NOTES ON SOURCES
The Historical Record
While the meeting between Capt. Joseph Vesey and Denmark Vesey in Denmark Vesey: Insurrection is fictitious, their conversations are based on issues and facts drawn from the actual historical record. This record, however, even from primary sources is often contradictory. For instance, in some cases Denmark is supposed to have cross-examined witnesses and to have spoken to the court. In other accounts, it is said he was not allowed to speak or to confront his accusers at all. No account, however, has any record of what Denmark said at his trial.
“There is no persuasive evidence that a conspiracy in fact existed or at most it was a vague and unfortunate plan in the minds or tongues of a few colored townsmen.” - Governor Thomas Bennett Official Report to the Legislature
There are two major sources of the trial record. There are the raw trial transcripts on file at the State Archives in Columbia, but they are not really transcripts. They do not show cross examinations, rather, they are simply a collection of notes from the interrogation of witnesses. They are not the original transcipts, but probably edited copies created for both houses of the legislature by Governor Bennett in his official report presented to the General Assembly in the fall of 1822.
We also have the Judges’ version of events which they privately published (perhaps to defend their actions) in a pamplet entitled The Official Report of the Trials of Sundry Negroes Charged with an Attempt to Raise an Insurrection in the State of South Carolina. A copy of this publication was found by a Union Officer in Beaufort after the Civil War. It was given to Harriet Beecher Stowe who gave it to the Harvard Library where it is housed today.
This “Official Report” by the judges omits some testimony found in the raw transcripts (notably the alleged poisoning scheme) and adds that of others—testimony that does not appear in the transcripts in the state archives. The Judges themselves do make it clear, however, that many witnesses, including the first to confess, were held in solitary confinement, beaten and threatened with execution before they agreed to give testimony against others. The Judges also make it clear, without apology, that their proceedings departed “in many essential features from the principles of common law.”
“habeas corpus and indeed all of the provisions of our constitution in favor of liberty are intended for [white] freedmen only.” - SC Attorney General Robert Hayne
We also have a few letters from Charleston citizens who lived through the alleged insurrection. One, from Mary Lamboll Beach, on file at the South Carolina Historical Society, mentions the wig that appears as evidence in the play. This “evidence” however was not presented at Denmark’s trial.
Except for notice of the executions and an editorial defending the integrity of the judges, actual coverage of the trial itself never appeared in the newspapers of the time. The Charleston Courier did publish (anonymously) the objections to the proceedings from Charleston resident and Associate US Supreme Court Justice William Johnson, who raised questions about the legality of the trials. He later wrote to his friend Thomas Jefferson to say, “I have lived to see what I never believed it possible I should see - courts held with closed doors, and men dying by the scores who had never seen the faces nor heard the voices of their accusers.”
“I have lived to see what I never believed it possible I should see - courts held with closed doors, and men dying by the scores who had never seen the faces nor heard the voices of their accusers.” - Associate US Supreme Court Justice Johnson in a letter to his friend Thomas Jefferson
Johnson’s views were echoed by his brother-in-law, Governor Thomas Bennett, who lost three of his own slaves to the gallows. He later reported to the state legislature that “there is no persuasive evidence that a conspiracy in fact existed or at most it was a vague and unfortunate plan in the minds or tongues of a few colored townsmen.”
Because of his concerns, Gov. Bennett asked State Attorney General, Robert Hayne to issue a ruling on the legality of the trials. Hayne replied that the trials were legal and that “habeas corpus and indeed all of the provisions of our constitution in favor of liberty are intended for [white] freedmen only.”
In the end, we have only one side of the story set down for us by those that tried Denmark Vesey, and looming over all of this is Vesey’s silence. For almost 200 years the truth of Denmark Vesey and his alleged insurrection has remained elusive.
Historians Disagree
In 1998, the Vesey case was in many ways re-opened with new scholarship and the publication of three new books on the case: He Shall Go Out Free, by Douglas R. Egerton; Designs Against Charleston: The Trial Record of the Denmark Vesey Slave Conspiracy of 1822, edited by Edward A. Pearson, and Denmark Vesey by David Robertson.
In October 2001, in reviewing these three books, Johns Hopkins Historian Michael Johnson challenged the methods and assumptions of his fellow historians.
After reviewing the original transcripts, Johnson asserted that his colleagues had accepted too much of the “official” evidence against Vesey on face value. He warned that this evidence was suspect since so much of it was gained through coercion, torture and life-saving 19th century plea bargains. “Vesey never admitted his guilt," Johnson says, “Look at the court, [that sentenced him to hang] look at who was on it, what their motives were. When you do, you see that the evidence against Vesey is not credible. [The court singled] him out as a kind of Osama bin Laden of a slave conspiracy.”
The Rev. Joseph Darby, a leader in Charleston’s African American community notes, “The irony is that those who killed him, defined him.”
Johnson goes even further, speculating that the white powers that be may have cooked up the whole scheme as a means to shut down the growing power for the African Church and free blacks like Denmark Vesey.
Historian Douglas Edgerton of Le Moyne College, in the revised edition of He Shall Go Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey, challenges Johnson’s revisionist version of the Vesey affair, arguing that the overwhelming body of evidence points to Vesey’s guilt.
The controversy and scholarship continues with several new histocial studies in the works.