Background
Denmark Vesey was born in in 1767 in West Africa.
Denmark Vesey was born in in 1767 in West Africa.
Joseph Vesey, a Carolina-based slaver, purchased the boy in 1781 as part of a cargo of 390 bondpeople.
But when the ship reached Cap François, the captain “had no use for the boy” and turned him over to his colonial agents.
Either traumatized by his new life in Saint-Domingue or feigning illness, the child began to display “epileptic fits. ”
The fits promptly ceased, and Vesey decided to keep him as a servant. Charleston authorities later described the child as a person of “superior power of mind & the more dangerous for it. ”
Two of his sons were named Polydore and Robert; a third, Sandy, would be the only child to be implicated in his 1822 plot.
She was the only woman to carry his surname.
The prize was $1, 500, a princely sum that slaves who hired their time would take ten years to acquire.
Joseph Vesey agreed to sell Denmark his freedom for $600; the contract was signed on December 31, 1799.
Vesey threw his enormous energies into his business, and according to one former slave, Denmark labored “every day at de trade of carpenter” and “soon became much [re]spected” and “esteem[ed] by de white folks. ”
But because of competition from white carpenters, free mulattoes (whose fathers provided business contacts), and enslaved craftsmen (who lived with their masters and paid no rent), Vesey barely maintained a modest income.
The “African Church was the people, ” Gell replied.
He and Pritchard had considered insurrection in 1818, “and now they had begun again to try it. ”
At the age of fifty-one, Vesey briefly thought about emigrating to the English colony of Sierra Leone.
President Jean-Pierre Boyer had recently encouraged black Americans to bring their skills and capital to his beleaguered republic.
“As soon as they could get the money from the Banks, and the goods from the stores, ” Rolla insisted, “they should hoist sail” for Saint-Domingue and live as free men. Vesey planned the escape for nearly four years.
His chief lieutenants included Poyas, Gell, Rolla Bennett, and “Gullah” Jack Pritchard.
Although there are no reliable figures for the number of recruits, Charleston alone was home to 12, 652 slaves.
Pritchard, probably with some exaggeration, boasted that he had 6, 600 recruits on the plantations across the Cooper and Ashley rivers.
The plan called for Vesey’s followers to rise at midnight on Sunday, July 14—Bastille Day—slay their masters, and sail for Haiti and freedom.
The plot unraveled in June 1822 when two slaves revealed the plan to their owners.
Mayor James Hamilton called up the city militia and convened a special court to try the captured insurgents.
Vesey was captured at Beck’s home on June 21 and hanged on July 2, together with Rolla, Poyas, and three other rebels.
In all, thirty-five slaves were executed.
Forty-two others, including Sandy Vesey, were sold outside the United States; some, if not all, became slaves in Spanish Cuba.
Robert Vesey lived to rebuild the African Church in the fall of 1865.
Denmark Vesey began working as an independent carpenter and built up his own business. By this time he had married Beck, an enslaved woman. Their children were born into slavery under the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, by which children of a slave mother took her status. Vesey worked to gain freedom for his family; he tried to buy his wife but her master would not sell her. This meant their future children would also be born into slavery.