once have lived in Charleston, S.C. It was long assumed, by whites and
blacks, that Vesey plotted a violent rebellion in which slaves would
rise up against their owners, kill many whites and sail to freedom in
Haiti.
By Stephen Morton for USA TODAY
Former S.C. slave's legacy disputed
Updated 11/20/2007 1:13 A
By Rick Hampson, USA TODAY
CHARLESTON, S.C. — For years, this city has debated whether to erect a
monument to one of its most divisive figures — Denmark Vesey, the
convicted plotter of a 19th-century slave rebellion.
Now, just when the monument builders have the upper hand, there's
another question: Which Vesey should be memorialized?
The one who incited slaves to burn down the city, kill the whites,
steal the ships and sail to freedom in Haiti? Or the one who, says the
author of an upcoming book, was an innocent victim — framed by one
white politician to discredit another?
In 1822 Vesey was found guilty of planning what would have been the
biggest slave uprising in U.S. history. He was hanged along with 34
other blacks in what historians agree was probably the largest civil
execution in U.S history.
Today he's marked only by a plaque on what may have been his house and
by two paintings based on artists' conceptions of what he may have
looked like. He left no records or writings. His descendants
scattered.
Quest for a monument
At the time of Vesey's conviction, Charleston was America's chief
slave port and one of its tensest cities. Whites — outnumbered three
to one by slaves — were haunted by memories of a 1791 slave rebellion
in Haiti.
The Vesey affair seemed to confirm those fears. Afterward, whites
became more militant in their support of slavery and more antagonistic
toward Northern abolitionists. South Carolina cracked down on blacks'
rights and Charleston built a fortress and military academy, The
Citadel.
Then, in 1831, a slave named Nat Turner led an actual — though futile
— rebellion in Virginia. A fuse had been lit that would burn until the
Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor and the start
of the Civil War in 1861.
Ever since, many whites in Charleston saw Vesey as a killer, while
many blacks saw him as a freedom fighter.
About 20 years ago, an African-American social studies teacher named
Henry Darby decided that Vesey, buried in an unmarked grave in an
unknown location, deserved a monument.
Although Charleston is obsessed by history and filled with memorials,
he says, there's none to the blacks who built the city. "I thought we
should do something for Denmark Vesey," he says. "His story needed to
be told."
According to historical accounts, the story began around 1767 in the
West Indies, where he was born into slavery. He was sold to a slave
ship captain named Vesey, whom he accompanied on voyages around the
Atlantic. The young slave learned to read and write, mastered several
languages and became a skilled carpenter.
Around 1783 the captain moved to Charleston with his slave, who hired
himself out as a carpenter and became a lay leader of the African
Episcopal Methodist church. In 1799 he won a lottery and bought his
freedom for $600.
Vesey was outspoken — he read the Book of Exodus as a liberation
lesson for slaves — and charismatic — "looked up to with respect and
awe" by others of his race, according to the judges' official summary
of his trial.
In 1822, according to the summary, a slave told authorities about a
planned uprising. Vesey was arrested, and subsequent testimony put him
at the center of a plot.
According to one witness, Vesey secretly urged followers to allow "no
white soul (to) survive." When asked about innocent women and
children, he allegedly replied, according to trial records, "What was
the use of killing the louse and leaving the nit?"
Those words were handed from generation to generation in Charleston.
When Darby advanced his proposal in 2000, a flood of letters to the
Charleston Post and Courier accused Vesey of having plotted "ethnic
cleansing"; "nothing less than a Holocaust"; "mass murder."
Plans move ahead
Within a few years, however, the city had promised $20,000 toward a
Vesey memorial and provided a site in a municipal park. This summer,
the Charleston County Council voted $40,000 for the memorial, and the
city tentatively approved the design, which features a 7-foot statue
of Vesey holding a Bible in one hand and carpentry tools in the other.
The news provoked virtually no negative reaction — a sign to Darby
(who was elected to the county council four years ago) that
"Charleston has come of age. We no longer marginalize black history."
Mayor Joe Riley, who is white, attributes the change in part to
curiosity: "We all want to know what happened. We want the empty pages
of history to be filled in."
There lies the rub.
Historians such as Michael Johnson of Johns Hopkins have replaced the
old Vesey question — good guy or bad guy? — with another: Was he the
author of a black conspiracy or the victim of a white one?
Johnson has concluded "there was no plot. … Slaves and free people of
color talked about freedom a lot, and at the trial that talk was
amplified into a conspiracy."
In a forthcoming book, Johnson argues that testimony against Vesey was
coerced under "emotional duress and sometimes torture" from slaves who
feared for their lives.
Johnson says the real motive for the trials was the desire of the
city's hard-line mayor, James Hamilton Jr., to embarrass Gov. Thomas
Bennett Jr., a moderate on slavery, and that Vesey's real heroism was
his refusal to give false testimony.
Douglas Egerton, a historian at Le Moyne College in New York, who has
written about the affair, says Vesey indeed was the plot mastermind.
Egerton says that just because testimony is coerced doesn't mean it's
false, and that other blacks, including some who'd reached safety in
the North, agreed there had been a plot led by Vesey.
If Vesey was a victim, will there be enough enthusiasm to raise the
several hundred thousand dollars still needed for the monument?
Darby says that although he believes Vesey did plot rebellion, it
doesn't matter: "Whether one looks at him as a freedom fighter or as a
victim, the fact remains that he was a black man who hated slavery and
was executed for a cause."
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