Abstract
does Michael P. Johnson characterize the scholarship of Professors Pearson and Egerton and my own biography of Denmark Vesey.1 Johnson avers that, by our having accepted uncritically the Official Report, we have reconstructed Vesey as the leader of a slave conspiracy that in fact never existed; by having exercised empiricism's will to truth, we have falsely emplotted Vesey's life and unwittingly perpetuated the Charleston city judges' fictive version of the facts.2 Johnson's critical observations, carried to their logical and rhetorical conclusions, present Denmark Vesey in our accounts as having been perceived by us as a type of black Orpheus and dismiss our scholarship as no more than irrational belief. After the execution of Vesey and the textual dismemberment of his historical existence, Johnson suggests, we three narrative historians have retrieved Vesey's head from the stream of time, and we have projected upon our own voices, deluding ourselves that we hear him sing of liberty. I approach Johnson's argument rhetorically because, despite its apparent contextuality, his review-essay frequently elides primary and secondary sources and depends for its conclusions upon a trope. Unquestionably, the intent of the Charleston authors of the Official Report was to present Vesey as metaphor-the black man as a beast; plainly, my intent, as evinced in the above paragraph and in my published biography, is to present Vesey as metonymy, representing in his person the larger conspiracy. Implicit in Johnson's account is a different trope: the synecdoche of Vesey as fall guy for a white Charleston intolerant of political and religious heretics. To this end, Johnson writes that it is absurd to suppose that witnesses told the unvarnished truth (pp. 971, 953).
Published Version
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