Revolt(ing) History – What with the plagiarism debacles of Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose, the autobiographical in class lying of Joseph Ellis, and the ongoing debate over whether Michael Bellesiles is guilty of fraud or incompetence (not to mention the earlier mad if temporary rush to originalism as liberal historians raced to the defense of Bill Clinton in his impeachment troubles), the history profession has not looked very good lately. It may be about to look worse. Much worse.
I refer to the remarkable work of Michael P. Johnson, Professor of History at Johns Hopkins, who is well on his way to proving that the famous Denmark Vesey slave conspiracy in Charleston in 1822 never happened. The above link is to Johnson’s long article, “Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators,” William and Mary Quarterly 58 (Oct. 2001), 915-976, a substantial precursor to his impending book, Conjuring Conspiracies. An equally substantial forum with eight comments on Johnson’s dramatic charges, with a reply by Johnson, appeared in the WMQ‘s issue of January 2002. (All these comments are available through the preceding link. My page references are to the printed text.) This was the eagerly awaited issue that also contained the assessments of Bellesiles’ Arming America, and the fireworks from that controversy have tended to overshadow and obscure the significance — which is potentially far greater for the profession of history as a whole — of Johnson’s work on the way historians have treated slave revolts.
With only one or two exceptions, until now historians have accepted as a matter of faith that Denmark Vesey masterminded what would have been a major slave revolt had he and his co-conspirators not been captured and executed. As Johnson writes in his opening paragraph,
IN the pantheon of rebels against slavery in the United States, Denmark Vesey stands exalted. Historians celebrate this free black carpenter who organized slaves to emancipate themselves in 1822 by setting fire to the city of Charleston, South Carolina, slaying all whites, and sailing off to the black republic of Haiti. A free man who identified with slaves, a black man who claimed the human rights monopolized by whites, an urban artisan who prepared to lead an army of rural field hands, a man of African descent who built a coalition of native Africans and country-born creoles, a religious man who melded the Christianity of Europe with the spiritual consciousness of Africa, a diasporic man inspired by the black Atlantic’s legacy of rebellion and sovereignty, a radical man who wielded the ideals of the Age of Revolution against white oppression and hypocrisy, a militant man who scorned compromise and relished redemptive killing, a brave man unintimidated by the long odds against liberation, a loyal man who refused to name his co-conspirators when informants betrayed his scheme at the last minute, a stoic man who died on the gallows without giving his executioners the satisfaction of remorse or confession–Denmark Vesey was a bold insurrectionist determined to free his people or die trying. (p. 915)
Alas, Johnson demonstrates, it never happened. The concluding paragraph of his article:
Unanswered questions about Vesey and his co-conspirators abound. But this much is clear: Vesey and the other condemned black men were victims of an insurrection conspiracy conjured into being in 1822 by the court, its cooperative black witnesses, and its numerous white supporters and kept alive ever since by historians eager to accept the court’s judgments while rejecting its morality. Surely it is time to pay attention to the “not guilty” pleas of almost all the men who went to the gallows, to their near silence in the court records, to their refusal to name names in order to save themselves. These men were heroes not because they were about to launch an insurrection but because they risked and accepted death rather than collaborate with the conspiratorial court and its cooperative witnesses. Surely it is time to read the court’s Official Report and the witnesses’ testimony with the skepticism they richly deserve and to respect the integrity of a past that sometimes confounds the reassuring expectations generated by our present-day convictions about the evil of slavery and the legitimacy of blacks’ claims to freedom and justice. Surely it is time to bring the court’s conspiracy against Denmark Vesey and other black Charlestonians to an end. (p. 971)
Over the course of the pages between these paragraphs Johnson does much more than demolish the Denmark Vesey myth. He provides a model analysis of the conspiracy trial (should be required reading for anyone interested in conspiracies, alleged or real), demonstrating how virtually all other historians have ignored or distorted the archival record. In fact, his major accomplishment is probably not his retroactive acquittal of Vesey but his stinging indictment of how so much history is written today.
In short, there was a conspiracy, but it was not Vesey’s. It was the Charleston court’s, and it has been aided and abetted by historians over the years. From the first paragraph of Johnson’s reply to his critics:
The members of the Charleston Court of Magistrates and Freeholders who executed Vesey and thirty-four other black men claimed that the conspiracy involved stealthy recruitment of rebels, long lists of committed insurrectionists, stockpiles of deadly weapons, cunning military organization, meticulous tactical planning, and a collective determination to burn the city, slay the whites, and sail away to the free shores of Haiti. Nearly all historians of the subject have endorsed the court’s conclusions. Both the court and latter-day historians based these claims on uncritical readings of the testimony of intimidated and coerced witnesses who told the court what it wanted to hear: that an insurrectionary Armageddon had been narrowly averted by the vigilance of officials who preempted the uprising with a formidable mobilization of militia. In collaboration with cooperative black witnesses, the court crafted a conspiracy against Vesey and the other convicted men, in my view. Historians have abetted the court’s conspiracy by incautious readings of the witnesses’ testimony and the court’s Official Report. The result has been that the court’s reading of the Vesey conspiracy has prevailed since 1822. That reading, I tried to show, falsified court procedures and testimony, turned a deaf ear to what witnesses really said (at least what was recorded in the manuscript court records), and certainly did not reflect the views of the alleged conspirators–the men convicted, executed, and exiled–almost all of whom either entered not guilty pleas or, like Vesey, said nothing whatever.
Philip Morgan, former editor of the WMQ and one of the commentators in the January 2002 issue, is right on point when he writes that
[i]n fact, the truly haunting aspect of Michael P. Johnson’s extraordinary tour de force on the Denmark Vesey slave conspiracy is the complicity of historians in accepting the corrupt verdict of the kangaroo court. (pp. 159-160)
Indeed, it is beyond irony to see contemporary historians — liberals and radicals all — defending the accuracy and even the integrity of the racist, elitist Charleston court that railroaded Vesey and his fellows to the gallows. Politics is said to make strange bedfellows, but History would appear to make stranger ones: modern liberal historians accepting the judgment of a racist pro-slavery court, rather than the brave testimony of slaves themselves who protested their innocence, in order to confirm their view that rebellion and resistance simply had to be about to erupt at any time under slavery. Hard as it is to believe, modern historians even defend that court’s reliance on informers who were beaten until they said what was required of them, crediting that testimony more than the denials — or in Vesey’s own case, silence — of those who refused to confess despite the coercion. It’s as though western liberals and anti-communists had pointed to Stalin’s show trials not as evidence of his cruelty and corruption but as proof of widespread resistance to communism.
You think Johnson or I must exaggerate? Consider just two examples from the commentators:
Torture has a foundational association with slavery in Western culture as a requisite means of disgorging truth from slaves other subaltern people who lacked, as Aristotle put it, “the deliberative faculty.” (p. 187)
[Johnson] finds it “chilling” … to believe that testimony obtained under torture “is not by definition spurious” (p. 919). The only chilling fact here is that for centuries Western courts relied on physical torment to force the accused provide evidence against themselves and others. Coerced deposition may be false, but they may also be true. If historians had to rely only on statements willingly made to officials in open, democratic courts that lacked any racial or class bias — as if such a venue has ever existed in any society — the available scholarship on the law and popular resistance to it would be thin indeed. (p. 146)
Johnson notes quite correctly that his critics “argue that the court’s use of beatings, intimidation, and the threat of death to elicit testimony provides little reason to doubt the veracity of the witnesses.” They point to the fact that those who plead not guilty were subject to the same coercion but nevertheless conclude that “not guilty pleas are no more nor less credible than the testimony of witnesses who named names and saved their own necks.” This line of argument, Johnson notes with admirable restraint,
“ignores a common rule of thumb employed by judges, lawyers, and juries then now: testimony that is manifestly not in a witness’s interest is more likely to be true than testimony that is clearly in a witness’s interest. (p. 194)
As Winthrop Jordan, the influential historian of racism, observed in his comment,
Well, there goes another firm fact of life. We have here both an object lesson and a dramatic exposure of an outrageous professional scandal. (p. 175)
This controversy does bear some unfortunate similarities to the Bellesiles affair, since the initial occasion for Johnson’s engagement here was an assignment to review some books on Vesey, including an edited version of the trial transcript, that proved, on his close examination, to be utterly untrustworthy. Although Johnson charges “unrelenting carelessness” rather than purposeful distortion, this part of the controversy will sound familiar to those familiar with the battles over Bellesiles. As Winthrop Jordan points out:
Ordinarily, scholars expect to and are able to rely implicitly on the accuracy of quoted material. Especially is this the case with the printing of lengthy manuscripts. Professional exchange among historians would be rendered impossible if they had always to check whether some historian has quoted, say, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson correctly, since the internal logic of such an inquiry would require ascertaining Julian Boyd [the editor] got the matter right in the first place. We simply cannot run around constantly checking such materials. (p. 175)
Finally, however, the scandal Johnson has unearthed is not so much the “unrelenting carelessness” of so many historians re the documentary evidence that he discovered. It is that, in practice if not in theory, many historians have succumbed to the post-modernist claptrap of Fishian “metahistorian” Hayden White, cited by Johnson, who argues “that historians who go to the archives engage in meaningless ritual since what they find there only fits their preconceptions and what they write is, in any case personal invention.” (p. 200).
By diligent archival research and clear-headed analysis, Johnson has provided a compelling “object lesson” in the value of traditional, old fashioned, pre-post modern historical research. In doing so, however, he has revealed the pervasiveness and power of certain ideological preconceptions that are much more troubling for the history profession as a whole than its failure to properly police Bellesiles’ footnotes.
Update – And speaking of incompetent and untrustworthy transcribing, unreliable sources, etc., Denmark Veysey that I wrote originally is actually, i.e., accurately, spelled Denmark Vesey. I knew that, especially since I had the WMQ right in front of me. Alas, my fingers were doing the typing, not my head, and they know nothing. Seems that “unrelenting carelessness” is all over the place. Thanks to the ever-vigilant Eugene Volokh for catching this. (Now, if he’d only agree to proof my posts before publication….) I have corrected the spelling in the text.
