People, Locations, Episodes

Denmark Vesey, Slave Revolutionary born

Denmark Vesey's statue, Hampton Park

This date celebrates the life of Denmark Vesey in 1767. He was a Black abolitionist who planned one of the most extensive slave revolts in U.S. history in Charleston, S.C. 1822.

Born Telemaque in St. Thomas, the Danish West Indies, he was sold in 1781 to a Bermuda slave captain named Joseph Vesey.  Young Denmark, who was self-educated, assumed his master's surname, accompanied him on numerous voyages, and 1783 settled with his owner in Charleston.

In 1799, Vesey was allowed to purchase his freedom with $600 he had won in a street lottery. He was already familiar with the Haitian Slave Revolt of the 1790s, and while working as a carpenter, he read anti-slavery literature. Dissatisfied with his second-class status as a freedman and determined to help relieve the far more oppressive conditions of others he knew, Vesey planned and organized an uprising of city and plantation Blacks.

The plan reportedly called for the rebels to attack guardhouses and arsenals, seize their arms, kill all whites, burn and destroy the city, and free the slaves.  As many as 9,000 Blacks may have been involved, though some scholars dispute this.  Warned by a house servant, white authorities made massive military preparations on the eve of the scheduled outbreak, which forestalled the rebellion. During the ensuing two months, some 130 Blacks were arrested.

In the following trials, 67 were convicted of trying to raise an insurrection; of these, 35, including Vesey, were hanged on July 2, 1822, in Charleston, and 32 were condemned to exile.  In addition, four white men were fined and imprisoned for encouraging the plot.