The American Revolution, as I learned in high school, was a war fought by the united thirteen colonies against their British overseer to form a government whose legitimacy was derived from the voluntary agreement of its citizens.
We never thought of it as a war with Britain like that fought in 1812, nor did we see ourselves as rebels. We certainly never thought of it as a civil war fought between neighbors. In fact, it was all these things, and a revolution only after it had been won, the constitution ratified, and John Adams elected.
Like any war, people’s commitment to the cause varied by how deeply they were involved. For many on the northern frontier, it was simply an extension of the French and Indian wars, only this time the Indians were allies of the British. For people in Boston, whose livelihoods were threatened by British trade acts, the necessity to protest was greater.
South Carolina had been rebellious since it was founded, and settlers refused to accept the authority of the proprietors to establish the rules of governance. When the proprietors made grants to Huguenots to attract rent paying settlers, the people of Charles Town redefined political districts in the 1690's so they wouldn’t be represented in the House of Commons.
When the Board of Trade issued plans for inland townships in 1730, they were seen as frontier outposts whose existence would protect Charles Town from Indian attacks. When men moved into the farther frontier from Virginia and Pennsylvania in the 1740's, the people of Charles Town shrugged. The French and Indian war began in 1756 and they took the brunt of Cherokee attacks. Rice planters suffered from a decline in shipping.
The Board of Trade sent a Colleton relative, Thomas Boone, in 1761 with orders to reduce the powers the colonial House of Commons had assumed when it threw off the proprietors in favor of the king in 1720. The next year, Boone dissolved the assembly. When the assembly reconvened, it refused to work. The Board of Trade censured Boone in 1764, which left control to his lieutenant, William Bull.
The Peace of Paris in 1763 ended the war with France, but increased conflicts with England, who needed to pay war debts and believed the colonies, who benefitted from eliminating the French in North America, should contribute. The Sugar Act of 1764 taxed luxuries, including indigo, but exempted rice. The Currency Act banned colonial currencies and the money supply shrank. Henry Laurens retired from the slave trade.
A new governor appeared in Charles Town in 1766, Charles Montague, but when people in the back country asked the colony to establish courts to punish the gangs that were raiding their settlements, they were ignored. Only when the frontiersmen organized themselves and began hunting down outlaws did the Commons take note of the usurpation of its authority by the Regulators who controlled the back country by 1768. They soon degenerated into vigilantes who provided cover for some to settle old scores with what Walter Edgar called "sadistic" violence. Montague had already left Bull in charge.
Britain passed the Navigation Acts in 1767 to limit colonial shipping, and seized one of Laurens’ ships the next year. Bull tried to suppress the regulators in 1768 and dissolved the assembly for supporting Boston protests. The assembly went on strike again in 1771, refusing to pass any legislation, effectively ending any semblance of organized government. In 1772 John Colleton, the great-grand-son of the original proprietor, sold his Mepkin plantation to Henry Laurens.
Britain enacted the Tea Act in 1773, and Charles Town called a mass meeting to protest. Supporters harassed those who disagreed and banished slave trader William Wragg. According to Edgar, activists weren’t able to extort agreement from a back country that was more angry with the city than with the British.
By the time South Carolina sent five low country planters and lawyers to the Continental Congress in 1774, people were divided into competing groups that endure to this day. However, the responses to the war didn’t follow those regional patterns. Instead, there were people in every community who were loyalists and some who enlisted, and a great many, as they had in Barbados during the English civil war, who simply didn’t wish to take sides. When neighbors disagreed, there followed the demands for loyalty oaths, confiscations and banishments for those who refused, similar to the punishments seen on the Caribbean island after Humphrey Waldron migrated there.
The war had little effect on Charles Town until the British, led by Henry Clinton, appeared in 1779. Then William Moultrie, aided by a spongy walled fort, successfully repulsed the troops, who took everything of value, enticed slaves to flee and destroyed the rest as they retreated, creating enemies as they moved.
When Clinton reappeared in 1780, some were still willing to surrender if the troops could be evacuated. However, Clinton couldn’t accept those terms, and when he took the city, there were new loyalty oaths to swear, and new demands men take up arms, this time against the rebels. Charles Cornwallis ordered the sequestration of the plantations of more than 100 men who refused, including Henry Laurens. 65 of those who had actively fought the British were deported to Saint Augustine, along with leaders like Thomas Heyward, David Ramsay and William Johnson.
In the back country, the British raised troops among local loyalists, who then helped attack their neighbors. Thomas Sumter was so angry when men, commanded by Banastre Tarleton, burned his new house, he roused his neighbors to attack. The rebels finally prevailed at King’s Mountain, in October 1780. Many of the defeated loyalists were from North Carolina.
As happens when war goes on too long and exacerbates existing civil conflicts, the prisoners were mistreated, court martialed, then hung. After the war, there was no surviving political or economic order. Men refused to pay debts and attacked sheriffs and courts who tried to enforce payment. Outlaws reappeared to harass settlers and travelers. People demanded the General Assembly identify and punish any remaining loyalists with banishment and confiscation.
One of the few to protest such demands was an Irish born, Charleston lawyer, who served as a judge in the Scots-Irish Ninety Six district under the Articles of Confederation. Aedanus Burke warned they would give way "to malice, avarice, or revenge; commit more injustice and glaring partiality" than would some form of reconciliation.
To prove his point, the remaining property of the deceased Margaret Colleton, widow of the last John Colleton, was seized, divided into lots, and sold. William Moultrie was among the buyers.
By the time a meeting was held to ratify the constitution in 1788, people were so hostile to one another, Burke said "4/5 of the people" were against the document and the only reason it was ratified was chicanery by the Charleston elite.
Safety returned only after the economy revived with the adoption of cotton as a crop in the 1790's, more than fifty years after gangs first appeared in the back country. Eventually, angry men and women died, but not before a new generation came of age believing the war was fought to establish their belief an individual was not required to submit to any government.
Notes:
Burke, Aedanus. On the constitution, letter to John Lamb, 23 June 1788, much quoted; on danger of revenge, An Address to the Freemen of South Carolina, quoted by Edgar.
Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History, 1998.
Smith, Henry A. M. "The Baronies of South Carolina," The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 7:1911.
Showing posts with label 30 South Carolina (11-15). Show all posts
Showing posts with label 30 South Carolina (11-15). Show all posts
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Sunday, March 07, 2010
South Carolina - Doubt
Historians are attracted to comparative history because it provides the more scientifically minded a way to look at their subject from an outsider’s point of view. The hope is that comparisons will reveal the universals of the human condition and show the points of uniqueness that our cultural blinders prevent us from seeing.
When one looks at the investigations in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822 into a possible slave insurrection, the ones in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 into acts of witchcraft, and the ones described by Carlo Ginzburg in Friuli.between 1575 and 1644 one sees a similar pattern: progression from doubt to belief.
When churchmen in Friuli interviewed the first man with special powers, there was such a disjunct between the questions and answers that they dropped the case because "he told other tall tales which I did not believe, and so I did not question him further." It was only when another individual, one more knowledgeable about witchcraft, became probing that the Holy Inquisition believed it had uncovered witchcraft.
Similarly in Charleston, when James Hamilton, Jr., first interviewed Peter Poyas and Mingo Harth, their treatment of the questions with disbelief led him to think the possibility of a plot only lies. It was only when a second man, John Lyde Wilson, reported similar comments from a second slave that the Charleston city council acted.
In both cases, events moved from doubt to certainty, and once that change in attitude had occurred, there were never more questions about the existence of either the witches or the slave conspiracy.
In Salem, there appears to have been little initial doubt about the truthfulness of the early accusers: they weren’t peasants or slaves, but the daughter and niece of a respected churchman, Samuel Parris, and their accusations came after physical fits observed by several witnesses. The magistrates took protestations of innocence as proof of guilt, and meted milder sentences to those who confessed. It took the refusal of Giles Corey to go to trial to shake their confidence that they were dealing with real acts of witchcraft.
Historians have taken the final judgements to be the true ones, to question the events in Salem, but not in Charleston or Friuli. And so, we wonder what were the social, economic and psychological factors that precipitated Salem, but accept the reality of a slave mutiny and so don’t ask why Charleston in 1822, why not 1812 or 1832.
The acceptance of doubt took different forms in Charleston and Salem. The second was still a Puritan society, even if it had moderated its beliefs since 1620. People still believed in predestination, that God decided before individuals were born if they were saved, and nothing individuals could do would change their state of grace. At best, they could look for evidence of proof, as the magistrates had looked for evidence of witchcraft. However, they could never absolutely know if they were saved.
Jacobus Arminius disagreed with Puritan theology and argued God had granted man free will with which to accept or reject God. It was individuals’ decision that determined if they were saved, and if they made that decision there was no doubt about their state of grace. His beliefs informed the great Methodist revival that swept the country in the 1740's, and would influence the revivals that were to come in the next decade in the south.
Roman Catholics and Episcopalian Charlestonians, of course, would never have considered the question. They were saved by virtue of following the practices of the church. Doubt was not a concept, only certainty.
And so, the event that occurred in an environment where people lived with doubt, is treated with doubt today, and the ones that occurred where people saw doubt as proof of their failure to believe are the ones that are accepted as fact today. It may be no coincidence that the historian who felt the need to use comparative history to escape the bubble of culture, Frank Tannenbaum, was investigating the institution of slavery.
Notes:
Ginzburg, Carlo. I Bendandatti. 1966, translated as The Night Battles by John and Anne Tedeschi, 1983.
Tannenbaum, Frank. Slave and Citizen, 1947.
When one looks at the investigations in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822 into a possible slave insurrection, the ones in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 into acts of witchcraft, and the ones described by Carlo Ginzburg in Friuli.between 1575 and 1644 one sees a similar pattern: progression from doubt to belief.
When churchmen in Friuli interviewed the first man with special powers, there was such a disjunct between the questions and answers that they dropped the case because "he told other tall tales which I did not believe, and so I did not question him further." It was only when another individual, one more knowledgeable about witchcraft, became probing that the Holy Inquisition believed it had uncovered witchcraft.
Similarly in Charleston, when James Hamilton, Jr., first interviewed Peter Poyas and Mingo Harth, their treatment of the questions with disbelief led him to think the possibility of a plot only lies. It was only when a second man, John Lyde Wilson, reported similar comments from a second slave that the Charleston city council acted.
In both cases, events moved from doubt to certainty, and once that change in attitude had occurred, there were never more questions about the existence of either the witches or the slave conspiracy.
In Salem, there appears to have been little initial doubt about the truthfulness of the early accusers: they weren’t peasants or slaves, but the daughter and niece of a respected churchman, Samuel Parris, and their accusations came after physical fits observed by several witnesses. The magistrates took protestations of innocence as proof of guilt, and meted milder sentences to those who confessed. It took the refusal of Giles Corey to go to trial to shake their confidence that they were dealing with real acts of witchcraft.
Historians have taken the final judgements to be the true ones, to question the events in Salem, but not in Charleston or Friuli. And so, we wonder what were the social, economic and psychological factors that precipitated Salem, but accept the reality of a slave mutiny and so don’t ask why Charleston in 1822, why not 1812 or 1832.
The acceptance of doubt took different forms in Charleston and Salem. The second was still a Puritan society, even if it had moderated its beliefs since 1620. People still believed in predestination, that God decided before individuals were born if they were saved, and nothing individuals could do would change their state of grace. At best, they could look for evidence of proof, as the magistrates had looked for evidence of witchcraft. However, they could never absolutely know if they were saved.
Jacobus Arminius disagreed with Puritan theology and argued God had granted man free will with which to accept or reject God. It was individuals’ decision that determined if they were saved, and if they made that decision there was no doubt about their state of grace. His beliefs informed the great Methodist revival that swept the country in the 1740's, and would influence the revivals that were to come in the next decade in the south.
Roman Catholics and Episcopalian Charlestonians, of course, would never have considered the question. They were saved by virtue of following the practices of the church. Doubt was not a concept, only certainty.
And so, the event that occurred in an environment where people lived with doubt, is treated with doubt today, and the ones that occurred where people saw doubt as proof of their failure to believe are the ones that are accepted as fact today. It may be no coincidence that the historian who felt the need to use comparative history to escape the bubble of culture, Frank Tannenbaum, was investigating the institution of slavery.
Notes:
Ginzburg, Carlo. I Bendandatti. 1966, translated as The Night Battles by John and Anne Tedeschi, 1983.
Tannenbaum, Frank. Slave and Citizen, 1947.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
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.
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.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
South Carolina - Interrogation
Michael Johnson began his study of Denmark Vesey when The William and Mary Quarterly asked him to review three books. As he read them he came to believe "almost all historians have failed to exercise due caution in reading the testimony of witnesses recorded by the conspiracy court" that took its evidence from "intimidated witnesses."
His concerns about the handling of information obtained by torture are contentious, not simply because of their political implications. Historians are taught to respect their sources, and not to substitute their interpretations for reality. For a scholar to claim the text cannot be trusted undermines the foundation of good craftsmanship.
Carlo Ginzburg explored the problem of identifying facts in coerced confessions when he reviewed the transcripts of interviews made by the Holy Inquisition with peasants from Friuli.between 1575 and 1644.
Ginzburg believes that in the area where "German, Italian and Slav customs met," the peasants were practicing pagan fertility rites there were beyond the experience of their interviewers. In the first interrogations, both the questions and the answers were widely variable. However, once the examiners begin to systematically ask questions that assumed they were practicing traditional witchcraft, the answers they heard eventually came to match their expectations.
More surprising, in time a new set of beliefs derived from the interrogations spread through the region. The peasants came to believe they, in fact, were witches. The Inquisition not only had heard what it expected, but had brought it into existence.
Johnson knows that many of the witnesses interviewed by the special tribunal in Charleston in 1822 were incarcerated in the workhouse where they expected to be beaten. Even so, the first slaves they interviewed seemed to be genuinely baffled by the questions. After the first men were hung on July 2, witnesses not only had reason to fear for their lives and but also had some idea, derived from rumors, what the court wanted to hear.
Johnson’s hampered from making the doing the same kind of analysis as Ginzburg, because the manuscript transcriptions of the interviews only recorded the answers, not the questions. He can only deduce what must have been asked, and suggests the five men concentrated on verifying the timing of the planned insurrection, identifying the leaders, examining the plans to use guns, and exploring their hopes to involve slaves from rural plantations.
He also found two political events concerned the judges: the Missouri compromise and events in Haiti. He noted the judges consistently confused references by slaves to discussions in the state assembly in 1821 about allowing slave owners some freedom to grant manumission with the compromise of 1820 which placed limits on slave holding in the Louisiana Territory. Wherever the manuscript recorded the word "legislature," the published report substituted "Congress."
Slaves had revolted in Saint Domingue in the 1790's and achieved some independence in 1804. The Spanish area controlled by the Dominicans rebelled in 1821, and the Haitian president, Jean-Pierre Boyer, had invaded in February of 1822. Johnson found a lengthy article on conditions on the island in the Charleston Courier from April.
He deduces from the answers the slaves gave that they were asked specific questions about any possible links between their planned insurrection and Boyer. One slave, Robert Harth, noted Peter Poyas had "some knowledge of an army from St. Domingo" and another, Monday Gell said Vesey, who was born on the island, had "brought a letter to me which was directed to President Boyer."
Johnson quotes another article by Ginzburg where he says "’texts have leaks’ that can reveal insights unintended by their creators." As Johnson makes clear, the work of the special tribunal could not establish, beyond reasonable doubt, that there were or were not slaves planning a revolt, and if those men, if they existed, were the ones it executed. It could, however, reveal a great deal about the fears that haunted slave holders in Charleston who lived among people they owned, but only partly understood.
Notes:
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.
His concerns about the handling of information obtained by torture are contentious, not simply because of their political implications. Historians are taught to respect their sources, and not to substitute their interpretations for reality. For a scholar to claim the text cannot be trusted undermines the foundation of good craftsmanship.
Carlo Ginzburg explored the problem of identifying facts in coerced confessions when he reviewed the transcripts of interviews made by the Holy Inquisition with peasants from Friuli.between 1575 and 1644.
Ginzburg believes that in the area where "German, Italian and Slav customs met," the peasants were practicing pagan fertility rites there were beyond the experience of their interviewers. In the first interrogations, both the questions and the answers were widely variable. However, once the examiners begin to systematically ask questions that assumed they were practicing traditional witchcraft, the answers they heard eventually came to match their expectations.
More surprising, in time a new set of beliefs derived from the interrogations spread through the region. The peasants came to believe they, in fact, were witches. The Inquisition not only had heard what it expected, but had brought it into existence.
Johnson knows that many of the witnesses interviewed by the special tribunal in Charleston in 1822 were incarcerated in the workhouse where they expected to be beaten. Even so, the first slaves they interviewed seemed to be genuinely baffled by the questions. After the first men were hung on July 2, witnesses not only had reason to fear for their lives and but also had some idea, derived from rumors, what the court wanted to hear.
Johnson’s hampered from making the doing the same kind of analysis as Ginzburg, because the manuscript transcriptions of the interviews only recorded the answers, not the questions. He can only deduce what must have been asked, and suggests the five men concentrated on verifying the timing of the planned insurrection, identifying the leaders, examining the plans to use guns, and exploring their hopes to involve slaves from rural plantations.
He also found two political events concerned the judges: the Missouri compromise and events in Haiti. He noted the judges consistently confused references by slaves to discussions in the state assembly in 1821 about allowing slave owners some freedom to grant manumission with the compromise of 1820 which placed limits on slave holding in the Louisiana Territory. Wherever the manuscript recorded the word "legislature," the published report substituted "Congress."
Slaves had revolted in Saint Domingue in the 1790's and achieved some independence in 1804. The Spanish area controlled by the Dominicans rebelled in 1821, and the Haitian president, Jean-Pierre Boyer, had invaded in February of 1822. Johnson found a lengthy article on conditions on the island in the Charleston Courier from April.
He deduces from the answers the slaves gave that they were asked specific questions about any possible links between their planned insurrection and Boyer. One slave, Robert Harth, noted Peter Poyas had "some knowledge of an army from St. Domingo" and another, Monday Gell said Vesey, who was born on the island, had "brought a letter to me which was directed to President Boyer."
Johnson quotes another article by Ginzburg where he says "’texts have leaks’ that can reveal insights unintended by their creators." As Johnson makes clear, the work of the special tribunal could not establish, beyond reasonable doubt, that there were or were not slaves planning a revolt, and if those men, if they existed, were the ones it executed. It could, however, reveal a great deal about the fears that haunted slave holders in Charleston who lived among people they owned, but only partly understood.
Notes:
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.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
South Carolina - V. O. Key
When V. O. Key was writing about South Carolina politics in 1949, he described it as a one party state with no continuing sense of interest group and no obvious center of power. Concepts like region or class simply didn’t survive serious scrutiny. Each election began with at least four candidates and the winner was the one with the most friends and neighbors. Only the realization that a second party would necessarily need to appeal to a new group of voters like Negroes kept the Democrats unified.
While Key attributes the personal style, importance of race baiting and legislative government to post-Reconstruction institutional features, the Denmark Vesey controversy suggests the political contours of the state are much older. In 1822 Charleston, party differences were beginning to emerge, but the nascent political identifications would not have predicted who would be allies.
Most were shades of republicans. William Johnson, Jr., was appointed to the Supreme Court by Thomas Jefferson while John Lyde Wilson was closely connected to Aaron Burr, who’d been defeated for president by Jefferson in 1800, but then supported him against Alexander Hamilton. Wilson’s wife’s great uncle, Samuel Ashe, was an anti-federalist governor of North Carolina during John Adams administration who supported Jefferson.
Only James Hamilton, Jr, was raised in a federalist environment, that of slave transporting Newport, Rhode Island. However, by the time he was intendant of Charleston he was a Republican poised to became a supporter of Andrew Jackson. The tariffs and Missouri compromise made them realize a central government was a potential threat to their control over their slaves.
As Key suggested, kinship connections, and the cultures they signify, would have been a better indicator of alliances. Johnson and Bennett were related through Bennett’s sister Sarah. Wilson and Hamilton shared ties with the Alston family through William Allston and Esther LaBrosse De Marlbeouf. Hamilton’s mother’s father’s first wife, Elizabeth, was their daughter, while Wilson’s wife, Charlotte, was their granddaughter.
More important than either party or personal networks may have been the underlying attitudes towards the importance of a centralized government that separated the federalists from the Jeffersonians, and the rule of law that separated some Carolinians from both. Indeed, these differences may be no more than a continuation of attitudes towards the emerging nation state that had separated men into three groups under the Stuarts. [See posting for 27 December 2009]
Duels and lynchings are perhaps the greatest symbolic acts that place individual definitions of justice above those of the state and the law. When Wilson was elected to the state senate in 1826, Thomas Grimké wanted him impeached for fiscal impropriety as governor. Wilson’s response was to challenge him to a duel. In 1838 he wrote The Code of Honor to establish standards for such confrontations.
When John Bowman, the uncle of James Hamilton, accused his sister-in-law’s husband of fathering an illegitimate child in the north, the senior Hamilton lost the lower part of a leg when Bowman bested him in a duel that left the younger Hamilton to devise an explanation for his father’s accident.
Walter Edgar indicates Hamilton’s reputation was greatly enhanced by stories he fought 14 duels, although Robert Tinkler believes the only time he actually took up a pistol was against a young man in New York, William Gracie, who, he believed, threatened his intended marriage to an heiress, Elizabeth Heyward.
The execution of Denmark Vesey and five other slaves was a very public lynching preceded by a cart taking the six men through King Street to vacant land north of the city. The activated militia gave a sense of legitimacy to what, in fact, was the administration of a sentence arrived at in secret by a group of men using procedures the governor, Thomas Bennett, claimed "violated the ‘rules which universally obtain among civilized nations, in the judicial investigation of crime.’"
Key comments on the recurring pattern that men from the up country parts of South Carolina who ran of populist platforms like Ben Tillman, Cole Blease and Olin Johnston gradually moderated their views to expand their support beyond their regions and substituted persecution of Negroes for their former class appeals. He believed they not only had to build political coalitions in the conventional sense, but gain support through politicians committed to decentralized institutions.
He predicted Strom Thurmond would abandon his moderation to oppose civil rights. If Key had looked to the pre-Civil War years, he would have noted John Calhoun had forsworn his neutrality on nullification; if he were alive today, he would see pressures to conform being exerted on Lindsey Graham and Mark Sanford by the General Assembly.
Such hegemony is not accidental. Slaves and freedmen who watched the execution of a carpenter who purchased his freedom with a lottery prize, a slave free to hire himself out, and a ship’s carpenter understood the rituals of supremacy that were usually diffused and veiled. The state had already taken away the rights of owners like Joseph Vesey to free their slaves, and soon would stop men like Thomas Blackwood from allowing their chattel the freedom to work for themselves. The state was ready to defy international law by imprisoning any freedmen who appeared as sailors in the port, lest they mingle with slaves like Peter Poyas on the wharves.
Whites like Thomas Bennett were reminded of the power of secret groups to punish those who rebuff their hints when the other three hanged men were the governor’s property.
Notes:
Bennett, Thomas. Quoted by Michael P. Johnson, "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators," The William and Mary Quarterly 58:915-976:2001.
Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History, 1998.
Egerton, Douglas R. He Shall Go out Free: the Lives of Denmark Vesey, 2004, for description of execution. This is one of the books criticized by Johnson.
Key, V. O., Junior. Southern Politics in State and Nation, 1949.
While Key attributes the personal style, importance of race baiting and legislative government to post-Reconstruction institutional features, the Denmark Vesey controversy suggests the political contours of the state are much older. In 1822 Charleston, party differences were beginning to emerge, but the nascent political identifications would not have predicted who would be allies.
Most were shades of republicans. William Johnson, Jr., was appointed to the Supreme Court by Thomas Jefferson while John Lyde Wilson was closely connected to Aaron Burr, who’d been defeated for president by Jefferson in 1800, but then supported him against Alexander Hamilton. Wilson’s wife’s great uncle, Samuel Ashe, was an anti-federalist governor of North Carolina during John Adams administration who supported Jefferson.
Only James Hamilton, Jr, was raised in a federalist environment, that of slave transporting Newport, Rhode Island. However, by the time he was intendant of Charleston he was a Republican poised to became a supporter of Andrew Jackson. The tariffs and Missouri compromise made them realize a central government was a potential threat to their control over their slaves.
As Key suggested, kinship connections, and the cultures they signify, would have been a better indicator of alliances. Johnson and Bennett were related through Bennett’s sister Sarah. Wilson and Hamilton shared ties with the Alston family through William Allston and Esther LaBrosse De Marlbeouf. Hamilton’s mother’s father’s first wife, Elizabeth, was their daughter, while Wilson’s wife, Charlotte, was their granddaughter.
More important than either party or personal networks may have been the underlying attitudes towards the importance of a centralized government that separated the federalists from the Jeffersonians, and the rule of law that separated some Carolinians from both. Indeed, these differences may be no more than a continuation of attitudes towards the emerging nation state that had separated men into three groups under the Stuarts. [See posting for 27 December 2009]
Duels and lynchings are perhaps the greatest symbolic acts that place individual definitions of justice above those of the state and the law. When Wilson was elected to the state senate in 1826, Thomas Grimké wanted him impeached for fiscal impropriety as governor. Wilson’s response was to challenge him to a duel. In 1838 he wrote The Code of Honor to establish standards for such confrontations.
When John Bowman, the uncle of James Hamilton, accused his sister-in-law’s husband of fathering an illegitimate child in the north, the senior Hamilton lost the lower part of a leg when Bowman bested him in a duel that left the younger Hamilton to devise an explanation for his father’s accident.
Walter Edgar indicates Hamilton’s reputation was greatly enhanced by stories he fought 14 duels, although Robert Tinkler believes the only time he actually took up a pistol was against a young man in New York, William Gracie, who, he believed, threatened his intended marriage to an heiress, Elizabeth Heyward.
The execution of Denmark Vesey and five other slaves was a very public lynching preceded by a cart taking the six men through King Street to vacant land north of the city. The activated militia gave a sense of legitimacy to what, in fact, was the administration of a sentence arrived at in secret by a group of men using procedures the governor, Thomas Bennett, claimed "violated the ‘rules which universally obtain among civilized nations, in the judicial investigation of crime.’"
Key comments on the recurring pattern that men from the up country parts of South Carolina who ran of populist platforms like Ben Tillman, Cole Blease and Olin Johnston gradually moderated their views to expand their support beyond their regions and substituted persecution of Negroes for their former class appeals. He believed they not only had to build political coalitions in the conventional sense, but gain support through politicians committed to decentralized institutions.
He predicted Strom Thurmond would abandon his moderation to oppose civil rights. If Key had looked to the pre-Civil War years, he would have noted John Calhoun had forsworn his neutrality on nullification; if he were alive today, he would see pressures to conform being exerted on Lindsey Graham and Mark Sanford by the General Assembly.
Such hegemony is not accidental. Slaves and freedmen who watched the execution of a carpenter who purchased his freedom with a lottery prize, a slave free to hire himself out, and a ship’s carpenter understood the rituals of supremacy that were usually diffused and veiled. The state had already taken away the rights of owners like Joseph Vesey to free their slaves, and soon would stop men like Thomas Blackwood from allowing their chattel the freedom to work for themselves. The state was ready to defy international law by imprisoning any freedmen who appeared as sailors in the port, lest they mingle with slaves like Peter Poyas on the wharves.
Whites like Thomas Bennett were reminded of the power of secret groups to punish those who rebuff their hints when the other three hanged men were the governor’s property.
Notes:
Bennett, Thomas. Quoted by Michael P. Johnson, "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators," The William and Mary Quarterly 58:915-976:2001.
Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History, 1998.
Egerton, Douglas R. He Shall Go out Free: the Lives of Denmark Vesey, 2004, for description of execution. This is one of the books criticized by Johnson.
Key, V. O., Junior. Southern Politics in State and Nation, 1949.
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