The incident that reignited my interest in South Carolina was an article in The Nation by Jon Wiener describing the controversy stirred by Michael Johnson when he suggested Denmark Vesey had, in fact, not been plotting a slave revolt in Charleston in 1822, but had been convicted by false evidence forced from imprisoned slaves fearing for their lives.
Johnson had gone back to the rarely read manuscript transcriptions of testimony and compared them with the published report used by most historians. He suggested the legal discovery of the Vesey conspiracy unfolded occurred in two phases.
On May 22, Peter Desverneys, a slave owned by John Prioleau, told him he’d heard from a slave owned by John Paul, that something was about to happen. The scion of one of the first Huguenot families in Charleston informed his cousin-in-law, the intendent who functioned as mayor, James Hamilton, Jr. Hamilton questioned Paul’s slave William, who gave evidence against two other slaves owned by his master, Mingo Harth and Peter Poyas, and decided he told more lies than truths.
On May 30, George Wilson, a slave owned by John Lyde Wilson, told him there were plans for an insurrection. Apparently the member of traditional Charleston society took what he’d heard within the context of the Desverneys episode and alerted Hamilton who now "mobilized the militia and patrols." Johnson suggests Hamilton’s reaction created the sense of "deep interest and distressing anxiety" among the while residents of Charleston that he then deplored.
After the failure of an insurrection to materialize, a special tribunal began taking evidence in secret to learn the nature of what had been adverted. On July 2, representatives of the court publically executed a freedman, Denmark Vesey, three slaves owned by the governor, Thomas Bennett (Rolla, Ned, and Batteau), Peter Poyas, and another slave, Jesse Blackwood, owned by Thomas Blackwood, head of the Planters and Mechanics Bank.
While the court was in session, Bennett’s brother-in-law, William Johnson, Jr., published an account of an earlier South Carolina slave revolt in the Edgefield County that had turned out to be a hoax. Members of the tribunal thought Johnson was attacking them, and demanded the justice of the Supreme Court retract his insinuations.
Michael Johnson believes the special court then redoubled its efforts to prove the existence of the Vesey conspiracy with more evidence obtained by torture that lead to the execution of another two on July 12, 22 on July 26, four on July 28 and one on August 9. The Johns Hopkins historian believes in this second phase the court became more concerned with defending its honor than with discovering the truth.
Bennett waited until autumn to tell the state legislature that he believed the special tribunal’s secret sessions were "in every sense...an usurpation of authority, and a violation of law" The attorney general, Robert Young Hayne, disagreed and argued only free whites had rights in the judicial system.
Public opinion, much enflamed by the arrests and executions, sent Hayne to the Senate, elected Wilson as the next governor and sent Hamilton to the House of Representatives before electing him governor in 1830. Hayne was replaced by John Calhoun in the next Senate election, and replaced Hamilton as governor in 1832.
Bennett served three terms in the state senate, while Robert Starobin says Johnson was eventually forced to leave the state.
Notes: All quotes from Johnson.
Johnson, Michael P. "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators," The William and Mary Quarterly 58:915-976:2001.
Starobin Robert S. "Terror in South Carolina 1822: An Introduction to Denmark Vesey and the Slave Conspiracy in Charleston," in Starobin, Denmark Vesey: The Slave Conspiracy of 1822, 1970.
Wiener, Jon. "Denmark Vesey: A New Verdict," The Nation, February 21, 2002.
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