The debate over the Denmark Vesey conspiracy

#22, December 3, 2003

Designs against Historians

About fifteen years ago, I met a very interesting person named Marina Wikramanayake Fernando, a professor of International Relations at the City College of New York. She was a friend of my mother-in-law and had worked with her briefly on a Save the Children project in Sri Lanka before the civil war there had reached its peak. She had also been trained as a historian at the University of Wisconsin, Madison during the late-1960s, so it was natural, given the fact that I had recently completed my PhD, that we would fall into conversation about her earlier historical writing.

It was a very compelling discussion, at least from my perspective. Her prime focus had been the free black community of Charleston, South Carolina, and the argument she had developed had been quite a controversial one at the time. Indeed, when she told me the argument she had developed in her book (A World in Shadow, published by the University of South Carolina Press in 1973) I recall being quite surprised by it and wondered whether it held water in light of more recent writing that dismissed such claims. For she argued, and still maintained, that it was highly questionable that the Denmark Vesey conspiracy amounted to an organized plot to overthrow slavery; that it probably never existed as a conspiracy in the form that either those who put it down savagely, and those who used it as an example of black resistance to slavery claimed. We did not flesh out the argument in detail at this time, though I remember being quite persuaded by what I had heard. Instead, we discussed the nature of the academy itself, and the kinds of opposition she faced from other academics at the time, and how, to all intents and purposes, she had ended up needing to seek another line of work. Even now, while she is once again ensconced in the American academy, she does not teach history, and certainly not African American history, but rather is director of an International Studies program.

I remembered this conversation early in 2002, when I came across a review written by Jon Wiener in The Nation focusing on a “new verdict” about the Vesey conspiracy. [“Denmark Vesey: A New Verdict,” Feb. 20]. According to Wiener, Hopkins professor Michael Johnson had viciously (my word, not his) exposed the limitations in the work of recent historians on the conspiracy and offered up a new theory about what had happened. Johnson was asserting that a judicial murder had taken place largely manipulated by whites who used the situation to advance their own political positions in the city and state. As I read the review I was immediately struck by the fact that the argument I had heard from Professor Fernando over a decade previously was being repeated – not so much with regard to the political motivation of the whites, but in terms of the suspect nature of the evidence used against the “conspirators”. On contacting Professor Fernando, I learned that she had recently seen a short New York Times article on the same debate and had been struck by the same thing. At the very least, this seemed to me to be ironic, that what had been heresy for a Sri Lankan woman to say almost thirty years ago, was now being accepted as cutting edge scholarship in 2002 coming from a white male. No surprise there, I suppose.

On seeking out Johnson’s articles in The William and Mary Quarterly, I found that Fernando’s book was curiously omitted from the author’s discussion of previous attempts to debunk the Vesey myth. He did mention Richard C. Wade, who had been a mentor of Fernando and who had been discredited earlier, and he did cite World in Shadow, with the appropriate page numbers for the Vesey argument, in the “further reading” section of his article. This was curious because as a leading scholar of free blacks in South Carolina Johnson must have been well aware of the book’s contents. This added a further layer of irony, too, since an argument that had been erased in the first place, was now being erased once again in the recuperation of the historiography. I do not feel that there was anything sinister here, however. Johnson’s argument in my opinion is drawn in large measure (rightly or wrongly) from his savaging of Designs against Charleston; yet in preparation for the task of reviewing this book and the other works on Vesey it is highly unlikely that he didn’t revisit the argument Fernando had made regarding the conspiracy.

The manner in which this earlier thesis itself becomes a “shadow” and is erased in Johnson’s article speaks volumes about who is authorized to speak among Americanists in the discipline of history. As a Sri Lankan woman, albeit one trained at University Wisconsin-Madison, Marina Wikramanayake (as she was then) was clearly not going to receive widespread praise for such an exposée back in 1973, when most African Americanists were endeavoring to counter the influence of Stanley Elkins and Daniel P. Moynihan (even if someone as prominent as Nathan Irvin Huggins recognized the work’s significance in his foreword to the volume). But now, at least, we should give Professor Fernando some of the credit for this interpretation of the conspiracy.

However, there is a difference between the two theses propounded by Fernando and Johnson. While they may have the same point of origin, one whereby, according to Wikramanayake, the irony was “that plotter and victim should reverse their roles,” their explanations of this role reversal are of a different order. Johnson makes the claim that there are political reasons explaining the actions of leading whites who went after the black “conspirators”. And it is certainly true that many people were advanced politically in the process, and that few were able to challenge them and bring sense to the proceedings and so halt the virtual massacre that ensued. By contrast, Wikramanyake’s work seems to bear the marks of an understanding of colonialism and its forms of governmentality, which may have come from her experiences growing up in British Ceylon/Sri Lanka. While she preceded Ranajit Guha by many years, she seems to have suggested the same things about colonialism and similarly oppressive systems of government that he did when he talked about the need to understand the role of anxiety in colonial rule. Clearly, for Wikramanayake, anxiety was at the heart of the story. While Johnson seems to want to discount the importance of black resistance in his account, suggesting that it was largely white fabrication, she ties the events to the growing visibility and strength of the African Methodists in the city and the anxieties this provoked – with good reason. If there was a conspiracy, she would argue, it was one that was intended to go after the likes of Morris Brown who would find it necessary to flee north to Philadelphia.

Indeed, for the clearest and most accessible account of the perpetration of this judicial murder, readers should turn to A World in Shadow. Grounded in a history of the free blacks of Charleston and, in particular, the importance of the recently founded African Methodist church in the city, this work reveals better than Johnson’s laborious perambulation through the court documents (with its designs against the work of other historians) why it was that members of the white elite were sufficiently anxious that they would resort to this judicial mass murder.