robertson insists on calling Vesey a black man, an African-American. Sure, these things are true. But reminding us at nearly every turn? Can't Vesey simply be a man, or an American? He was forced to cross cultural and religious lines of recently imported slaves who had come from the Caribbean and all over Africa: Angola, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria. Some spoke Creole, others English, Arabic, or Gullah, which was an African-English dialect peculiar to Carolinians. Vesey was well-versed in the Bible and likely bandied with the Koran to win support. He was fluent in English, Spanish, French, spoke Gullah, and had knowledge of other tongues. The United States was founded on such a premise of cultural integration, and to embrace this principle one ought to admire Vesey's vision. Of course, the man did have local genocide in mind. Then again, we suppose that's not all that different.

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