Denmark Vesey

Resistance Leader

• Born: c. 1767
• Birthplace: St. Thomas, Virgin Islands
• Died: July 2, 1822
• Place of death: Charleston, South Carolina

Slave-revolt leader

Vesey, a former slave who became a carpenter, is credited with leading one of the most significant slave rebellions in the United States. The 1822 South Carolina revolt that bears his name became the largest slave uprising in North America since the 1739 Stono Rebellion, although it quickly failed.

Area of achievement: Social issues

Early Life

Denmark Vesey (VEE-see) is a shadowy figure. Not much is known about his early life, and the events of his adult life are disputed by historians. Vesey was probably born into slavery on the Danish Caribbean sugar island of St. Thomas around 1767. In 1781, he was purchased by Captain Joseph Vesey, a slave trader, who trained him as cabin boy. Vesey renamed the boy Telemaque, after the mythical son of Odysseus. In time, he became known as Denmark after the island of his birth.

In 1783, Joseph Vesey settled in Charleston, South Carolina. Denmark, literate and multilingual, lived with the Vesey family and worked in the family’s imported-goods business as an office clerk and trader. He married a slave woman, Beck, who gave birth to at least three of his children. Any children born to a slave mother were legally slaves from birth, so Vesey had very limited control over his own children, whose names and fates are unknown. Since whites did not recognize the marriages of slaves, Vesey and Beck never lived together and were separated when Vesey’s owner moved his household to an Ashley River plantation. The children remained with their mother. When Vesey won fifteen hundred dollars in a lottery, he purchased his freedom and returned to Charleston, possibly to be closer to his children and Beck. He became a carpenter.

Life’s Work

After his relationship with Beck ended, Vesey married Susan and became one of the first members of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, commonly known as the African Church, in Charleston. Embittered by the continuing enslavement of Beck and their children, Vesey eventually turned his back on the New Testament and what he regarded as Christianity’s false promise of universal brotherhood.

Vesey began to plan to lead his children and friends to freedom in Haiti. This small Caribbean island nation stood as a beacon of liberty to enslaved African Americans because Haitian slaves had overthrown their French masters in a bloody revolution that concluded in 1804. What made Vesey’s conspiracy unique was both his advanced age of fifty-four and that he planned a mass exodus of black families out of Charleston. The plot called for slaves in the vicinity of the Ashley and Cooper rivers to slay their masters on the morning of Sunday, July 14, 1822, and fight their way toward the city docks. Although Vesey employed several black men to make weapons, the leading conspirators, including Gullah Jack in Pritchard, decided that they would not risk stockpiling weapons or recruiting soldiers before July. Vesey believed that once the revolt began, men would flock to his side.

Despite efforts to maintain secrecy, conspirator William Paul told of the planned revolt to Peter, a slave, on May 22. At about the same time, another slave, George Wilson, gave information about the plan to his master. Exactly one month later, Vesey was arrested. Found guilty, he was hanged on July 2, 1822, along with five other conspirators as an immense crowd of African Americans and whites watched. Charleston courts eventually arrested 131 slaves and free African Americans, executing 35 and transporting 37 to Spanish Cuba. A total of 23 African Americans were acquitted, 2 died in custody, 3 were found not guilty but whipped, and 1 free black was released on condition that he permanently leave the state. The African Church was razed, possibly as an attack by whites on black independence and autonomy. It was rebuilt in 1865 at the end of the Civil War.

Significance

In 2001, Michael Johnson, professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, presented evidence that Vesey did not organize the rebellion that bears his name. Johnson argued that Vesey was simply one of many black victims of a conspiracy engineered by the white power structure of 1822 Charleston. The passage of time has made it impossible to know what really happened. However, it is clear that slaves and former slaves did fight back against oppression; they did not passively accept their fate. Whether or not Vesey led the rebellion, he is significant as a symbol of fierce black resistance to slavery.

Bibliography

Egerton, Douglas R. He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. This readable book re-creates the Caribbean and South Carolina of the 1700’s and early 1800’s to explore Vesey’s life as an emigrant, a slave, and a freedman.

Paquette, Robert L., and Douglas R. Egerton. “Of Facts and Fables: New Light on the Denmark Vesey Affair.” South Carolina Historical Magazine 105, no. 1 (January, 2004): 8-48. A good account of what is known and what is rumored about Vesey’s Rebellion.

Robertson, David M. Denmark Vesey: The Buried Story of America’s Largest Slave Rebellion and the Man Who Led It. New York: Vintage, 2000. This is a solid biography of Vesey and his impact.

Vesey, Denmark, et al. The Trial Record of Denmark Vesey. Reprint. Boston: Beacon Press, 1970. This old work is useful because it reprints the transcript of Vesey’s trial.