White Hysteria?
Recent scholarship in 2001 by historian Michael Johnson gave a new twist to historian Richard Wade's 1964 theory that the Vesey Conspiracy was nothing more than "angry talk." According to Johnson, Mayor James Hamilton Jr. concocted a false conspiracy to use as a "political wedge issue" against Governor Thomas Bennett Jr., who owned four of the accused slaves. Somewhat in reaction to the Missouri Compromise, which restricted slavery in the western territories, Mayor Hamilton came to support a militant approach to protecting slavery. He called for draconian measures, while the governor clung to a paternalistic view. In 1822, white Carolinians uniformly believed in the existence of a conspiracy. Governor Bennett, while believing that the plot was not as widespread as Hamilton thought, nonetheless called Vesey's plan "a ferocious, diabolical design."
Johnson also asserted that aside from questionable court records, no other material evidence existed of Vesey's plans to lead the revolt. Specialists, however, observe that a number of blacks familiar with Vesey or the Reverend Morris Brown, especially free black carpenter Thomas Brown, spoke or wrote about the plot in later years.
In 2004, historian Robert Tinkler, a biographer of Mayor Hamilton, reported that he uncovered no documentation to support Johnson's theory. James Hamilton, he concluded, "believed there was indeed a Vesey plot."
In the April 2011 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly, historian James O'Neil Spady showed that under Johnson's own criteria, the statements of some of the earliest witnesses, George Wilson and Joe LaRoache, ought to be considered credible. Neither man was coerced nor imprisoned. Both volunteered their testimony, and LaRoache even risked statements that the court could have construed as self-incriminating. Spady concluded that a real, but perhaps smaller, conspiracy had been about to launch when the plans were revealed.
Read more about this topic: Denmark Vesey
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