Religion played a central role in debates over slavery in 19th-century America. Yet few people know how a formerly enslaved man named Denmark Vesey reimagined the role that the Bible played in these debates.
In 1822, Vesey organized an armed revolt to free enslaved people in Charleston. Vesey and his collaborators intended to set fires around Charleston, attack the city’s White residents and escape to Haiti. But his plan failed to launch because two men leaked the plot to their enslavers. Hasty arrests and trials followed. On July 2, Vesey and five enslaved men accused of planning the revolt with him were hanged. By the end of the summer, 29 more enslaved men were executed for their alleged involvement in the plot. This year marks the 200th anniversary of their deaths.
A monument commemorating Vesey as an anti-slavery hero now stands in Charleston’s Hampton Park. Ironically, the park is named for Wade Hampton, a Confederate general who was later elected governor of South Carolina. The monument includes a statue of Vesey. He holds a hat and bag of carpentry tools in one hand, while clutching a Bible to his side with the other. The inclusion of a Bible in Vesey’s monument subtly acknowledges an important, if often overlooked, element of Vesey’s story.
Vesey was born in West Africa or the Caribbean sometime around 1767. He was enslaved in his early teens by Joseph Vesey, a ship captain who trafficked enslaved people. Eventually, Joseph Vesey settled in Charleston. When Denmark won $1,500 dollars in a local lottery, he used his winnings to buy his freedom and set up a carpentry business in 1800.
Sometime in the late 1810s or early 1820s, Vesey became involved in what was then known as the African Church, a forerunner of today’s Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first AME congregation in the South. Since Vesey could read, write and spoke multiple languages, he led weekday evening classes for his church. At his trial, several witnesses testified that Vesey appealed to numerous biblical texts to promote revolting against enslavers.
At the time, Charleston’s proslavery clergy assumed the Bible endorsed slavery. In sermons and publications directed to local congregations and politicians, they often quoted lines from the King James version like “Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters” (Ephesians 6:5) or “Servants, obey in all things your masters” (Colossians 3:22) as biblical support for slavery. When sentencing Vesey and his co-conspirators to death in 1822, Lionel Henry Kennedy, the magistrate at their trials, even quoted these texts, as well as a line from 1 Peter 2:18: “Servants, be subject to your masters,” to the condemned men.