Fugitive Movements: Commemorating the Denmark Vesey Affair and Black Radical Antislavery in the Atlantic World

By University of South Carolina Press

In 1822, White authorities in Charleston, South Carolina, learned of plans among the city's enslaved and free Black population to lead an armed antislavery rebellion. Among the leaders was a free Black carpenter named Denmark Vesey. After a brief investigation and what some have considered a dubious trial, Vesey and thirty-five others were convicted of attempted insurrection and hanged.

Although the rebellion never came to fruition, it nonetheless fueled Black antislavery movements in the United States and elsewhere. To this day, activists, politicians, writers, and scholars debate the significance of the conspiracy, how to commemorate it, and the integrity of the archival records it left behind. Fugitive Movements memorializes this attempted liberation movement with new interpretations of the event as well as comparisons to other Black resistance throughout the Atlantic World—including Africa, the Caribbean, and the Northern United States.

This volume situates Denmark Vesey and antislavery rebellion within the current scholarship on abolition that places Black activists at the center of the story. It shows that Black antislavery rebellion in general, and the 1822 uprising by Black Charlestonians in particular, significantly influenced the history of slavery in the Western Hemisphere. The essays collected in this volume explore not only that history, but also the ongoing struggle over the memory of slavery and resistance in the Atlantic World.

Manisha Sinha, James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut and author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition, provides the foreword.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Jan 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781643362663

Book preview

Fugitive Movements

The Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World

Sponsored by the Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World of the College of Charleston

Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery: Race, Status, and Identity in the Urban Americas

John Garrison Marks

Challenging History: Race, Equity, and the Practice of Public History

Leah Worthington, Rachel Clare Donaldson, and John W. White, eds.

Paths to Freedom: Manumission in the Atlantic World

Rosemary Brana-Shute and Randy J. Sparks, eds.

The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World

David P. Geggus, ed.

Fugitive Movements

Commemorating the Denmark Vesey Affair and Black Radical Antislavery in the Atlantic World

EDITED BY JAMES O’NEIL SPADY

FOREWORD BY MANISHA SINHA

© 2022 University of South Carolina

Published by the University of South Carolina Press

Columbia, South Carolina 29208

www.uscpress.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/.

ISBN 978-1-64336-265-6 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-64336-266-3 (ebook)

Publication of this book is made possible in part by the generous support of the Avery Research Center for the Study of African American History and Culture and the Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World at the College of Charleston.

A portion of Freedom Fighter or Attila the Hun? How Black and White Charlestonians Remembered Denmark Vesey, 1822–2014 originally appeared in Denmark Vesey’s Garden, copyright © 2018 by Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts. Reprinted by permission of The New Press. www.thenewpress.com

Front cover photograph: Denmark Vesey monument, Hampton Park, Charleston, SC. Photo by Brenda J. Peart, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Front cover design by Daniel Benneworth-Gray

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FOREWORD

MANISHA SINHA

Introduction

Part I: Fugitive Direct Action

Denmark Vesey, South Carolina, and Haiti: Borne, Bound, and Battered by a Common Wind

BERNARD E. POWERS JR.

Denmark Vesey and the 1822 Charleston Antislavery Uprising: New Themes and New Methods

JAMES O’NEIL SPADY

Writing Reparative Histories of Connection: The 1831 Tortola Slave Conspiracy in the Atlantic World

ANITA RUPPRECHT AND CATHY BERGIN

Black Southwestern Pennsylvanians and the Politics of Free Soil in the Northern Borderlands

LUCIEN HOLNESS

Fugitivity and Citizenship in the Southeastern Coastal United States: Representing Black Resistance, 1862–1902

WENDY GONAVER

Part II: Fugitive Memory

The Silent Jean St. Maló: A Counterhistory of Slavery

WILLIAM D. JONES

Slavery, Resistance, and Memory in the Lowcountry: The Commemoration of the Stono Rebellion

SHAWN HALIFAX AND TERRI L. SNYDER

Arrows of Power: The Builsa Feok Festival of Slave Resistance and Abolition in Ghana

SAMUEL NTEWUSU

Revisiting Denmark Vesey’s Church

ROBERT L. PAQUETTE

To See What He Could Do for His Fellow Creatures: Enslaved Women, Families, and Survivors in North American Slave Conspiracies

DOUGLAS R. EGERTON

Freedom Fighter or Attila the Hun? How Black and White Charlestonians Remembered Denmark Vesey, 1822–2014

BLAIN ROBERTS AND ETHAN J. KYTLE

NOTES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Illustrations

Map of the Caribbean and Southern US (1814)

Map of the Gold Coast of West Africa (1729)

Map of Charleston (1844)

Map of social relationships among witnesses in Vesey trial

Portrait of Susie King Taylor

Port Royal Island (1862)

Stono Rebellion South Carolina state highway marker (front side)

Stono Rebellion South Carolina state highway marker (Reverse side)

Ebo Landing on Dunbar Creek

Historic plats from present-day Caw Caw Park vicinity

Stono Rebellion state highway marker unveiling (2006)

Warrior with regalia during Feok festival (2018)

Warriors performing war dance, Feok festival (2018)

Traditional priest/war captain with dancers, Feok festival (2018)

Excerpt from Charleston Times, December 29, 1817

A.M.E. Church, Charleston, South Carolina (1865)

Denmark Vesey Freedom Monument (2015)

Acknowledgments

This book began as a conference sponsored by the Carolina Lowcountry in the Atlantic World Program (CLAW) at the College of Charleston in 2019. I am grateful for Simon Lewis and Joe Kelley’s suggestion that I put this together and for the financial support of the CLAW program and Soka University of America. I am also grateful for the editorial guidance, support, and suggestions offered by Ehren Foley at the University Press of South Carolina. The press’s external reviewers gave important and useful suggestions for organization and themes. We have tried to implement many of them. The book is better as a result. Many thanks to my students, particularly Anthea Mudanye, Jordyn Saito, and Khin Thazin. My faculty and student colleagues in the African and Ethnic Studies campaign at Soka University of America have had a significant influence on this book as well. This book is dedicated to Denmark Vesey, his coorganizers, and all who risked harrowing consequences to struggle against racial chattel slavery.

Foreword

Slave resistance rather than bourgeois liberalism lay at the heart of the Transatlantic abolition movement. To understand this simple truism is to appreciate both the national as well as transnational significance of the Denmark Vesey Conspiracy of 1822. As James Spady adeptly argues in this book, we must view the Vesey conspiracy through the lens of a broader antislavery uprising in antebellum South Carolina. We must then reject conventional historiographical divisions between resistance by the enslaved and antislavery activism. In the United States, where over ninety percent of the African American population was enslaved before the Civil War, it means reckoning with the broader reach of Black radical antislavery that encompassed slave rebellions, fugitivity, and other forms of resistance to slavery. A capacious understanding of African American radicalism would include freedom suits, petitions, intellectual responses to the pseudoscience of race, the long fight against racial segregation and the criminalization of Blackness, autonomous institution building epitomized by Black churches, conventions, and fraternal societies, as well as an alternative historical genealogy of resistance and survival embedded in folk memory and Black popular culture.

This superb volume of penetrating essays on the Vesey affair and its ramifications at all these levels goes a long way in unearthing the hidden and silent archives of the Black antislavery Atlantic. Far from being passe, slave resistance has recently been conceptualized in theoretically sophisticated ways, opening new vistas of the African American radical political imaginary. Samuel Ntewusu, in this anthology, and I, in my book on abolition, have argued that the origins of Black radical antislavery lie in slave resistance in the west coast of Africa, often forgotten in histories of African participation in the slave trade. A range of activities in West Africa, more than just the African military antecedents of slave rebellions in the Americas, define slave resistance in the era of Vesey. They represent the start of the the Black antithesis to the slave trade and enslavement.

Transatlantic Black antislavery radicalism included not only Africa but also Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin America. James Sidbury recently recommended that we internationalize early African American history, and I have attempted to chart a Black abolitionist international. From Julius Scott’s recently published and already iconic The Common Wind to Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwanko’s notion of Black cosmopolitanism, much of this work has emphasized the cross-fertilization of Black resistance in American slave societies. Inspired by Scott and C. L. R. James’s classic, Black Jacobins, numerous historians of Black antislavery, including myself, have pointed to the pivotal place of the Haitian Revolution, an abolitionist revolution par excellence, in the Black and white abolitionist imagination. As Bernard Power’s essay on Vesey’s conspiracy in South Carolina and other work on Gabriel’s and the German Coast rebellions in Virginia and Louisiana reveal, a case can be made for the formative influence of Haiti on slave rebellions not just in the slave societies of the Caribbean and South America but also in the United States. Vesey’s conspiracy is an essential part of this antislavery ferment in the age of revolution.

Recent historical literature on the United States has conceptualized Black antislavery radicalisms in theoretically sophisticated ways. Steven Hahn has reimagined northern free Black communities, with their fair share of slave runaways, whom the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison called self-emancipated slaves, as maroon communities. In Spady’s formulation and Wendy Gonaver’s article, fugitivity becomes a central trope to understand Black resistance to slavery. As Spady writes, All Black freedom movements are fugitive, and he reformulates Black antislavery as a fugitive social movement. His essay provides us with new interpretive and methodological tools to understand slave rebellions as antislavery that puts to rest the contrived controversy over whether Vesey’s conspiracy actually took place or was a figment of slaveholding state authorities’ imagination. In my own work, I discuss the importance of a new generation of fugitive slave abolitionists in the 1840s and 1850s in radicalizing an interracial abolition movement and moving it toward direct action. These freedom seekers also produced the movement literature of abolition, publishing their slave narratives under abolitionist auspices.

Fugitivity encompassed the search for free spaces as in Vesey’s abortive plan to sail to Haiti or in Lucien Holness’s discussion of how Black Pennsylvanians secured free soil in their state. As Elena Abbott’s new book on the creation of an international free soil illustrates, Black-freedom claims sought to redraw the social geography of slavery and freedom on not just a national but also an international scale. Slaveholders’ response was to contain the moral contagion of the antislavery Black international, as in the passage of the Negro Seamen Law by South Carolina after the Vesey affair, which became a model for similar laws in other Deep South states. These laws incarcerated free Black seamen while their ships were in southern ports, in violation of the US Constitution and treaties with foreign powers, on the theory that these free seamen of color threatened the security of slavery.

Taken together the articles in this book lie at the very cutting edge of historical scholarship in seeking to understand the steady everyday acts of resistance taken by enslaved men, women, and children—what James Scott called the weapons of the weak—that make spectacular moments of rebellion possible. Recent work by Vanessa Holden alerts us to the gendered dimensions of Black antislavery radicalism, the manner in which Black women, children, and families survive and resist in a continuum of community resistance punctuated by major rebellions like Nat Turner’s uprising. Douglas Egerton’s essay on enslaved women survivors of Vesey’s conspiracy sheds light on these women in a more fraught manner.

The book’s purpose in unearthing and preserving an archeology of Black resistance around Denmark Vesey’s conspiracy on its two hundredth anniversary succeeds admirably, especially in a group of essays on the reparative history on slave rebellions in South Carolina and the Caribbean, and it attempts to preserve a distinct memory of Vesey and other enslaved rebels. These counternarratives and fugitive memories preserve a history of the Black radical tradition and link our contested present to the past. Robert Paquette’s contribution on Vesey’s church, the AME Mother Emmanuel, destroyed in the aftermath of the rebellion but rebuilt during Reconstruction, illustrates this point well. This historic Black abolitionist church in Charleston, where the Confederate flag–waving Dylan Roof shot in cold blood eight worshippers and their minister, Rev. Clementa Pinckney, and where President Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black President, sang the abolitionist hymn Amazing Grace to commemorate Roof’s victims, illustrates that the long after lives of slavery and Black resistance to it are still with us today.

Introduction

The two-hundredth anniversary of the 1822 Denmark Vesey Conspiracy in Charleston, South Carolina, arrives after a decade of antiracist mobilization in the United States. However, neither the activism nor the racism of racially disproportionate police brutality and mass incarceration is new. Activists and scholars have argued that racism today is a reconstituted Jim Crow, which was itself a reconstruction of the racism of slavery. Over time, racism has changed and not disappeared. Black antislavery radicals of the nineteenth century would likely recognize elements of their own time in our struggles over racist vigilante violence, racialized poverty, and voter suppression. In fact, there is global recognition of the persistence of anti-Black racism in the United States. #BlackLives Matter protests over the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in the United States happened all over the world in 2020. We live in the wake of slavery.¹

Denmark Vesey was a free Black carpenter and a former slave when he was executed for participation in the antislavery rebellion that bears his name. Today, he and other Black antislavery rebels are sometimes identified by antiracist campaigns as movement heritage. Charleston’s decisions to erect a monument to Vesey in 2014 and to take down a prominent monument to John C. Calhoun, an enslaver and proslavery ideologue, in 2020 demonstrate that a moment for representing slavery and antislavery has come. Such reckoning will require better representation of the history of radical Black antislavery, including Denmark Vesey and his allies in 1822, because the US has often framed militant Black resistance to enslavement as terrorism or pathology. As a result, too many people still struggle to distinguish Black radicalism for freedom from racist radicalism for white supremacy.²

This volume situates Denmark Vesey and antislavery rebellion within the current scholarship on abolition that places Black activists in the center of the story. Armed rebellions were part of the long, Atlantic-wide history of antislavery. Antislavery rebellion, in general, and the 1822 Charleston Antislavery Uprising (hereafter the 1822 Uprising), in particular, significantly affected the history of slavery and racism in the West. Nonetheless, as Ethan Kytle and Blain Roberts show in this volume, the 1822 Uprising has been difficult to memorialize, even though Confederate officers who fought against the United States are widely memorialized with thousands of plaques, statues, busts, and paintings in public parks and buildings. Despite these many monuments to White rebels, efforts to commemorate Vesey, or the Stono Slave Rebellion in South Carolina, which Shawn Halifax and Terri Snyder discuss, have been met with Ku Klux Klan resistance in the relatively recent past. However, if the current moment of reckoning accomplishes only the modest goal of replacing monuments, it will have mostly failed. Systemic racism was part of the story of slavery and antislavery. Reckoning with racism must include an understanding of how entwined racism and slavery were.³

It matters that Vesey was already a free man when he helped plan the 1822 Uprising, but his participation was not charity. Special taxes and regulations targeting free Black Charlestonians made life more of a struggle for Vesey than for white craftsmen. Whites held Vesey’s children and spouse as chattel property in different households. He had purchased his own freedom in 1799, but by the 1820s South Carolina law made it almost impossible for him to buy his family and free them. As years passed in such freedom, he reportedly grew to hate to be around white people. He became outraged that his fellow Black Charlestonians lived as a suppressed people and did not act decisively for their freedom. He apparently liked to debate slavery with white people when Black people could overhear. Eventually, he met free and enslaved men who had similar criticisms of the white supremacy of nineteenth-century South Carolina. He and they became key organizers for an uprising against the conditions that they and their families, friends, and communities endured. Theirs was a personal struggle for family, friends, and community—like most of the others presented in this book.⁴

All Black freedom movements are fugitive. This has been true of slave rebellion, religious revivals, labor strikes, civil rights, Black Power liberation, and #BlackLivesMatter. Black fugitivity, Tina Campt has argued, is a refusal to stay in one’s proper place. Fugitives cross boundaries, unauthorized, and are always running. The fugitive chooses to live for the possibility of an unbounded life and refuses to be subject to law that negates or exoticizes Black lived experience. Therefore, fugitivity is a status precariously placed between possibility and danger: even when they were the omnipresent majority population where chattel slavery was still legal in the early nineteenth century, the enslaved remain unrecognized as people or citizens. Free or enslaved, Blackness was (and is) treated as suspect in a white-supremacist society. There is no prospect for belonging as equals. There is no possibility of escape other than temporarily and incompletely. Even when they are free, fugitivity continues to structure the lives of property-less Black workers, who become targets for street harassment and carriers of intergenerational traumas.⁵

All movements are social. However small the number of people participating in the antislavery activities described and analyzed in this book might have been, they were nonetheless part of social movements. A social movement emerges from a specific community, not the mind of an individual. The movement creates the arguments—the counternarratives—against dominant discourses. In Charleston these were perceptions of race and status that kept Black people from recognizing and risking opportunities to organize for freedom. Social movements also marshal and share resources. Together, the result can become a collective challenge to even well-established relations of power, such as racial capitalism’s chattel slavery (or its twenty-first-century mass incarceration of Black people). Readers of this volume can compare the 1822 Uprising to other examples of Black antislavery social movements across time and place. Doing so offers a way to commemorate the 1822 movement by contextualizing the rebels’ actions in the world they knew, as they most likely knew it. Some of the 1822 planners had traversed parts of the world, and others knew people who had. Many of them were born and raised in parts of the Atlantic basin other than where their resistance efforts took place. Probably for most if not quite all, the motivation to rebel arose not from the principles of the Declaration of Independence or the Bible, although it was certainly sometimes shaped by such texts. Direct evidence suggests that movements against slavery were caused by slavery’s exploitations. All around the Atlantic basin, slavery’s assault on their bodies, friends, other loved ones, livelihoods, status, and communities drove resistance and rebellion. Under that pressure, fugitivity shaped every aspect of their social movements.⁶

The two-hundredth anniversary of the 1822 Uprising can participate in the current era of reckoning. There has been an interpretive segregation between Black rebellion, represented as terrorism, and white rebellion, represented as legitimate freedom fighting. Examples of the latter, such as Lexington and Concord, are often celebrated as a part of the national story of the United States. Why should people who killed to avoid taxes they deemed to be like slavery be honored while other people who killed to escape chattel slavery are ignored? In fact, Black direct action—including armed rebellion—was a determined attempt for freedom from the most oppressive and exploitative circumstances. The discursive quarantine of Black rebellion in contemporary culture recapitulates segregation. It is a legacy of the color line that W. E. B. Du Bois had called the problem of the twentieth century in 1903. Before Du Bois, Frederick Douglass knew the color line. He named it in an 1881 essay. He knew that aspects of it preceded the Civil War.⁷

Charleston whites in the early 1800s also policed a color line. Vesey, free Black men, and all Black people in the city knew the line well. When white Charlestonians hanged Gullah Jack and thirty-four other Black men in 1822, or when they demolished the African church as collective punishment after the trials, they treated the Black community as suspects, whether free and enslaved, even though they had not even considered accusing the overwhelming majority of them of any part in the 1822 Uprising. In the session of the South Carolina legislature immediately following the trials, whites devised new ways to suppress and regulate the enslaved and the free Black community. Jim Crow innovated upon these suppressive tactics; it did not invent them. Furthermore, in 2015, when Dylann Roof chose the rebuilt Vesey church for his neo-Confederate murders of nine praying Black churchgoers, he also treated Blackness as permanently fugitive, as permanently subject to summary punishment without due process, without any evidence, and despite the kindness of their invitation for him to pray with them. Roof echoed an older, historical violence. Whites had responded brutally to Black antislavery advocates who, as Manisha Sinha has shown, opposed chattel slavery and racism trenchantly. Ultimately, Roof’s violence was a commemoration and instantiation of racist slavers’ collective punishment of Black people for the 1822 Uprising. His was a contemporary form of the old effort to demolish spaces that Black people created because he considered Blackness inherently threatening.⁸

Fugitive Movements

Contributors to this volume advance aspects of the new scholarship on Black antislavery and antiracism. There are several essays on aspects of the Vesey affair, its antecedents, dynamics, and commemoration. There are several more essays beyond the Vesey case to provide comparative examples. Three related themes unite the volume: (1) it presents both radical Black antislavery and commemoration as fugitive social movements, (2) it broadens the demographic portrait of participation in Black resistance to enslavement, and (3) it argues that the memory and commemoration of Black antislavery have been part of the organized struggle against racism. The volume organizes the essays into two parts. Part I features essays dealing with direct resistance to enslavement by Black people. Part II explores commemoration, memory, and historiography. Not every essay engages all the themes.

The often-cited US fugitive slave Harriet Jacobs physically hid herself with the assistance of friends and relatives in North Carolina for years before her escape. Then she escaped to freedom in New York City. Such hiding, physically or discursively, is a feature of all the fugitive movements discussed in this book. The 1822 rebels physically hid themselves for meetings to coordinate with one another and plan rebellion and mass escape. Fugitivity entails both the actions of the individual runaway and the coordinated actions of activist and rebellion movements. Black antislavery activists in Pennsylvania, Lucien Holness demonstrates, planned in secret for their sudden appearances to intervene in domestic slave trafficking. Their fugitivity was also discursive. They revised the free-soil ideology to include Black people, and they found and coordinated with allies to enforce their revision. Similarly, some of the 1822 rebels asserted a fugitive and gendered right to freedom as men—something absolutely unacknowledged as belonging to them by the overwhelming majority of white Americans.

Comparisons to other Black radical antislavery activists show how the 1822 Charleston antislavery movement was part of the Atlantic-wide, antislavery struggle—not a sidelight. Reported widely in the Western world, the 1822 movement had a distinct role in the history of wider efforts. Its organizers were aware of Atlantic developments and controversies over slavery. They sought to participate by freeing themselves, their families, their friends, and their community. Such efforts were more than just dramatic examples of the desire for freedom among the enslaved. North and South, in the Caribbean and on the Continent, Black antislavery radicals expanded rights, united different African cultural heritages, and supported Haiti through emigration. Commemorating these actions contributes to rethinking the history of antiracism. Antislavery was perhaps inseparable from antiracism, as the failure of emancipation to end racism suggests. A history of antislavery as antiracism might show how grassroots antislavery radicals inspired and influenced efforts against both Jim Crow and the twenty-first century’s New Jim Crow. It might consider how Black people’s efforts to commemorate Black antislavery rebellions have been part of that antiracist history. Essays in this volume develop such themes.

Historians have long noticed that Haiti’s existence as a revolutionary, independent Black republic influenced the 1822 Uprising and other radical antislavery movements. Despite this influence, Haiti’s important revolution had been neglected until quite recently, even by professional historians. The historical map of the Caribbean included in this volume exemplifies this forgetting: it erases Haiti from the map, representing the island merely as Hispanola and Santo Domingo. Bernard Powers in this volume does more than any previous historian to detail the pathways, timing, and substance of the Haitian Revolution’s influence in Charleston. A central feature was how Haiti’s example reached Charleston via what Julius Scott has called the common wind of information currents among Black refugees in the era of the Haitian Revolution. Powers links this information network to developments in Charleston. He connects the controversies over French refugees, including free and enslaved people, directly to Captain Joseph Vesey—who was still Denmark Vesey’s master in the 1790s. Powers demonstrates that it would have been quite impossible for Vesey to have been insulated from Haitian developments. Moreover, Powers details the presence of St. Domingue slaves and refugees within the state. He demonstrates their presence in South Carolina and in Charleston through ads, court records, and other manuscript archives. The specter of rebellion they brought with them, and of which they reminded Charleston by their presence in the city, affected Charleston culture. It affected South Carolina law. However, importantly, Haiti changed the expectations and consciousness of the enslaved people in Charleston.⁹

Map of the Caribbean and southern United States (1814), showing Haiti as Hispanola and Santo Domingo. A Chart of the West Indies, from the Latest Marine Journals and Surveys. New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Powers goes beyond consideration of slavery and emancipation to argue how the Haitian Republic was also both an antiracist power and a haven for Black people. If Black people fled Haiti as slaves when they left with masters, other Black people in the Caribbean and elsewhere would flee masters by going to freedom in Haiti. Haiti became a refuge. The connections of this argument to the events of 1822 are obvious and evident: court testimony suggests that some of the planners intended to flee to Haiti. However, Haiti’s public role as refuge for Black people yearning to be free also should establish for readers the plausibility of the belief by some of the 1822 Uprising planners that Haiti would help them. The 1822 planners had reason to believe that Haiti was an ally to people such as themselves, if they knew much about Haiti at all. Powers shows that such knowledge may have been unavoidable in Charleston.

Another example of revolutionary action by the enslaved might be the St. Simons Revolt during the US Civil War. Wendy Gonaver offers an analysis of the relationship between fugitivity and citizenship in the 1862 St. Simons Revolt against Confederates. She shows that revolt is a difficult term to apply because it implies there are perhaps only two sides. The St. Simons rebels knew there were at least three sides. They had experience with the Union already, which had relocated them to the island as refugees. Although the rebels helped grow the ranks of the 1st South Carolina Volunteer Infantry Regiment (Colored), they knew not to trust Union promises. If they had taken up arms against their slave masters just a couple years earlier, their fight would have been treated as criminal conspiracy rather than military service to the United States. They took up arms to fight off Confederates raiding the island to carry them off for their own reasons, and they knew their freedom was precarious. They had no optimism about citizenship. Ninety women and men fought off the raiders for themselves and one another without white authorization or command. Was it rebellion or loyalism that motivated them? Gonaver’s analysis explains that it was both and neither. Their actions were autonomous, fully conscious of the limits of Union allies, aware of the precarity of their situation, doubtful of US promises of pay or even freedom. The precarious quality of the citizenship that these Black men struggled to attain through their service was structured by inherited racism in both the Confederate and Union ranks. The narrative of the former slave Susie King Taylor of her experiences as a nurse in the 1st South Carolina—published in 1902—rightly critiques the limits of Black citizenship after the war. However, she also shows that the men had developed this critique themselves, during the war and that they struggled for decades afterward to advance their interests and rights against brutal resurgent racism and the apathy of their former Union allies such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

There was a hemispheric, antislavery, slave war under way, and it almost broke out as an armed insurrection in 1822 Charleston. In my essay in this volume I observe that the half-hidden, fugitive nature of the 1822 Charleston Uprising plan bore general similarities to the 1791 slave insurrection that triggered the most radical phase of the Haitian Revolution. In both places, rebellion was helped along by secret meetings, sacred technologies, vows of secrecy, and a clearly identified date to start the assault. However, 1822 also has similarities with the St. Simons Revolt in that it possessed its own local ideology of self-help. We should not assume that their conception of freedom was dependent on Anglo-American or other colonial ideas of freedom. In 1791, 1822, and 1862, the rebels planned to free themselves, their families, their friends, and their communities for their own reasons.¹⁰

The larger slave war spanned African and American sites. For a region of West Africa that is now in northern Ghana, Samuel Ntewusu argues that Builsa warriors fought enslavement from an indigenous, personal, and critical perspective rather than from colonial ideologies of liberty and freedom. Evidence that Ntewusu develops through interviews and documents allows for a comparative perspective on the motives of enslaved and free Black people in South Carolina in 1822. Importantly, Builsa people have continued to commemorate their resistance to enslavement, and their commemorations are themselves part of their politics and identity. Similarly, Rupprecht and Bergin discuss and analyze the 1831 Tortola Conspiracy. Tortola is an island in the Caribbean east of Puerto Rico. The event, they argue, lays bare relationships among capitalism, circuits of knowledge among the enslaved, and the memory of slavery in the twenty-first century. Similar to the 1822 Uprising in Charleston, the Tortola organizers’ radicalism came from the bottom up. Local grievances and the experience of enslavement itself drove their desire. However, it also drew on broad information networks to affect the debates around emancipation at the highest levels of the British government. Other similarities to the 1822 Denmark Vesey events include how whites in Tortola tried the enslaved using an eighteenth-century law that limited the rights of accused slaves in ways that would not be legal for English subjects. Despite the urgency in which the trial proceedings occurred and the inevitable difficulties of the archive that resulted from a sloppy trial, nobody doubted that there really was a plan. Questions will always remain about some of the details. Nonetheless, read alongside Ntewusu’s essay, Bergin and Rupprecht demonstrate that a retelling of the story of emancipation with Black antislavery rebellion at the center is reparative. The Builsa have created a historical commemoration for themselves. In Charleston, a locally meaningful commemoration could also be created around the 1822 Uprising’s effort to take back freedom or be incorporated into existing ceremonies.

Memory and commemoration of rebellion have been part of struggles over racism in subsequent generations. Rupprecht and Bergin argue this, and Snyder and Halifax observe that the turn of the twenty-first century has seen a growing emphasis on publicly memorializing slavery and commemorating enslaved people’s resistance. Importantly, Halifax and Snyder begin their narration of this commemorative turn with the resistance of African American communities, historians, and preservationists who have sought to commemorate and venerate slave rebels for generations. Their specific story is of the 1739 Stono Rebellion, the commemoration of which, like the 1822 Uprising, has seen bitter and entrenched resistance from whites whenever proposed. Met with racist resistance in South Carolina, including by the KKK, African American preservationists nonetheless have succeeded in marking prominent sites and keeping the story alive within the community. These activities helped create interest among academic historians, including the current generation. Halifax and Snyder share research (and a personal research narrative) that newly reveals sites and dimensions of Stono previously under-considered. Halifax and Snyder conclude that the purpose of commemoration is not only to publicly remember but also to make a public reckoning with the past. It is part of a larger, global and local ongoing struggle against racism and exploitation.

Such reckoning with the memory of slave rebellions always began immediately, through mourning lost relatives and friends. Blain Roberts and Ethan Kytle’s essay reminds us that families of the deceased were the first to preserve the memory of the rebels: in 1822, members of the Black community in Charleston wore mourning attire for their executed friends and family in public were abused for it. A full century later, the civil rights activist Septima Poinsette Clark remembered growing up outside Charleston listening to her father’s stories of similar beatings of slaves. She learned then that the struggle over the memory of slavery and racism was part of the struggle for freedom in the 1960s. White Charlestonians in the 1970s and beyond often continued to view Vesey as an infamous attempted murderer, not as a legitimate Black antislavery radical. As they had during the rise of Jim Crow, many whites preferred to remember allegedly docile and happy slaves, condemning public commemorations of Black revolutionaries, just as they had abolitionists and civil rights activists. Only in 2014 was a monument to Vesey finally erected.

The 1822 rebel movement in Charleston exemplified rhetorical strategies found in other movements in this volume. Both rhetorical appropriations and silences were strategies that were common in antislavery efforts in the Atlantic world. Lucien Holness argues that Black free and enslaved people in southwestern Pennsylvania articulated their own Black free-soil principles. These principles went beyond the white argument for free-soil territory where slavery (and by extension almost all Black people) would not be permitted. Instead, Black free-soil principles asserted a set of legal protections that adhered to free and freed Black people’s rights. Free Black Pennsylvanians, Holness argues, came to believe that protecting their own free labor necessitated antislavery work. Understanding that racism and slavery were entwined, they sued for their own freedom whenever sold into slave states and also for the freedom of others, creating their idea that freedom adhered in their personhood, regardless of residing on free or slave soil. They built a network of activists willing to use vigilante actions to liberate people whom slavers were transporting through the region.

Many of the essays deal with the inevitable problem of the incompleteness of records. A legacy of the colonial cultures that suppressed Black writing, the lacunae that result necessitate reasonable speculation, or else important stories go utterly untold, a kind of collaboration with colonialism and racism. Engaging in an extended discourse to identify proper and improper speculations regarding Denmark Vesey’s religious associations, Robert A. Paquette describes the origins of the African church in Charleston in 1817. Delving into scholarly debate about the archive of the 1822 Uprising, he identifies the social roots of the congregation and the extent of Vesey’s affiliation with it. Paquette clears up an important incident in 1817. That year, a group of Black Charlestonians acquired land and built the small church building. In late December the city guard confronted them and detained 469. The guard reprimanded some of them, which probably included beatings and whippings for some of the people detained. Paquette argues that this incident helped push Denmark Vesey to organize a rebellion with other Black men in the city.

Douglas Egerton also engages in grounded speculations. He offers an exploration of silences in the archive and recovers details of the lives of the women—and others—associated with the rebels of 1822 and other movements. He follows the women’s experiences after the trials, executions, and banishments of the men had ended. He argues that there is little direct evidence for women’s involvement in rebellions against slavery, and that this is possibly a result of African military antecedents. Revealing new details about Vesey’s spouses and descendants, Egerton shows that the survivors struggled with the legacy of rebellion. They struggled economically because of the loss of the men, and they struggled socially within enslaving societies that likely stigmatized them and their families.

William D. Jones’s essay takes a different approach to silence in the archive. He considers silences as a kind of speech. The Dirge of St. Maló was a nineteenth-century song telling the story of an eighteenth-century slave rebel and maroon. Jones shows how its silences are in fact coded resistance. He suggests St. Malo’s silence can be a pathway to the expression of resistance ideology. Further, the dirge is a kind of collective oral history. As such, Jones is less concerned about minor factual variances relative to the documentary record. He is interested in the larger meanings, which include that silence can be a form of resistance. This argument complements my essay on the 1822 Uprising, in which I reveal the silences and omissions in enslaved witnesses’ statements as resistance, as a tactic for protecting others.

The 1820s as a Black Antislavery Turning Point

The 1822 Uprising was part of a watershed moment in the history of Black antislavery. In response to the American Colonization Society’s efforts to send free Black and manumitted slaves to Africa, some of the 1822 planners organized to free themselves and their friends and families on their own terms. They preferred to choose freely who was freed and to choose equally whether to stay and fight or to flee somewhere across the ocean. There are some indications that some specifically favored Haiti, where they would be full citizens of a Black republic. Contemporary northern Black activists who sought immediate abolition in the 1820s noticed the 1822 Uprising. Antislavery activists around the Atlantic world noticed the events in Charleston. The 1822 Uprising helped set the stage for a second wave of Black antislavery activity that would focus on the immediate and total abolition of slavery from the late 1820s forward. Like the 1822 Uprising, this more radical antislavery had an international focus and was uncompromisingly militant on the question of Black people’s right to their bodies and families as well as to material belonging in their community. Charleston’s Black community voiced this determination in a combinations of American and African cultural, political, and spiritual traditions that other cities in the Americas also possessed. There is no reason to imagine that other rebellion coalitions did not have some of these characteristics, at once a movement for freedom and against the colonial status of Blackness—free or enslaved.¹¹

The 1822 Uprising was also part of a watershed moment in the history of white racism. After the uprising, to defend slavery whites in South Carolina and elsewhere refined the surveillance and the regulation of both enslaved and free Black people. Foreshadowing the racism of Jim Crow, free Black people around the country would become subject to new or expanded regulation, taxation, or prohibitions in the 1820s and 1830s. The various states would adopt new racially targeted taxes and fees, voting prohibitions, and reduced civil rights. South Carolina restricted the movements of free Black people, even sailors visiting port from other parts of the world. Pennsylvania took away free Black men’s voting rights. Frederick Douglass fought railroad segregation in Massachusetts during the 1840s. After emancipation, decades later, Douglass recognized the renewal of disdain for Blackness. They are negroes, he wrote in 1881, and that is enough for whites to target them anew once slavery had ended. Freed people, Douglass noted, were denied work for which they were qualified, denied accommodations at public facilities, denied fair access to the ballot box, and denied equal justice and fair trials. In perhaps one of the earliest identifications of what scholars now call societal racism, Douglass observed that a Black person in the United States had ceased to be the slave of an individual, but has in some sense become the slave of society. This systemic racial bias—adapted to a new social and political environment—became known as Jim Crow in the twentieth century. Two hundred years after 1822, systemic racism persists in new formations despite the civil rights and Black liberation movements of the 1950s–1970s. This is what Saidiya Hartman calls the afterlife of property.¹²

There are continuities from Vesey’s story to the Jim Crow history of lynching to police abuses and murders in the contemporary era of mass incarceration. Michael Johnson has suggested such a continuity: that the 1822 trials were like lynchings. Denmark Vesey was a free man. He had not injured anyone, yet the court hanged him, and the full record of his trial has not survived. That seems to resemble a lynching. Activists have made similar claims about police shootings of unarmed Black men today. The 2015 killing of Walter Scott in North Charleston also had elements of a lynching. A North Charleston police officer stopped the car that Scott was driving because of a nonfunctioning brake light. Scott ran from the car, and the officer pursued. There was a brief scuffle. When Scott broke free and ran away again, the officer stood, took careful aim at the fleeing man, and shot him in the back eight times. In order to justify the use of deadly force, the officer filed an incident report saying Scott had grabbed his taser. The officer claimed that he had tried to administer CPR. All those statements were irrefutably proven false within days, when a video showed the officer placing his taser beside Scott’s body and never administering first aid of any kind. His alteration of evidence is not unlike the 1822 trial court’s alteration of, for example, Bacchus