Denmark Vesey's Revolt: The Slave Plot That Lit a Fuse to Fort Sumter

6-Seeds of Insurrection

In order to view this proof accurately, the Overprint Preview Option must be checked in Acrobat Professional or Adobe Reader. Please contact your Customer Service Representative if you have questions about ἀnding the option. Job Name: -- /351334t 6 SEEDS OF INSURRECTION • In South Carolina the liberalizing repercussions of the American Revolution met stronger resistance perhaps than in any other state. The firmly entrenched slave system of the Palmetto State had something to do with it. In this connection , the attitudes of the South Carolina delegates to the federal constitutional convention were significant. The slave trade might have been prohibited by the federal Constitution, one observer asserted, but for the delegates from Georgia and South Carolina. Spokesmen for Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia all denounced the traffic, even though all of them were slave-holders. As a result of the insistence of other Southern delegates, however, the Constitution permitted the slave trade to continue until 1808. Presumably Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina spoke for a major portion of the region's electorate when he reminded the convention that, if the drafting committee failed to provide some security to the Southern states against an "emancipation" of slaves, he would be bound by duty to his state to vote against the reporU John Rutledge said he did not believe the South would encourage the slave trade, nor was he afraid that slave insurrections would occur as a result of more importation. He was willing to exempt the northern states from the obligation to protect the South from rebellion.2 (He was not around to be reminded of this sentiment when South Carolina, fearful of servile revolt, requested a reinforcement of its federal garrison in 1822.) When the national Constitution was debated in the South Carolina legislature in 1788, Rawlins Lowndes, who opposed ratification, wanted to know, among other things, why the northern delegates opposed the importation of slaves, why In order to view this proof accurately, the Overprint Preview Option must be checked in Acrobat Professional or Adobe Reader. Please contact your Customer Service Representative if you have questions about ἀnding the option. Job Name: -- /351334t SEEDS OF INSURRECTION 55 the slave trade should be limited to twenty years and why a tax should be placed on it even before the time limit expired. In the first Congress of 1789 Representatives William Smith and Thomas Tucker of South Carolina both vigorously objected to a ten-dollar tax on slaves imported into the country. The drafting of the state's first postwar constitution was also affected by a constant concern for property, especially slaves. Even though South Carolina had participated in the war to shake off the monarchial rule of George III, one of the rewards of the Revolution in the state was not government by the people. The state constitution of 1790 provided for the most strongly centralized and aristocratic government that could have been set up under the limitations imposed by the Constitution of the United States.3 The state was controlled by an elite class of coastal merchants and slave-holding planters. Its political institutions were designed to protect them against the alien notions that might be entertained by non-slave-owning back country immigrants. Coast country immigrants such as Joseph Vesey, since they helped to maintain the slave system, were not considered a cause for concern. What trend there was toward democratic institutions in South Carolina can only be appreciated by viewing it from the perspective of the period prior to the drafting of the 1778 state constitution. That document disestablished the Episcopal Church and provided that it was no longer to be supported by taxation. But while that particular church was "disestablished ," there was not complete disestablishment. "The Christian Protestant religion" was constituted and declared to be "the established religion of this State." The governor, lieutenant governor, members of the privy council and the legislature all had to be of the Protestant faith. Dissatisfaction with this charter among the people of the state brought proposals for reform. Even so, Ralph Izard, the second largest planter in the state, was complaining to Thomas Jefferson in a letter in 1785 that: "Our governments tend too much to Democracy. A handicraftsman thinks apprenticeship necessary to make himself acquainted with his business. But our In order to view this proof accurately, the Overprint Preview Option must be checked in Acrobat Professional or Adobe Reader. Please contact your Customer Service Representative if...