Denmark Vesey’s Bible: The Thwarted Revolt That Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial by Jeremy Schipper

Abstract

Reviewed by: Denmark Vesey’s Bible: The Thwarted Revolt That Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial by Jeremy Schipper Jason R. Young Denmark vesey’s Bible: The Thwarted Revolt That Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial. By Jeremy Schipper. (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford, U.K.: Princeton University Press, 2022. Pp. xxxiv, 181. $26.95, ISBN 978-0-691-19286-4.) In 1822, Denmark Vesey, a formerly enslaved man living in Charleston, South Carolina, fomented an ill-fated insurrectionary plot against slavery. Subsequent court records make clear that Vesey was convinced (and successfully convinced others) of the incommensurability of slavery and Christianity. Perhaps more important, Vesey found in the Bible justification for the violent overthrow of the system. In Denmark vesey’s Bible: The Thwarted Revolt That Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial, Jeremy Schipper offers a novel account of the Vesey plot through a close reading of extant court records, sermons, newspapers, and personal papers. Much of this material implies that Vesey appealed to biblical texts to justify his use of violence, but the particulars of his antislavery theology remain shrouded in mystery. Schipper hopes to reconstruct something of the biblical verses and interpretations that Vesey might have relied on in support of a general slave uprising. Part of Schipper’s challenge, of course, was that “no writings by Vesey survive” (p. xxix). Indeed, as Schipper observes, “slaveholders’ extensive writings related to Vesey from the early 1820s provide much more documentation of their own use of the Bible to condemn his plot than of Vesey’s use of it to support his plot” (p. xxix). Despite its publication at the two hundredth anniversary of Vesey’s conspiracy, Denmark vesey’s Bible reads primarily as a review of early- nineteenth-century proslavery Christian thought. As a result, the title does little to convey either the contents or the basic framing of the book. To be sure, Schipper offers a close reading of antislavery Christian theology, especially in a convincing review of arguments related to Exodus 21:16. Still, proslavery Christian ideologues take center stage in this book. [End Page 350] In part, this focus reflects the author’s reliance on written and textual sources. Many African Americans living during the era of slavery experienced the Bible as an aural or oral scripture rather than as a literary text. It is quite possible, then, that Denmark Vesey’s Bible—that is, the textual sources from which Vesey drew inspiration—was only partially located in the text itself. Because enslaved African Americans were largely prohibited from accessing literacy, the Bible was, for many Black people living in the South, less a book to be read and more a series of stories to be told and songs to be sung, often outside the purview of the slaveholding class. One thinks here of Olaudah Equiano’s Talking Book episode. In this sense, Vesey’s Bible might be better located outside the authorized textuality of court records, printed sermons, or legal treatises. In the concluding pages of Denmark vesey’s Bible, Schipper argues that his book “has told a story of some early efforts—both hopeful and horrific—to define and control the Bible’s implications in the midst of racial terror and violence in an American city” (p. 127). He notes, “We could ask who interpreted the Bible correctly: Vesey and his fellow conspirators or proslavery apologists” (p. 127). Instead, Schipper proposes a curious equivalency in which Vesey as well as his proslavery adversaries “were not as invested in determining what the Bible means in the abstract as they were in what it implies for the deadly struggle against or the brutal enforcement of American white supremacy” (p. 127). But the violent, if authorized, theology of proslavery ideologues was in no way equivalent—either in its ethics or its effects—to the revolutionary theology of Denmark Vesey and his co-conspirators. The differences between these two positions are perhaps nowhere more elegantly described than in the keen distinctions Frederick Douglass drew between the slaveholding Christianity of the United States and “the Christianity of Christ” (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass [Boston, 1845], p. 118). As a final word on the Bible’s relationship...