The Denmark Vesey Affair ─ A Documentary History

“Brilliantly conceptualized, exhaustively researched, and eloquently written, it is a gold mine for anyone interested in America’s ongoing dilemma with slavery and race.”—John Stauffer, author of Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln

“This stunning and magisterial documentary history accumulates and analyzes much evidence never before considered adequately, if at all. The work of fifteen years by assiduous senior historians of slave rebellions, it not only considers the pre-history of the Affair but also the long aftermath.”—David Moltke-Hansen, editor of William Gilmore Simms's Unfinished Civil War: Consequences for a Southern Man of Letters

“Will surely become the definitive source on the Vesey Conspiracy. Such an impressive assemblage and explication of records shows not only how Vesey’s actions contributed to America’s Civil War, but also why he continues to influence us, particularly in the South.”—Bernard E. Powers Jr., author of Black Charlestonians: A Social History 1822-1885

“Places the Denmark Vesey conspiracy in a broad context. This volume should put to rest the argument by some historians that the conspiracy was little more than ‘loose talk’ among those held in bondage.”—Loren Schweninger, author of Families in Crisis in the Old South: Divorce, Slavery, and the Law

In 1822, thirty-four slaves and their leader, a free black man named Denmark Vesey, were tried and executed for their alleged plot to murder the white citizens of Charleston, South Carolina. Presenting a vast collection of contemporary documents that support or contradict the “official” story, the editors of this volume annotate the texts and interpret the evidence. This is the definitive account of a landmark event that spurred the South to secession and holds symbolic meaning today—as evidenced by the 2015 shooting that took place in Emanuel AME Church, a church Vesey had attended. This volume argues that the Vesey plot was one of the most sophisticated acts of collective slave resistance in the history of the United States.


A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller

Douglas R. Egerton, professor of history at Le Moyne College, is the author of Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America. Robert L. Paquette, executive director of the Alexander Hamilton Institute in Clinton, New York, is coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas.