In an award-winning review article published in the William and Mary Quarterly in October 2001, “Denmark Vesey and His Co-conspirators,” historian Michael Johnson revived historian Richard Wade's controversial claim, that the celebrated Denmark Vesey conspiracy of 1822 was in fact a conspiracy scare, a figment of the white imagination. The terrible bloodshed unleashed against enslaved Carolinians that summer stemmed from the fear among white authorities that the people they had enslaved since the 1670s were plotting to take vengeance. Johnson argued that, contrary to complicated and unclear archival evidence, most historians of this terrible episode had settled on “the heroic interpretation of Vesey,” who, historians claimed, had organized a widespread rebellion to overthrow an oppressive slave society (915). The “conspirators” were not only enslaved rebels; they were also historians who had skirted the strictures of their craft to develop a historical narrative of Black resistance that was politically satisfying.
Jason...
