THE NEWBERRY SEMINAR IN EARLY AMERICAN HISTORY
Edward Pearson
Franklin and Marshall College
Decisions Against Charleston:
The Denmark Vesey Conspiracy of 1822
"Led by the free black carpenter Denmark Vesey, a small number
of enslaved artisans and laborers conspired to destroy the port
city of Charleston, South Carolina in the early summer of 1822. A
few days before the rising, however, local authorities learned
about these plans, subsequently imprisoning over one hundred
slaves. In the trials that followed, the court sentenced
thirty-five slaves to death, exiled another forty-two, and
dismissed the remainder. The rich documentary record generated by
the trial illuminates the material and ideological worlds that
urban slaves made in early antebellum Charleston. Drawing on the
language of revolutionary emancipationism that circulated around
the Atlantic world during the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, African religious practices, as well as
radical readings of the Old Testament, Vesey and his associates
fashioned an ideology of subversion and salvation that nearly
resulted in the destruction of the intellectual and cultural
center of the slaveholding South."
at The Newberry Library
Thursday, April 25, 1996
3:30-5:30 p.m.
*****
If you plan to attend, please call Adam Stewart at (312) 255-3524
or e-mail stewarta@newberry.org for a copy of the paper. Please
do not request a paper if you do not plan on attending. The
seminar format assumes that all participants have read the essay,
and all those who request a paper will attend the seminar.
CALL FOR PAPERS: Scholars interested in presenting a paper in
the 1996-97 Seminar should contact either Alfred Young, Senior
Research Fellow, The Newberry Library at 215 Forest Avenue, Oak
Park, IL 60302 or Stephen Foster, Department of History,
Northern Illinois University, Dekalb, IL 60015. Please submit a
one- page proposal, a brief c.v., and a statement on the
relationship of the paper to other work and plans for
publication.