Denmark Vesey: The Buried History of America's Largest Slave Rebellion and the Man Who Led It by David Robertson
Denmark Vesey: The Buried History of America's Largest Slave Rebellion and the Man Who Led It by David Robertson
On July 2, 1822, Denmark Vesey and five of his co-conspirators were hanged in a desolate marsh outside Charleston, South Carolina. They had been betrayed by black informers who revealed Vesey's attempt to launch the largest slave rebellion in the history of the United States -- an uprising astonishing in its level of organization and support. Nine thousand slaves, armed with stolen munitions and manufactured weapons, were to converge on Charleston, raze the city, seize the government arsenal, and murder the entire white population, sparing only the ship captains who would carry Vesey and his followers to Haiti or Africa.
Significant as the rebellion and Vesey himself were in American history, they have been all but forgotten. In this meticulously researched and gracefully written biography, David Robertson brings to life the extraordinary man who, though he had lived and prospered for more than twenty years as a freed black, was willing to risk everything to liberate his people. We discover how the charismatic Vesey, by preaching a doctrine of negritude combined with an apocalyptic religious vision and -- when necessary -- intimidation, was able to recruit large numbers of blacks to a messianic crusade for freedom. And we see how, in the face of death, he refused to recant or to throw himself on the mercy of his captors.
Robertson details the aftermath of the failed insurrection, including Vesey's trial and execution, and analyzes its social and political consequences. In the slaveholding South, it intensified whites' fear of blacks and led to increased levels of cruelty and repression. Vesey's revolt was invoked by Frederick Douglass, exhorting black troops during the Civil War; it prefigured Marcus Garvey's "back to Africa" movement; and it established black churches as centers of political activity -- a role they would play more than a century later in the nonviolent civil rights movement
Finally, Robertson examines the disturbing and timely questions that Denmark Vesey's legacy continues to raise today, in a racially and ethnically pluralistic nation still struggling to define itself.
Alfred A. Knopf, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 1999.
THIS IS A USED BOOK IN "AS NEW" CONDITION. THE DUST WRAPPER IS ALSO IN "AS NEW" CONDITION. THERE IS, HOWEVER, "FOXING" TO THE TOP PAGE EDGES.