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

14-A Fuse to Fort Sumter

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 14 A FUSE TO FORT SUMTER • Denmark Vesey's call to arms stirred in South Carolina an intensity of feeling that helped to set the state on a determined anti-nationalist course. The Missouri debate had contributed to sectionalism. Other phenomena-relations with Haiti, the abolitionist campaign, and the tariff controversy -also propelled South Carolina away from its one-time nationalist position. But the dominant force underlying the shift was slavery. And no event in the state's experience with slavery up to that time aroused such concern over the explosive potential of the servile population as Vesey's blueprint for revolution. South Carolina's reaction to the Vesey affair signified the choice of a way of life. The choice was to be confirmed and reinforced by other events, but only after a headstrong commitment to slavery had been adopted. Even Governor Thomas Bennett, who was not the zealot on slavery that some of his contemporaries were, had said after the Vesey commotion that "the evil [slavery] is entailed."! This was some years before there was any intensive abolitionist campaign to heat the tempers of slave-holders and cause them to rally behind their system in self-defense. In 1822 the abolitionist movement had hardly begun. As early as 1820 the economic threat of protective duties had been perceived. But the tariff did not then represent the kind of immediate and personal danger which could goad public sentiment into favoring ironfisted local control of slavery and against a supposedly unsympathetic federal government. Vesey had supplied spurs for South Carolina's horsemen of neo-feudalism.2 As time passed, South Carolina's behavior was to show 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 212 DENMARK VESEY'S REVOLT how solidly the state had welded itself to the slave system. With her commerce declining, with her own soil exhausted from overplanting in a single crop, with her population drifting to the west where fertile new fields were being cultivated in effective competition with the worn out land of the east-South Carolina refused to face the changed conditions . The state ignored warnings against wasting her soil, advice to fight tariff discrimination by adopting varied industry . Instead South Carolina clung to the vision of a onecrop economy based on slaves and supporting an aristocracy of planters in baronial splendor. It was a chimerical dream and should have been discernable as such. But the Palmetto State was to devote its energies for a generation to defending the delusion. Preoccupied with the wrongs being visited on her by the North, South Carolina insisted on employing ill-adapted political weapons to defend an obsolescent economic order. In the process, the state acquired a persecution complex and became combative and intolerant of dissent, particularly on slavery. As one of the most respected South Carolina historians has put it: "Her thinkers became attorneys in a case, not seekers for essential truth in social and political relations ... [they] expended vast resources in the defense of an impossible program in which success would have been the greatest calamity."3 During this period the South Carolina mind-in the phrase of another native authority-became a foetus in a bottle.4 While no date can be designated as the one clearly marking South Carolina's turn against the union, it is clear that as late as 1821 there was considerable evidence in the state of nationalistic sentiment and little evidence that the proponents of such views suffered for it. In 1819 President Monroe, accompanied by Calhoun in a tour of the South, had been enthusiastically welcomed in Charleston, as well as in the rest of South Carolina. (This was before the Virginia President had incurred the ire of South Carolina by opposing its Negro Seamen Act.) That same year Judge Abraham Nott of the South Carolina Appellate Court had, without 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...