Trials and Errors: Denmark Vesey and His Historians

Abstract

N 1964, Richard C. Wade ignited a historiographical controversy in the pages of the Journal of Southern History and in his monograph, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 820-o-86o. Revising the standard about the plot organized by free black carpenter Vesey to destroy Charleston, South Carolina, in the summer of 1822, Wade concluded that it was probably never more than loose talk by aggrieved and embittered men rather than a full-blown effort to rebel against slavery. Not all historians accepted new interpretation. A number of students of the antebellum South and its peculiar institution, including, among others, William W. Freehling in Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, i816-i836 and in his Denmark Vesey's Antipaternalistic Reality, Eugene Genovese in Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, and Sterling Stuckey in Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America regard episode as a genuine, but unsuccessful, attempt by a group of enslaved people to gain their freedom. Michael P. Johnson, in Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (co-authored with James L. Roark), never questioned the existence of the plot that Vesey and his associates organized. The recent publication of three books on dramatic episode has not only rekindled interest in the efforts of Vesey and his associates to liberate themselves but has also inspired Johnson, who once accepted the majority opinion of Freehling et al., or as he now calls it this heroic interpretation (p. 915), to write a long and highly critical article on these works serving to reignite a debate that began more than thirty-five years ago. After many years in the interpretive wilderness, Richard Wade has now found an ally in Michael Johnson.'