Book dossier

Denmark Vesey

by Robertson, David, David M. Robertson

"On July 2, 1822, Denmark Vesey and five of his coconspirators were hanged in a desolate marsh outside Charleston, South Carolina. They had been betrayed by black informers who revealed Vesey's attempt to launch the largest slave rebellion in the history of the United States - an uprising astonishing in its level of organization and support. Nine thousand slaves, armed with stolen munitions and manufactured weapons, were to converge on Charleston, raze the city, seize the government arsenal, and murder the entire white population, sparing only the ship captains who would carry Vesey and his followers to Haiti or Africa."--BOOK JACKET. "Significant as the rebellion and Vesey himself were in American history, they have been all but forgotten. In this meticulously researched biography, David Robertson brings to life the extraordinary man who, though he had lived and prospered for more than twenty years as a freed black, was willing to risk everything to liberate his people."--BOOK JACKET. "Robertson details the aftermath of the failed insurrection, including Vesey's trial and execution, and analyzes its social and political consequences. In the slaveholding South, it intensified whites' fear of blacks and led to increased levels of cruelty and repression. Vesey's revolt was invoked by Frederick Douglass, exhorting black troops during the Civil War; it prefigured Marcus Garvey's "back to Africa" movement; and it established black churches as centers of political activity - a role they would play more than a century later in the nonviolent civil rights movement."--BOOK JACKET.