Designs Against Charleston: The Trial Record of the Denmark Vesey Slave Conspiracy of 1822.

NELSON, PAUL DAVID

Designs Against Charleston: The Trial Record of the Denmark Vesey Slave Conspiracy of 1822, edited with an introduction by Edward A. Pearson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xvi, 387 pp. $49.95 cloth.

DENMARK VESEY WAS A SELF-EDUCATED FREE BLACK MAN in Charleston, South Carolina, who in 1822 organized a slave revolt that, had it succeeded, would have been the most extensive in the history of the United States. Born about 1767, perhaps in Western Africa or the Dutch West Indian island of St. Thomas, Vesey was bought as a slave by a seafarer, Captain Joseph Vesey, in 1781. Named Telemaque by Captain Vesey, his appelation later was corrupted to Denmark. Or perhaps he deliberately chose a new name because he had been purchased in a Danish colony. He also took Vesey as his surname. After accompanying his master on a number of voyages, he settled with Captain Vesey in 1783 in Charleston. In late 1799, he purchased his freedom, paying some $600 out of $1,500 that he had won in a lottery. He opened a carpentry shop and seems to have thrived as a businessman, for at the time of his death he had accumulated an estate worth several thousand dollars. He became a leader of the Charleston African Methodist Episcopal Church, conducting worship and discussion classes, and he fathered a number of children by various slave women.

During the first two decades of the nineteenth century, Denmark Vesey became dissatisfied with his second-class status as a freedman and determined that he would relieve the far worse oppressions of slaves in Charleston. Influenced by the rhetoric of the American and French Revolutions, familiar with the great West Indian slave revolts of the 1790s, particularly in Haiti, and well-read in antislavery literature, he planned and organized an insurrection of city and plantation blacks. Reportedly, he intended to seize weapons from guardhouses and arsenals, arm his followers, kill every white person that he could lay hands on, burn the city of Charleston to the ground, free the slaves, and flee to Haiti. Exhorting his disciples "not to spare one white skin alive," he told his people that the Haitians would supply the rebels with adequate military assistance for the task at hand (p. 86). There may have been as many as 9,000 blacks involved in Vesey's plans, although scholars dispute this figure. The date of July 14, 1822, was set for the uprising, but Vesey was betrayed by a house servant and the time was advanced to June 16. White authorities on the eve of the outbreak thwarted Vesey's plans, making massive military preparations to forestall the uprising before it could begin. In the next two months, Charleston officials arrested 130 blacks, including Vesey, and put them on trial. In the ensuing court proceedings, Vesey defended himself well, but he and thirty-four other blacks were convicted and hanged. Vesey died on July 2, 1822. Thirty-two of his followers were sentenced to exile.

Edward A. Pearson has edited the trial record of Vesey and his fellow conspirators and in the process has given to the historical profession a document of great importance that was heretofore relatively inaccessible. The transcript is in the collections of the South Carolina Department of Archives and History and was previously published only once, in 1822. Although claiming to be a complete trial record, that version contained omissions and synopses which weakened its effectiveness. Pearson has worked over the document with great care and scholarly diligence, providing copious, invaluable editorial footnotes to aid the reader in deciphering and understanding the record. Also, he has written an introductory essay to provide further context, giving biographical information on Vesey and commenting at length on the economic, social and cultural life of early nineteenth-century Charleston. In three appendixes, he provides a "conspiratorial chronology," biographical information on the conspirators and witnesses, and additional documents consisting primarily of extracts from contemporary newspaper accounts and private letters. His bibliography of primary and secondary materials, published and unpublished, is long and impressive.

Pearson's introduction is not as useful as his edited transcript. Although in many ways sound, scholarly, and useful, it suffers from two detracting weaknesses. First, Pearson at times speculates too much about events that formed Vesey's character. His introductory essay is littered with qualifying words such as "apparently" and "probably," and he includes information about such things as voodoo without any evidence that they had anything to do with Vesey. Second, he is too enamored of modern tendencies (fads?) in scholarship that emphasize "models" and unclear jargon. He unnecessarily borrows from Antonio Gramsci's formulation, the "organic intellectual," Paul Gilroy's discussion of "micro-systems of linguistic and political hybridity," and Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark's belaboring of the obvious about the nature of creative work. He uses words like "discourses," "resonance," and "counter-appropriation" in ways that obscure rather than clarify his meaning. He concludes his essay with a particularly clangorous statement about how Vesey and his fellow conspirators "collectively fashioned a new discourse into a compelling ideology of rebellion" (p. 164).

PAUL DAVID NELSON Berea College