ISSN: 1094-902X
Volume 3, Number 2 (Spring 2000)

He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey by Douglas Egerton. Wisconsin: Madison House, 2000. 272 pp.

Designs Against Charleston: The Trial Record of the Denmark Slave Conspiracy of 1822. Edward Pearson, ed.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.  424 pp.

Denmark Vesey. By David Robertson. New York: Knopf, 1999.   208 pp.

The unsuccessful Denmark Vesey revolt of 1822 marks one of the critical dividing lines of American history. It shattered the complacency and assurance of South Carolina slaveholders, the Americans most deeply invested in the institution, destroying their post-War of 1812 nationalism and undergirding an aggressive paranoia that would propel the state, and the South, toward eventual secession. As the author of the plot that drove South Carolina crazy, the obscure former slave Denmark Vesey can arguably be said to have had an impact on American history equal to such celebrated figures as Webster, Clay and Calhoun; indeed, his actions helped to shape the contest in which these three statesmen contended.

With the publication of these three new studies, Vesey’s life has finally received the attention it deserves. Indeed, barring unforeseen circumstances, it seems unlikely that there can be much more to add to the record of this enigmatic figure. The sources for his life, as for most Americans born into slavery, are few. We have no portrait, nor even a detailed physical description. His date and place of birth are obscure, as are his ethnicity and parentage. There is no reliable first-hand testimony from Vesey of his philosophy or intentions. Out of tantalizingly slender source material--principally the coerced confessions of his captured so-conspirators--the shadowy outlines of a pivotal figure in our history have been given form. Just as important, these three works offer crucial insight into the nature of the slaveholding relationship. It is hard to see how Stanley Elkins’ controversial 1959 thesis that the brutalizing conditions of slavery infantilized blacks and that the familiar "Sambo" personality was a common and genuine type, not a pose, can survive a careful reading of these volumes. In the testimonies related in the transcript of the Denmark Vesey trials, the delusion of paternalism falls away, and the state of war between master and slave that existed just below the surface of Southern life is graphically exposed.

Nowhere is the "mask of obedience" more starkly thrown off than in the indelible encounter between the planter Elias Horry and his coachman, John. Incredulous at his slave’s involvement in the plot--"he would as soon suspect himself," Horry had said--the master plaintively asked his coachman what his intentions had been. "To kill you, rip open your belly and throw your guts in your face," the man exploded. (1) 

The Vesey revolt shattered the paternalist presumptions of Charleston’s slaveholders and laid bare the reality asserted long before by John Locke: that slavery is the state of war continued between captive and captor. (2)   The stark revelation of Carolina slaves’ hatred of their condition--and their would-be paternalist masters--proved so disturbing that some South Carolinians, including the governor and a U.S. supreme court justice, refused to credit it. Following the lead of their skepticism, some modern historians, most notably Richard C. Wade, concluded that the plot was no more than "a vague and unformulated plan in the minds or on the tongues of a few colored townsmen," blown up by draconian slaveholders who used the hangings and deportations to overawe potential future rebels and to reassert control over a lax urban slave regime. (3)

However, a 1986 article by William W. Freehling, republished in revised form in 1994, convincingly argued that the evidence contradicted Wade’s hypothesis. Slaveholders had too much invested in their paternalist self-conceptions to engage in such cold-blooded preemptive violence, Freehling argued. Moreover, far from concocting or eliciting false testimony about the plot from the enslaved conspirators, Freehling showed that the authorities actually censored the most inflammatory details to conceal the horrifying extent of the danger. In the testimony of Harry Haig, a string of asterisks replaces several lines of text, just as black magic marker effaces sensitive information from government documents secured under the Freedom of Information Act. Drawing on the handwritten transcripts of the trials, which Wade had not seen, Freehling supplied the passage that the court had expunged: Haig had testified that Vesey’s lieutenant, Gullah Jack, "was going to give me a bottle with poison to put into my master’s pump & into as many pumps he could about town & he said he would give other bottles to those he could trust to." This, in "thirty-three unpublishable words," constituted "the peculiar nightmare of the Domestic Institution." (4) Poisoning, unlike armed rebellion, was an individual act that could be undertaken by anyone and that could not effectively be prevented. At no other time in Southern history had the assumptions of slaveholding paternalism collided more violently with the reality of slavery as a deferred state of war. Even more remarkably, the paternalists themselves documented the crisis of their system in a remarkably complete and faithful trial record.

All students of American slavery are indebted to Edward Pearson for returning to print this unique and essential document. In addition to the trial transcript itself, Pearson has provided an extended introduction that constitutes, in addition to a thorough retelling of the story of the planned insurrection, a broad review of the entire problem of slave revolts, as well as a discussion of the culture of free and enslaved blacks in the urban South. This introduction, complemented by an invaluable set of additional documents and other appendices, takes up more than half the volume; but it is the transcript itself that offers the true interest. In his Domination and the Arts of Resistance, the anthropologist James Scott discussed oppressed groups’ ability to undermine their oppressors’ "official transcript" by creating ironic and subversive "hidden transcripts"; as Pearson notes, following Scott, the Vesey trials represent "one of those rare moments of political electricity when...the hidden transcript [was] spoken directly in the teeth of power." (5)  More to the point, the Vesey document constitutes an extraordinary example of an explosive "hidden transcript" exposed in the body of a literal "official" transcript.

What does this transcript tell us? First and foremost—a fact not remarked upon by Pearson or the other two authors—that the institution of slavery inverts the values of right and wrong. Kindness, loyalty, honesty, mercy: all of these are perverted into vices under the slave regime, while deceit, betrayal, cruelty and violence become virtues. The effects of this reversal of morality could prove devastating to deeply moral individuals subjected to it. One such individual was George Wilson, an enslaved mulatto blacksmith and a class leader in the A.M.E. Church who appears to have been deeply respected by black and white alike. Joe La Roche, one of the plot’s key organizers, informed Wilson of the plot, less because he expected him to join it than to save his life. After agonizing over the information for five days, Wilson reluctantly informed his master, who immediately informed the city authorities. For his service to the state, he was freed in 1825. Although his Christian principles would not allow him to permit the slaughter of white Charlestonians by his silence, his betrayal of Vesey and his confederates plagued Wilson for the rest of his life, and he died by his own hand in 1848. (6)

Given the importance of Pearson’s project and the value of the volume he has laid before us, it may seem petty to note its shortcomings. Nonetheless, these need to be acknowledged. Editing an historic document is an undertaking of delicacy and complexity, best carried out either by a team of researchers with varied specializations or by a senior scholar. Pearson has done an excellent job overall, but his inexperience shows. His research for the volume has been broad, and one has the feeling that nearly everything he has read has made its way in. A discussion of slave "hiring-out" leads to a long excursus on Frederick Douglass’s experiences as a ship caulker that is only marginally germane to the topic at hand. Regarding the young Denmark Vesey’s seeming epileptic seizures when assigned to field work in Saint Domingue, Pearson sensibly comments, "Like many slaves who affected sickness to avoid work, [Denmark] very probably feigned fits." But then he continues, "He alternatively may have suffered from seizures as a consequence of participating in voodoo ceremonies." This unsubstantiated speculation is followed by a discursive discussion of examples of supposed spirit-inspired hysterics in the West Indies. Equally distracting examples of Pearson’s sheer speculation abound.

Some of Pearson’s inaccuracies are irritating but minor, such as his misidentification (twice) of the home port of Joseph Vesey, Denmark’s owner, as "Suffolk," Massachusetts (a county, not a town; the actual port was Charlestown).  Others are more unfortunate, because they exclude potentially important insights. Pearson recurs several times to Vesey’s use of a tale about an encounter between Hercules and a man whose wagon is stuck in a ditch. Hercules tells the man to put his shoulder to the wheel, and begin the work himself. (7)   Recognizing that removing a wagon from a ditch was not one of Hercules’ mythical twelve labors, Pearson cites it as an example of Vesey’s ability to use classical material "to fashion a parable that ably demonstrated the need for self-determination among enslaved people." (8)   Right enough; although it was the Greek slave Aesop, not Denmark Vesey who first accomplished this task—and Vesey’s employment of one of Aesop’s more obscure fables is perhaps more suggestive than his supposed alteration of classical mythology to suit his purposes.

In the same place, Pearson speculates that Vesey’s early name, Telemaque, who Pearson describes as "a hero in The Iliad," might have led to his interest in classical literature. (9)  This point contains the germ of an important insight. Telemaque, from which "Denmark" appears to be a corruption (pointing also to Vesey’s origins in the Danish West Indies), is the French version of "Telemachus," the son of Odysseus and a major character in Homer’s Odyssey, not the Iliad. If Denmark did investigate the origins of his name, he may well have been struck by his namesake’s bitter struggle to find his missing father. This possibility opens up a vein of speculation that none of the three works in question here explore. Likewise, although Pearson’s notes to Vesey’s numerous Biblical references are generally adequate, it is clear he has little of the first-hand acquaintance with the text that would enable a rich and nuanced interpretation of Vesey’s theology of deliverance.

The conclusion to Pearson’s introduction is flat and infected with academic jargon: "An active cultural creator, [Vesey] and his followers collectively fashioned a new discourse into a compelling ideology of rebellion that promised to take a politically engaged band of slave artisans, to borrow a phrase from Frederick Douglass, from ‘the tomb of slavery’ to ‘the heaven of freedom.’" (10)

If Pearson's excellent edition shows some marks of inexperience, Douglas Egerton’s He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey displays the hand of a masterful historian in complete control of his craft. The author of an equally meticulous book on the Gabriel rebellion of 1800, (11)   Egerton is a practiced hand at extracting maximum information from scanty and intractable sources. The elusive nature of the available evidence—virtually all of which Egerton appears to have consulted—makes conjecture inevitable, but he engages in it with restraint and without discursiveness. On the vexed question of Vesey’s birthplace, for example (about which Pearson has two pages of elaborate speculation), Egerton remarks simply: "Perhaps nothing speaks more eloquently about the dehumanizing nature of Atlantic slavery than the fact that one of the most influential abolitionists in antebellum America lacks a known birth place and birthdate, and, for approximately the first fourteen years of his life, even a name." (12)     Writing in a graceful and understated style, Egerton conveys an astonishing amount of information about the settings of Denmark Vesey’s remarkably varied "lives": in St. Thomas, before the mast in the Caribbean and Atlantic, on the sugar plantations of St. Domingue, as an urban slave in the brutal world of post-revolutionary Charleston, and, after purchasing a winning lottery ticket in 1799, in the ambiguous status of a free man of color in a society grounded on slavery.

One of the strongest chapters in Egerton’s book explores the crucial subject of religion and its relation to Vesey’s conspiracy. The role of religion in the lives of slaves has been hotly debated, often by scholars possessing only a rudimentary knowledge of the Bible and Christianity. Far from serving as a tool of social control, Biblical religion presented from the outset a powerful threat to slaveholder authority: "But even when heavily censored by white masters, a religion of universal brotherhood posed obvious problems in a slave society. Anyone who wanted to acquaint enslaved Africans with the entire Bible, lamented Whitemarsh Seabrook, a Sea Island planter and a member of the state Senate, was fit for ‘a room in the Lunatic Asylum.’" (13) 

Prominent religious leaders in South Carolina struggled to convince planters that Christianity, "properly sanitized," could help to sustain the regime by making slaves "docile and obedient." (14)   But white Baptist and Methodist missionaries, in their quest to make converts, ignored the caveats of conservative Christian leaders and preached a relatively undiluted brand of the Gospels. Enslaved South Carolinians resonated particularly with the Old Testament, and found in its tales of miracles, magic and places of power—"blazing bushes that did not burn, walking staffs that turned into serpents… and holy men who could part the great water while Jehovah’s chosen people escaped their captivity"—elements quite compatible with aspects of African cosmology. (15)  Much has been made of Vesey’s frequent references to the book of Tobit—a surprising, and, to this writer, perplexing choice to adopt as a proof-text for rebellion—but Egerton cogently observes that Vesey’s use of a book canonical to Catholics and apocryphal to Protestants indicates "that he had abandoned his Presbyterian Bible." (16)    The religion constructed by worshippers at Vesey’s African Church was a capacious vehicle, capable of appropriating seemingly contradictory elements from a variety of Christian, Jewish, and African traditions. Egerton rejects the frequently-stated view that Vesey drew recruits to his conspiracy from the ranks of the assimilated, "Christianized" urban black population while using the East African conjuror Gullah Jack Pritchard to enlist plantation Africans, arguing that

in fact no such dichotomy existed. African magic and European Christianity may have uneasily coexisted on the Carolina countryside, but Old Testament tales melded easily with Africa’s sacred legends in Charleston’s African churches. Gullah Jack was, after all, a member of Vesey’s African Church, as was his neighbor Monday Gell, an Ibo. Neither man appeared to find any contradiction between the religious teachings of their childhood, and what they heard in Cow Alley. It was not that the old carpenter cynically used his church to recruit revolutionaries, but rather that his fusion of Old Testament law and African ritual transformed his timid disciples into revolutionaries. (17)

While the story of Moses was important to Vesey and his followers, Egerton observes, Vesey focused more centrally on other aspects of Exodus and the Old Testament. Unsurprisingly, he stressed Exodus 21:16 ("He that stealeth a man, and selleth him…shall surely be put to death"). He also drew inspiration from the commandments to extirpate Israel’s enemies in Joshua and Zechariah, particularly Joshua 6:21: "Then they utterly destroyed all in the city, both men and women, young and old [with] the edge of the sword." (18)

David Robertson’s Denmark Vesey is a more popular and far less scholarly treatment of its subject than the preceding two works, and need not detain us too long here. Written by a white Southern novelist, it stands somewhat in the tradition of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner as constituting, in part, a personal meditation on the author’s relation to slavery, slave rebellion, and racism. Alone among the books under discussion, Robertson’s work attempts to place the Vesey revolt in the long perspective of South Carolina’s birth as a "colony" of Barbados, a point worth stressing. It is also worth reading for its discussion of the continuing polarizing power of Denmark Vesey in modern South Carolina. Its most serious flaw is a far-fetched argument based on uncorroborated conjecture that Vesey may have been a practicing Muslim—a claim that seems to have far more to do with the militant modern stance of the Nation of Islam than with any historical evidence. This hypothesis is bolstered with a mystical interpretation of "1884," the number of Vesey’s winning lottery ticket, that makes Minister Louis Farrakhan’s numerological speculations on UFOs and the number 17 at the Million Man March look like a Euclidean proof.

More than any other American antislavery leader, Denmark Vesey, in his words and deeds, made visible the connection between slavery and a state of war, and prepared to take up arms in a holy war against it. It is altogether fitting, as all three authors relate, that Frederick Douglass invoked Denmark Vesey’s name in 1863 when recruiting the black troops who would turn the tide against the Confederacy. By then, the struggle against slavery had become a real war; a holy war indeed.

Robert P. Forbes, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University

© 2000 The North Star. All Rights Reserved.

Notes

1. Edward Pearson, ed., Designs Against Charleston, 3. [return to text]

2. Second Treatise of Government, Chapter IV, Par. 23. [return to text]

3. Richard C. Wade, "The Vesey Plot: A Reconsideration," Journal of Southern History, Vol. 30, No. 2. (May, 1964), 150. See also Wade, Slavery and the Cities: The South, 1820-1860 (New York, 1964). [return to text]

4. William W. Freehling, The Reintegration of American History: Slavery and the Civil War (New York, 1994), 56.  [return to text]

5. Pearson, 12.  [return to text]

6. Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free, 223.  [return to text]

7.  Pearson, 79, 120, 171. Annoyingly, the index only refers to the discussions in Pearson’s introduction, not to Joe La Roche’s testimony in the trial transcript. [return to text]

8.  Ibid., 171n. [return to text]

9.  Ibid. Pearson explores the same point on p. 23 where he calls The Iliad an "archetypal story about seafaring." [return to text]

10. Pearson, 164. [return to text]

11. Gabriel's Rebellion: the Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). [return to text]

12. Egerton, He Shall Go Out Free, 3. [return to text]

13.  Ibid., 103. [return to text]

14.  Ibid., 104. [return to text]

15.  Ibid., 118. [return to text]

16. Ibid. [return to text]

17.  Ibid., 120. [return to text]

18. Ibid., 114-15. [return to text]