Remember Denmark Vesey

Douglas R. Egerton. He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey. Madison, Wis.: Madison House, 1999. 248 pp. Maps, illustrations, appendix, and index. $49.95.

Edward A. Pearson, ed. Designs against Charleston: The Trial Record of the Denmark Vesey Slave Conspiracy of 1822. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. 387 pp. Maps, appendices, bibliography, and index. $37.95.

David Robertson. Denmark Vesey: The Buried History of America's Largest Slave Rebellion and the Man Who Led It. New York: Knopf, 1999. 208 pp. Illustrations and index. $23.00 (cloth); $13.00 (paper).

When John Brown was captured at Harpers Ferry and threatened with execution for what looked like an attempt to stir a slave uprising, Ralph Waldo Emerson couldn't decide whether it was a good thing or bad thing to focus attention on the man himself. "It is the old mistake of the slaveholder," he wrote, "to impute the resistance . . . to some John Brown whom he has just captured and to make a personal affair of it. No matter how many Browns he can catch and kill, he does not make the number less, for the air breeds them, every school, every church, every domestic circle, every home of courtesy, genius, and conscience is educating haters of him and his misdeeds." However much Emerson was convinced that antislavery transcended individuals, he was moved as well by concern for the man himself (whom he had met several times) and was almost willing that Brown should escape the looming penalty with a plea of insanity. Was it not accounted insane to be willing to die for a principle? But Brown as heroic martyr possessed a value that all abolitionists, Emerson included, could appreciate, and so the invader of Virginia became "that new saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of men into conflict and death, . . . who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross." ¹

Historians of the so-called Vesey Conspiracy--the similarly failed, black-led uprising in Charleston in 1822--confront the same options in approaching that event: broadly speaking, either "to make a personal affair of it" or to see the players as scripted by broad impersonalities of power and recoil. Two of the books under review are frankly biographical and center on Vesey himself, while the third, Edward A. Pearson's Designs against Charleston, makes the presentation of a new version of the trial record the occasion for a lengthy biographical introduction. None of these writers is wholly satisfied with what I take to be still the standard account of the plot itself, John Lofton's Insurrection in South Carolina (1964), and yet they seem to feel it more important now, at the end of the twentieth century, to put a human face on this deepest of plotters than to rehearse the crisis itself, which gets surprisingly short shrift in Egerton's study and scarcely more in Robertson's.

The decision to emphasize the life and agency of Denmark Vesey--even to insist that he is among the greatest and most heroic of the abolitionists--is understandable enough and works even now in direct contradiction to the largely successful conspiracy of South Carolina slaveholders to obliterate Vesey from the public and historical record. As Robertson notes, "It is not confirmable whether Vesey was born in Africa or in the West Indies; the site of his execution has been obliterated; his face is unknown; and what he or his companions thought or felt, we can gather only from the very rare occasions when they are recorded as having spoken their own words" (p. 146). ² Of the three studies, Robertson's is the most alive to this subtle and essential tragedy of slavery, the anonymity routinely imposed on its victims--very deliberately so in the case of Vesey, who, we remember, was not a slave, had indeed not been a slave for more than twenty years before the...