There is thought here in Charleston SC and approved by the Mayor, Joe Riley, that a statue to Denmark Vesey should be erected.
Of course slavery was an atrocity, but Vesey was a freed slave who wanted to free all slaves by killing all the white folks. Is that noble? Do you think such a statue should be erected?
I’m not sure about the statue, but here’s a bit of background on Denmark Vesey and his planned revolt to get the dabate started.
VESEY, Denmark - 1767?-1822. The self-educated former slave Denmark Vesey is credited with plotting the largest slave revolt in American history. The revolt never took place because the conspirators were caught and executed.
Vesey’s early life is mostly unaccounted for. He was probably born on the island of St. Thomas in the Danish West Indies (now United States Virgin Islands) in about 1767. His real name is unknown. He was sold as a slave in 1781 to the slave trader Joseph Vesey. He settled in Charleston, S.C., with the trader in 1783. In the late 1790s they were in Haiti helping French colonials flee the slave uprising. Back in the United States in 1800, Vesey won 1,500 dollars in a lottery and used 600 dollars of it to buy his freedom. He worked as a carpenter in Charleston and achieved local notoriety for his preaching against slavery–mostly to black audiences. Charleston at the time had a sizeable free black population.
Although the specifics of the conspiracy are uncertain, it is believed that Vesey plotted with city and plantation slaves to stage an uprising. They would attack arsenals to get weapons, kill all whites they encountered, and destroy the city. Word of the plot reached city authorities, and ten slaves were arrested. Their testimony led to the arrest of Vesey. He confessed nothing, saying that he had nothing to gain by freeing slaves. He was convicted and, with five other blacks, was hanged on July 2, 1822. Altogether some 130 blacks were arrested and 67 convicted. Thirty-five were executed and 32 sent into exile. Four white men were also fined and imprisoned for assisting in the plot.
Such a noble man. cough Someone we all want our kids to emulate. snort “See kids, if you hate the way school is going, just get some guns and kill everyone!” cough
I don’t think it’s a good idea. This can also be applied to honoring Klansmen for being outstanding members of the community, if you wish.
Hell, if blacks outnumbered whites 3 or 4 to 1, why didn’t they just all get up and walk out? Sure, the few white slaveowners there were would have fussed, but who is going to argue with 2000 or 3000 slaves versus maybe 100 armed men, at the extreme?
I don’t think that the slaves were able to “just walk out,” even if they outnumbered the whites. They had no weapons, and you don’t think the slaveholders would allow that, do you? They’d shoot the first one that tried to walk out, which they often did to those trying to escape. The slaves never attacked the arsenals to get any weapons.
Kill all the whites huh? Not exactly much of a thinker is he? How did this fellow expect to win a contest like that? Even if he had succeeded in gaining followers enough to take over and destroy a city, how long would it be before the troops came marching in and he and the people he led were slaughtered? Moral questions aside, the man was evidently a bungler. Why emulate that?
I don’t think we know enough to establish that the plan was to kill all the whites. If the plotters wanted to kill all the whites would it, or would it not, have included the white men who assisted in the plot?
As UncleBeer noted in his citation, he was going to kill all the whites they encountered, meaning any white person who wauld try to stop them.
According to this, the specifics are uncertain and Vesey denied being involved. Could he have been a victim of a witch hunt? After all, people do have a tendancy to over react to rumors.
Perhaps this is the what actually cost his life. If he was preaching against slavery, I’m sure some rich plantation owners could easily have created the rumor of a plot as an excuse to rid themselves of Vesey.
Jack
Granted, if you look at it from the other angle (he was set up) and given the fact that his captors wern’t exactly good men themselves, it could look like he was set up.
Still, however… The big fear in those days was that one of those uprisings would be successful, like I mentioned. John Brown certainly tried, and everyone was paranoid after that. It wouldn’t have been a place to speak out against the white overlords or whatnot.
I still don’t think he deserves a statue, tho.
John Brown’s attempt came much later.
Thanks to all who responded. Here are my thoughts on this. Vesey was a free man with $900 in 1800. If I were in his position, I would’ve taken the first train north and never look back. But he stayed in Charleston and attempted to free his less fortunate brothers, and paid with it for his life.
We, as white folk, are aghast that anyone would attempt to kll us en masse. But Vesey wasn’t planning genocide. He was planning to kill any and all who stood in their way, and few women and children would have stood in their way. Comparison has been made to our Revolution and that we were only killing soldiers. However, Vesey was trying for a lot more than political independence, but actual physical freedom, and the only persons who could stop them were civilians.
John Brown, altho a white person, was much the same. These are people who did have nothing personally to gain, but gave the ultimate price for their altruistic goals.
I meant, of course, “and that we were killing only soldiers,” not “and that we were only killing soldiers.”
So did this paragon of virtue and understanding have any other traits? I mean, is there something else in his life that merits him being immortalized in bronze? I don’t see anything that merits it so far.
And dang I’m forgetting my history, on the John Brown thing.
It can be said that John Brown had … some issues to deal with personally. He was not of sound mind from most accounts. His attempt to start a slave rebellion by taking over Harper’s Ferry was dubious at best.
However, its failure and the subsequent execution of John Brown gave Northern abolition proponents a convenient martyr, who also happened to be white.
I imagine that there must be some place that has a statue of John Brown, although he and his supporters went out and hacked to death five pro-slavery men in Kansas back in 1856.
It shows one how repugnant this ‘peculiar institution’ was: even failed attempts of freedom from slavery will get one immortalized, and properly so. If someone were to have gained fame by dismembering or otherwise torturing every Nazi he met, he would be regarded as a hero, too, no?
All I can say is the ‘official’ version of events seems a little suspicious. But then, it always does, for me.
I’ve noticed that just about everyone has ignored my post.
I guess the truth sucks.
NiceGuyJack,
In spite of what the citation states, history has pretty much established that Vesey was guilty as charged. His defense was that he had nothing to gain so he didn’t do it. That doesn’t mean he didn’t have a motive: freedom for all slaves. I haven’t researched this, so I can’t conclude positively that he was guilty as charged, but that was what I had always read. The circumstances are overwhelming. He saw what happened in Haiti, and that gave him the idea. He preached abolition and stayed in Charleston. People fingered him as the instigator.
But maybe he was innocent. No matter. Who could object to a statue then, albeit for a nobody.
Actually, the idea that Brown was nuts only started years after the Civil War. Loewen addresses this in his Lies My Teacher Told Me and this is one of the areas where Loewen appears to be on target. I have not found any reference to mental instability in John Brown from contemporary records. I’m sure that he knew he would fail, personally, but he hoped to set the stage for a later successful attempt. If you want to consider that much of the impetus for secession came from people who feared that the North harbored quite a few more John Browns, he may have been both successful and correct.
tomndebb wrote:
Actually, John Brown was quite certain that he would succeed. His plan (get this) was to arm the slaves (at least initially) with pikes! Pikes for crying out loud! (OK if you’re planning to fight King Arthur. Not so good against guns.) Brown had a whole bunch of pikes specially made for the occasion.
Brown assumed that slaves would flock to him, and he then planned to lead a slave army which would strike from hiding in the Appalachian Mountains, ultimately freeing slaves throughout the South.
Sorry, Tom, but the guy was certifiable. He wasn’t adjudged so at the time only because the abolitionist machine of New England seized upon him as a martyr, and did everything in its collective power to promote that image of him.
The abolitionist press ignored, for example, his earlier Manson-esque nighttime sneak attack and slaughter of pro-slavery settlers (including children, IIRC) along Potawatamie Creek in the Kansas territory. In fact, Charles Manson is probably a pretty good modern analog for Brown. Manson, too, hoped to incite a race war, and slaughtered folks in an attempt to further that end. Like Manson, the strong-willed Brown gathered a group of sycophantic followers to carry out his bizarre plans.
I read several books on Brown as part of a history project in college. You might try reading To Purge This Land With Blood: A Biography of John Brown by Warren Oates and Stephen B. Oates. It should give you a pretty accurate picture of the man, from which to draw your own conclusions about his sanity.
The Nat Turner Rebellion (which took place in the 1830’s, IIRC) is another early example of slave revolt in the U.S. Stephen Oates has also written about this revolt, in The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion, though I have not read that one yet.
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I can’t agree about the pikes. Muzzle-loading rifles have an extremely low rate of fire and aren’t easy for someone with no training to learn to use. Muskets have a higher rate of fire, but still require training to use, and have a very short effective range.
In the 1850s, guns were used quite effectively by trained, disciplined, well-equipped armies. Rifles were certainly used by irregular militias many decades earlier, but these were free men with plenty of vital (if not always military) experience. These weapons backed up until World War I by swords (and, among cavalry, beyond). Pikes were issued during the American Revolution; I don’t know if they were issued by either side during the Civil War, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Almost to the turn of the Century, militaries were designing rifles to mount bayonets on, rather than the other way around. What is a single-shot rifle, with a bayonet fixed, after it has fired a shot? Sounds a lot like a pike to me.
Granted, the cutting edge of technology a few years after these events would make pikes and single-shot bayoneted rifles mostly obsolete. But the cutting edge of technology was hardly what Brown had access to. Union armies kept buying muzzle-loading “rifle muskets” long after the invention of the lever-action repeating rifles (Spencer and Henry). (Pikes were certainly obsolete by 1940, when they ordered for the British Home Guard; I don’t think they were ever issued.) The point is, pikes were a fairly logical choice for a low-budget, untrained force.