South Carolina - Evidence

In his review of books about the Denmark Vesey conspiracy in Charleston in 1822, Michael Johnson was critical of scholars who failed their craft by relying on secondary, rather than primary, sources.

Scholars are dependent on the work of others. Each individual does original work in some area, but is expected to lecture and write on subjects beyond that research specialty. He or she has no choice but to trust the work of others that’s been vetted by peer review. To read some work lacks due diligence is as distressing as hearing bank auditors don’t question account entries.

Johnson notes the five man special tribunal appointed to investigate a potential slave uprising issued an Official Report in 1822 which is used by most historians. He notes there are also two
manuscript versions of its interviews that look "similar, suggesting that they were written by the same clerk. The unambiguously legible and perfectly horizontal handwriting stretching line after line indicates that neither manuscript represents rough notes scribbled hurriedly during court sessions. Both must have been written later, at least one of them presumably based on notes that no longer survive. Neither document, then, preserves the court transcript as we think of such things today: verbatim records of what witnesses said."

Internal evidence of the kind every historian is supposed to be trained to evaluate suggests that one "is the earliest extant record of the court proceedings," and the other a later copy. Johnson examined the three documents to detect differences between them to argue that the Official Report created a narrative that was not supported by its own work.

As I read his critique, I thought about the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. They bear some similarities with both the investigation in Charleston and the work of the Holy Inquisition in Friuli described by Carlo Ginzburg. All three sets of interrogators used torture or its threat to elicit cooperation. The hysteria in Salem stopped when Giles Corey chose to be crushed to death rather than stand trial.

Second, all follow the pattern of early diversity in reports that’s replaced by uniformity as witnesses learn what their questioners expect to hear. Indeed, Mary Beth Norton observed that 14-year-old Abigail Hobbs, one of the first to confess in Salem, described the witches the way she would the Wampanoag and Abenaki who were menacing the area. Later witnesses gave ritualized descriptions of pinching, pricking, choking fits and signing books.

The thing that’s different is the cultural response to the events. It’s this response that has hindered the work of historians, and made some what Johnson calls "unwitting co-conspirators."
People in Massachusetts were shocked by Corey’s death, and since have treated the trials as an embarrassment, but a very public one. If one wants to learn more, the University of Virginia has a web site where it’s publishing transcriptions of every document related to the trial. One does not need to take Norton’s word for what Hobbs said. One can read it for oneself.

In contrast, Charleston believed at the time, and still believes, that its secret methods saved it from a catastrophe. As Johnson notes, others who want to believe slaves were not passive victims have made Vesey into the heroic reverse of the Charleston ogre, "a bold insurrectionist determined to free his people or die trying."

In the age of the internet, when amateurs everywhere can verify the accuracy of scholarship by discovering obscure original documents, some university or research center needs to make all the Charleston documents available and leave it to the public domain to evaluate what was once secret evidence. Some no doubt will still conclude the plot was very real, while others will still see proof that slaves weren’t passive. The rest of us can ponder the environment that created the need for the secret tribunal in the place, and consider the best ways to meet threats that are sensed but not overt.

Notes: All quotes from Johnson.

Ginzburg, Carlo. I Bendandatti, 1966, translated as The Night Battles by John and Anne Tedeschi, 1983.

Johnson, Michael P. "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators," The William and Mary Quarterly 58:915-976:2001.

Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil's Snare, 2002, reviewed by Jill Lepore in The New York Times Book Review, 3 November 2002.