← Civics & Coffee: A History Podcast
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to Civics and Coffee, a history podcast. The show all about United States history delivered to you in the time it takes to enjoy your morning cup of coffee. I'm your host, Alicia, a historian trained in United States history with a passion for telling both the known and unknown parts of America's past. So grab your coffee and get ready for some bite sized history. Welcome back everyone. Every once in a while a book hits you for its attention to detail and its ability to immerse you in the past. Dr. O' Neill Spady's take Freedom is one such narrative. Not only is it a compelling story about black agency and community, but it is clear that Dr. Spady went into great lengths to try to recreate a story we thought we knew. I hope you all enjoy the conversation. Hello everyone. Joining me today is Dr. James O' Neill Spady. He is an associate professor of American history in the humanities and the Social sciences at SOCA University of America. His work locates the global themes of race, indigeneity and colonization at the center of U.S. histories. He has written several books, including Take Freedom, which will be the focus of our conversation today. Welcome, Dr. Spady.
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B
Thank you. Thank you for that introduction. Thanks for having me.
- [01:28]
A
Thank you so much for being here. Let's dive into this incredible book. You are breaking some new ground with this research. So I guess I want to start with how did you come to this topic and how did you discover these documents?
- [01:44]
B
Yeah, the actual, the earliest genesis of this project is when I was working on my dissertation and I was writing it and I was early in the process and a controversy erupted about the archive at the center of the 1822 Denmark Vesey Uprising story. And a scholar named Michael Johnson at Johns Hopkins was contending that there wasn't any there there really other than a white conspiracy to frame people and essentially lynchings. And it was a. A big event in the history of telling this story. And it changed the way I was framing my dissertation a little bit because. Because I was. I was researching South Carolina and I was interested in race and colonization and I was planning to write in part about the 1822 events. So I took that out of my dissertation to think about it more. I wrote the dissertation. Eventually I published the book that it turned into after extensive revisions over a long period of time, and I returned to this project. So one of the things that had always troubled me about the early debate about the archive was a way in which there was an analysis of power embedded in the criticisms of the archive that went something like this because these people were enslaved. The accused were enslaved people mostly. And because of a power imbalance. Between the slave masters and the enslaved. There was no way to trust anything of what they would say, that they would lie. They'd say anything to save themselves. And so they were easily. Or sometimes perhaps not so easily. Cajoled, threatened, tortured into false statements. And that analysis of power struck me as too narrow. Because the fact is that there's a struggle on under enslavement. Enslaved people are not passive receivers. They are also practitioners of power. And, uh, I wanted to try and recover that story a little bit. And in doing so, I wondered if I took enslaved people's power and consciousness. More seriously. Than I believe critics had, how would it change the story? Uh, and I thought I saw a hint of it in a first article that I published. When I realized that some of the enslaved people had never been arrested. Could have kept a secret. And probably gone under the radar. And they came forward voluntarily. So I wondered about that. You know, it suggests that they had more complex motives. Than simply being intimidated. It also means that they had never been incarcerated, Perhaps with others. So that they might collude in a false story. So how could it be that different people Gave similar stories. Without being incarcerated together? That kind of thing began to make me puzzle. And. And then I discovered that some of them were intimate friends and acquaintances. And, of course, what that means is that in order for the idea to be true, the. The argument to be true. That they would say anything and lie and have people killed. They'd have to be willing to turn on their bosom friends, associates, sometimes family members. To tell a false story. In the hopes that it'll be believed. So that maybe their best friend can get hanged and not them? So what happens if they get caught in the lie? Did they both get hanged? So, when we realize that the enslaved Have a much more nuanced understanding of relations of power. Than a simple notion of their easy intimidation. We can come to a new set of questions which would flow something like this. How did they understand the relationships of power. That they were enmeshed in. When they were detained, arrested. Or when they learned of the story and were never detained or arrested? And what did they think they might be able to accomplish. Over and against. What they knew their violent enslavers were capable of? Were there ways they tried to shape the story. That would allow themselves and maybe even loved ones and friends to escape? That's the kind of thing that got me started.
- [05:53]
A
Well, and can you describe some of the conditions. That fueled the uprisings in 1822.
- [06:01]
B
Yeah. So that gets to another problem that was existent in the historiography that I've always wondered about in the writing on this. Historians have tended to think of it as part of either the legacy of the American Revolution or the early emergence of the abolition movement, um, both of which attached to the national story of the United States. And I wondered if we worked in the way that I wanted to, to tell the story from the actual enslaved people and to think really seriously about what their vantage point would be, would it change? And, you know, I found that it does. 1822 is an odd time to still be thinking about the American Revolution, especially with large numbers of people who had been trafficked into South Carolina from 1804 to 1808, and they had never been even present for the fighting of the revolution. It's also really early to be thinking Christianism. So I began to wonder about local circumstances and others have written about this a little bit, but I began to wonder about it. So there are several things that happen in the 18 teens that I think matter. One of them is the Christian population among the Africans and African Americans in the enslaved community and the free community of Charleston, South Carolina begin to organize their own church, right? They have a variety of grievances about their seating arrangements in the white Methodist church and about the handling of their funds, their own funds, the funds that are raised in the donations from African American people. And they create their own Church in 1817, and it is immediately attacked by a certain faction of the enslaving white population. That's one factor of this kind of simmering violence against their church beginning in 1817. And after another is often the same political faction within Charleston, hostile to what little freedom that both the hired out slaves and especially the freed black folks have within the city. And they're effort pretty public in legislation and in public writing to curtail those freedoms. And a third kind of contributing factor for the emergence of the movement that turns into the uprising, very local factor, is the early efforts to send people to what will become Liberia, the so called colonization movement. In 1821, there's a ship that departs from Charleston, South Carolina, taking some of the slave community away. And what all these things have in common is the way in which they attack the aspirations of the enslaved and the free to live in a freer community right there. And they're very local. Not an abstract set of ideas, but the immediate connection to one's own family. A central theme of the book, a motivating theme for the movement becomes affections, affections among the enslaved for each other, for friends, for co workers, for family. And the way in which the white population is increasingly menacing those relationships with sale, with taking part of your family and allowing it to have freedom, perhaps in West Africa, or attacking the church that people are creating to try and protect educational space and a moral space, an institutional space for the African community. All these things assail the community's affection, the members of the community and their affections for each other. So by 1821, the winter of 1821, it's pretty clear that there's no opportunity for freedom because the legislature has just narrowed free in 1820, the terms. And those who had had their freedom petitions denied by the state legislature had used the appeal procedure and had been all of them denied by the legislature. So nobody was going to be able to buy or be manumitted anymore. Seen. And so when you create, when you create that kind of context, I argue in the book, this is how you spark an uprising. You attack people's sense that not only can they not aspire to something, but the very things that they hold dear right now are under threat and potentially could be lost at any time.
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A
You talk about kind of the. The importance of community in this book. And so can you talk about the role of black women in social networks and how it relates to this story?
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B
Yeah. So this is a tough one to tell because the archive is really. It features a lot of prejudices against the possibility that there are. There is a role of women. I think the white slave owning class doesn't imagine that they could be militarily relevant and therefore is easily persuaded that they have no knowledge and they have no role. And then there's one of the first people imprisoned guy named enslaved man named William Paul. He begs them not to take up any of the women, as he puts it, according to the official report, because none of them know anything. But there are eight women who are alluded to or named, many of them named in the manuscript archive. And I wanted to look really closely at who they were and to think about who they were close to. And as I did that, I discovered that each of them had these ties of affection to some of the men and that they were sometimes testifying against those people. And so why. And of course it's because in part they're at the center of the community. The yards, so called, of the women. Right. Amerita's Yard is the title of the first chapter and it's named for one of the enslaved women. One of the key enslaved women, Emerita laroche. Those yards are collection spaces where the men come and the children come and the other women come, and they labor together, and they socialize in these yards.
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A
And.
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B
And they share meals in these yards. And there are several cases of some of the women named in the. In the. In the records making meals for others who are accused in the. In the trials. And so they're clearly at the center of something. And. And then Joe laroche and Rola Bennett. Joe laroche is one of the people that comes forward voluntarily, and he testifies against Rola Bennett, and Rola Bennett will ultimately be hanged. And he's one of the organizers. And Rola Bennett had recruited Joe larochi, and they are having their meals in emerita laroche's yard. She's serving them food while they are talking about the uprising. Strong chance that she has some understanding from that alone. But then in the trial of Rollo Bennett, it comes out that at one point, another one of their relations on the laroche plantation outside of the city said, says that he will send through emerita news, and he apparently did send news that he would be coming down to Charleston, essentially, for the uprising on the Saturday night before they launch. So emerita laroche is verbally carrying a message from a backcountry plantation. Well, an outside of the city plantation, into the city for some of the key organizers. And little moments like that sort of reveal that there's a story that the official story doesn't capture. And that shouldn't be surprising that they don't capture it, because, as I argue in the book, they're being actively deceived by the enslaved. They're learning just about as much as they can make the enslaved give up. Some of that is deflecting from people, and some of it is withholding entirely in parts of the storm.
- [13:58]
A
Well, and one of the things that I think was so strong about this book is you physically place the reader in the physical geographic location, and you highlight how the enslaved and the free black community kind of created their own fugitive geography on the water and the land of the white city. And so I'm curious, what was this, and why was it critical to their uprising?
- [14:29]
B
Yeah, so this gets to the notion of fugitivity, right? Of being a fugitive and the way in which the normal state of black life in Charleston and under enslavement is a fugitive state. One is, in the sense, always running from white power discursively and physically, at times, physically and so the geography of the city, the reconstruction of a map of the city, which took an enormous amount of time, and it's, you know, featured heavily in the book. There are a whole bunch of different maps, specific reconstructions of the layout of the city in 1822. There was no map of the city in 1822. The most recent previous one was 1808. And the most recent anti dating one or post dating one would be in the 1830s. So there's a map of the city in 1822. I reconstructed it. And the point of that was to be able to help us take on the vantage point of the enslaved. There's a lot of detail and description of where they're meeting or identity references to where they're meeting for the planning and what they're planning to attack and how they're planning to. Where are these places? And so I just. I decided one of the two main strategies for more richly contextualizing and getting a better chance at telling the black story in this, getting that vantage point. I decided to reconstruct the map of the city so that we could see their geography, place these points on the map. And one of the things that it brings, really brought home to me was the way in which the city. In 1822, the town layout was penetrated by floodwaters in ways that it is not now. There were swamps running nearly to the center of the peninsula at high tides. And there were numerous mill ponds, especially on the west side. 3 Big Mill Pond complexes. The Lucas mill, the Bennett mill, and Duncan's Mill. And those mill ponds and the swamps associated with them, the marshes associated with them, and even a creek that's still emptying out from the city. Create opportunities for water craft to enter the city quietly at high tides, even at low tide, but especially at high tide. So that was intriguing to me, right? And then, of course, I realized that the enslaved are using that ground all the time to collect resources, Most famously oysters, which were very popular and food item in the black community. Part of a sort of commons that they had access to. And so they were. They were harvesting oysters. They spent a lot of time in that water. And so the notion, the argument of the book becomes that the geography of the city itself is something they know intimately and they can use. Use for physical flight and for planning this uprising. So we get to see exactly where these different targets are. And it leads to some interesting realizations. Like a significant portion of the city at high tide, a couple times a day is kind of on an isolated peninsula from the Rest of town with. And now it's. This is where the Medical University of South Carolina is. I mean, most modern people, when they read this book, anybody who knows the city of Charleston, now, when they look at the maps, they'll. They won't look like the city they know. And they'll realize that whole areas of the west side were underwater during big portions of any given day. And there's a peninsula along the west, along the Ashley river on the west side of the city that's formed by those mill ponds and the associated marshes and backed up creeks whenever they flood the mill pond in order to power the mill. And that peninsula has a powder magazine on it. There's only one bridge, really, to access it from the heart of the city. And if they can control the bridge and if they can land at the peninsula quietly, they can capture that magazine relatively easy because it appears to be very lightly populated. And that appears to be what they're planning to do, capture that bridge. They try to recruit people specifically to capture that bridge. And there's a nighttime meeting out on that peninsula that's talked about in the archives, where a handful of them, for reasons unknown, are taught they choose to meet under trees in the middle of the night out on that peninsula for some reason to do their planning. And I argue in the book that it's highly likely that what they're doing is they are aware that there's a. Of the flooding that creates the peninsula and isolates from the city. They're aware of the powder magazine there. They're aware of the bridge down below being the key choke point, and they're going to use it.
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A
Yeah, it just. It added such imagery to the book, and it was a wonderful addition to the book. And so I know, I can only imagine the hard work that you put into recreating the map. And so I'm here to tell you it was not for naught.
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B
Yeah, yeah, and I'm glad to hear you say that, of course, because it was a lot of work and it offers a lot of opportunities to see how people are placed and to understand differently. I mean, another great example would be Monday Gal and Bella Jack through a long process of elimination. Using the court records and the newspapers and the property records, I come to a theory that both of their homes are very close to each other, just a few steps from each other on Meeting street, near the intersection with City Market, which means that when there are meetings being held there, as there are, um, they are in the heart of the city, they're not for those Meetings. They're not hiding anywhere in the middle of the day. They're where everybody comes to get their daily provisions. Um, it's, it's really interesting to see and then trying to explain why would they be choosing sites like that and how'd they get away with it. So that's the arm of the book. Yeah.
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A
And you, you talked about the, the creation of the church. But I wanted to ask you, you know, what was the motivation behind establishing the African church in 1817?
- [20:21]
B
The white Methodist church that they exit is no longer acceptable to them for seating reasons, for reasons of their religious dignity and because the, the, the donations from churchgoers, they don't have their, they have their control of the black community's donations taken away from them by the white church leaders. They want control of all the money. And that precipitates a pretty large exodus. It's ultimately a few thousand people from the African descended and African American people from the Light Church. And they form what will be known as the African Church. It'll ultimately, it doesn't at first, but ultimately it will affiliate with the African Methodist Episcopal Church that Richard Allen founds in Philadelphia. And so they, they build their own building, what's known as the Northern, what's known as the Tross and Neck, just north of the city, outside the city limits. And they have white support in doing that. There's a faction of the white community that supports their building of their church and their independent worship. And then there's another faction of the community that really dislikes it. They also will have two satellite churches in the heart of the more urban area. One on Anson street and another down on Cow Alley, what's also called Philadelphia Alley, really close to the wharves, that last one on Cal Alley. And so they have a huge following in the city. The circular church which is white led, still has African and African American participants. But this African church is a big force in town for a few years until, until the uprising. And which the white leadership of the city uses as an excuse to destroy the, destroy the church. They literally take it apart, apart board by board and sell off the lumber.
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A
And so kind of moving into the, the movement and which turns into the uprising. How does understanding the relationships among who had become the rebels in the community help us kind of better understand the uprising?
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B
Yeah, I mean, so a big part of my story is to try and understand the logistics. If you are enslaved, you understand the danger of ease even talking. You can be executed for just talking about uprising. So you understand something. It's really dangerous. And there have been executions. Denmark Vesey possibly witnessed the 1797 execution of a few people in Charleston for talking about raising a rebellion. And so one needs a couple things. You're going to have to have a lot of people and you're going to have to have access to weapons. How do you have the conversations that lead to those things safely? And this is where all these affections within the community and personal, trusted relationships come in. One can trust one's family and beloved friends more than random strangers, not always with dangerous secrets, because a very dangerous secret scares people and that makes them act differently, perhaps, but you can. And, and as I argue in the book, there's a lot of practice of this in the Charleston community. There are fugitive slaves all the time coming through town. They've run away from masters for a weekend or they've, you know, they fled for more permanently. They're trying to get their freedom, get on a ship and get out of the city. There's all sorts of motivations. And there are ads in the paper frequently to recapture these folks. And those ads often talk about how they believe that the enslave, their enslavers, feel that perhaps these people have fled to their family members, elders, children, siblings, uncles, aunts, all kinds of people that they're related to or just they were well known around different parts of town and probably are going there, that kind of presumption. So those personal relationships of affection are a resource of power for the enslaved. And that means confidentiality. That means being able to talk about dangerous things with the hope and expectation that those who love you will not easily disclose that kind of stuff, even if they don't want to be part of it. And so that's a key thing. And you can, I argue in the book, as I narrate the. The social movement that the uprising is emerging from, that, like the church movement. You're. You watch this, the information of this desire to resist the. The implications of enslavement. You watch it develop into a resolve for an uprising through intimate social relationships of trust and care. And so that's. That's one of the core power dynamics. And they will choose not to talk very much to strangers. In fact, one of the things that is the undoing of it is when William Paul, perhaps unwisely, tells somebody he barely knows on the Waterfront that they're, you know, they're going to do something for their freedom soon. And did this person. No. And that person reacts out of fear and consternation, I suppose, concern that they'll Be wrapped into something and doesn't know William Paul even well enough to fully name and identify first. And that was a core mistake for, for William Paul that day. When they, when they stayed within their trusted relationships, they did better. And staying within their trusted relationships helped them identify sources for the weapons they would need. And I'll say this too, like the organizers, the key organizers, many of whom were Africans, a central question they got asked frequently was do you have people and do you have guns? They get asked this repeatedly in the records, you can see it. And they're immediately answered with oh yeah, we'll have weapons enough or oh, we've got a lot of people. And you get numbers. 4,000, 6,000 large, large numbers which make for that. That's good persuasive rhetoric. How true it is, it's hard to say. They're big round numbers. It strikes me as it's sort of an estimate perhaps of how many enslaved people are in the region almost, you know, as a way to try and encourage someone that they really, really, really want to join with them because for one reason or another, that person maybe has access to a gun. That person maybe has in one case the keys to a storage of weapons. And they really want that person to feel confident and to in that space of confidence and trust, be willing to take a big risk to get the freedom that they want, that they would rather have than not have.
- [26:55]
A
Well, and, and how did, how did those recruitment efforts kind of challenge assumptions?
- [27:01]
B
Yeah, the core assumption that it challenges is the central one at the official reports store and that is that the enslaved kind of can't conceive of rebellion themselves. A ridiculously, transparently false, odd, racist presumption. And it's in the official report. So it's a different aspect of the research. Part of what I do is identify who created the manuscript records for the first time since ever. He's not involved in the trials. He's not involved in any of that. His name is Christopher Gnoret. People can read about it in the book. Obviously I detail the whole process of identifying him. But identifying who created the manuscript records means you can separate the manuscript when you realize that he wasn't part of the trials from the official report. And it means that you can use them to cross examine each other. Right. There's the manuscript record that was made during the events during the trials. And there's the official report that is written up after the trials are over and published in October of that year long, a couple months after the last trials and executions are done. And. And you can cross examine it. So the official report says that basically it's not. Not conceivable that these enslaved people could do this on their own. They had to have some free person at their head. And this is part of their exaggeration of Denmark Vesey's role. Denmark Vesey is one of the key organizers. He's definitely one of the most important organizers. He's one of the organizers that. Well, he pays the ultimate price. He pays it early. He's executed on July 2. But he's one of a group of people, most of whom are enslaved. And some of those people, also like Denmark Vesey, go to their graves refusing to name people. Peter Poeas, enslaved African, Gullah Jack, an enslaved East African. They go to their graves just like Denmark Vesey. And they were at the center of the organizing. And they were sometimes identified as the leader by others in the. In the movement. In other words, not Denmark Vesey, but Gullah Jack is named sometimes as the leader. So they. They are part of a group together. And the. The official report, though, wants to blame Denmark Vesey alone, because the authors of the official report can't conceive or won't accept that the enslaved themselves might organize themselves. But when you look at the. The manuscript, you see plenty of evidence that there are others that the recruits feel are the leaders. As I mentioned, Dollar Jack and Peter Poyaz Mondeguel Monde Gel is a really interesting character that the book spends a significant amount of time talking about. So it dispels that notion. And the argument that I make is also targeted to dispel the idea that the enslaved are easily intimidated. I'm sure they're afraid. Of course they're afraid, but fear often accompanies a great deal of courage. Right. And they can seem to conceive of themselves as being in a kind of death struggle with slavers. They look at it that way. And so courage and fear can coexist. And deception doesn't have to mean that it's all a lie. It may well mean that you're. You're hearing partial truths or maybe things that are entirely true but don't represent the entire story that there are parts that they're withholding. Yeah. So the enslaved here, they. They end up as. I think we must see them as tacticians, thoughtful strategists with a keen sense of the power dynamics at play, the risks to other people that they care about, and with a lot of hope that they can somehow throw off the yoke, save themselves and their loved ones, and Be free together rather than separately or not at all.
- [30:56]
A
And this book is filled with complex, nuanced people. And one of the folks at Yale you've mentioned a couple of times Is Gullah Jack. And so can you talk about him a little bit and some of the ways that he influenced the movement and the uprising?
- [31:11]
B
Yeah. So Gullah Jack, some. Some historians have identified him as a Congolese west central African. But he was. He was enslaved at Zanzibar, which is on the eastern side of the continent, which is a huge continent. It's extremely far from the coast of west central Africa. And he's enslaved in that brief period between 1804 and 1808, when South Carolina becomes the only state to reopen the slave trade, Anticipating that the federal government will close it down in 1808, as it ended up doing. And so he arrives in Charleston in 1806. And he is, by all accounts, when captured, kidnapped, abducted in east Africa, he was already a kind of doctor, A healer, and a craftsperson woodworker. And he's wearing. When he's sold at Zanzibar To Zephaniah Kingsley, who will ultimately bring him to Charleston in the end and be sold there. He's wearing a small bag of what are called charms. But it's. It's a. It's a. A medicine bag. It's got around his neck. And he is allowed to continue to keep it on slave ship. And he has it when. When he's organizing with the ruggles. Gullah Jack is a powerful figure, culturally, within the black community of Charleston in 1822. The name Gullah might be a reference to the Gullah people. Obviously, it's spelled the same way in the records. It could also be a reference to crab claws. A bantu word for crab claws would be color. And Jack, in his organizing for the rebellion is Gullah. Jack is giving his recruits crab claws to put in their mouth on the morning of the attack. That he says will protect them, make them invulnerable. And so those are, as it's referred to in the records, his cullas. Right. So he could be kalojack. Either way, he clearly has really great relationships in rural spaces, too. So he. He becomes this highly influential figure, A sort of spiritual leader. And he. He works on ceremony for the enslaved. That's meant to encourage them, to give them courage, to help them express and contain their fears of what they're about to attempt. Nicola is a great example of that. But he also leads ceremony. He teaches others on how to lead ceremony. And they hold what Appear to be somewhat like east or South African Ngoma ceremonies right there, north of Charleston, at a place called Bulkeley's Farm, it seems on several occasions. But there's a good description. One example, on April 27th of 1822, shortly before they're discovered, they pray and dance all night in a ceremony that is probably designed to help them express and get reassurance for their fears and. And to build an esprit de corps, a unity that can prepare them for the. For the war ahead.
- [34:20]
A
And so, thinking about preparing for an uprising, what were some of the logistical challenges the rebels had to account for in their plans?
- [34:33]
B
The enslaving white minority in the city has all the guns, and they have mounted patrols nightly. They have warning systems in place, and they have supplies for that one might want for an uprising behind lock and key. So there's one logistical challenge. Another is you're on a peninsula. If you get control of the city, where do you go? And a third well, is related to where do you go? I mean, are you fleeing the city entirely? Are you braving out into the country in order to try and create a larger Haitian, like, conflagration? And they are aware of Haiti. They're reading the newspapers about Haiti. It's indicated in the records. Denmark Vesey is talking to them about Haiti. It's indicated in the records. So that's one of their logistical issues. They resolve it. And this is where the mapping really becomes really important because they identify various places within the city where weapons are stored. There's an advertisement that circulates for one of the stores that's on what is now Marion Square. He's advertising 300 muskets, 300 guns for sale. Has them in storage, apparently on site right there. The US Arsenal is on what is now Marion Square within the city, right in the center of town. At that time, it's. It's there. Later, it'll be on the west side of town, but at this time, it's here. And there's a small guardhouse on that Marion Square. And just north of that is a place called Wharton's or Hammett's Store. It's a warehouse. Mr. Hammett is part of the. The Neck Rangers unit. And there are weapons stored within that store for this militia unit, state militia unit. They know these weapons are there partly because of public disclosures, familiarity with the city. And they do a few things that now make sense when you map the city and when you think about how they're using personal relationships to do their recruiting, they Got to get into. They need to get into that storehouse, both of them, Wharton's store, Hammett's arsenal stored in that site just north of Marion Square, and the. The other store that's advertising 300 and perhaps the US arsenal. They want to get into those weapons because if they can capture those weapons, two things happen. They have guns, and also the white militia units do not. They have taken their weapons. It's very clever as strategy, right at once. Disarming the opposition while arming yourselves in a way, it almost doesn't even matter if they can fully use the weapons. That they can deny them to the enemy is going to matter in a fight. It equalizes things a little more. So there's that. And so they approach one of Benjamin Hammett's enslaved people, a man named Bacchus, and he has the key. He has access to the key, and they recruit him to be part of it. And they approach a man named Yorick Cross, an enslaved man who's also an African, and they send to recruit him people who are also from the same region of Africa as he. And it comes out eventually why they're talking to him, because eventually they ask. He's. He's very reticent in the records, anyway. He expresses a lot of reticence, saying, do you have people? Do you have guns? How are you going to pull this off? It seems very dangerous. And in the end, they ask him to allow, on the night of the uprising, 12 men to stay at his wife's place, which is at the corner of what was then called Boundary and King, now known as Calhoun street and King Street. And that is on the southwest corner of Marion Square, where, really close to where these arsenals are, right within few yards. So they are stationing people in ways that can make those easily reached. And so when you map it and when you do, in a sense, kind of two sorts of mapping, a social network mapping and a physical mapping of the city, as the book does, quite extensively, really as much as I could, you realize the nature of the organizing and its plausibility. And it, to me, it reveals, and I argue in the book, that it suggests that their planning was highly methodical and it was really plausible. If they hadn't been exposed in advance on the night of the attack, they would have, even if not every bit of coordination came off the way it was supposed to, they would have gotten a fighting chance to at least try. And that obviously matters. But they were exposed, and so we'll never know. But I think what we learn is a lot about the consciousness of the enslaved and the desire for freedom and the mutual affection among the enslaved and the willingness, under the right, or perhaps most dreadful conditions, to consider taking enormous risks with one's own life.
- [39:29]
A
Well, like you mentioned, they're exposed. They. They are taken to a tribunal. And so how does that tribunal held after the uprising, kind of also serve as an example of black resistance?
- [39:44]
B
Yeah. So this is where some of the skepticism about the archive becomes really, really important, because it's at this moment now, where as they arrest first a handful of people and imprison the earliest folks in. In the. The gall down below the city, city hall, they then have to. They start gathering a lot of people, and they. So they start putting people in the jail, in the workhouse. And the argument has been from the critics of the archive that that creates a situation where a false story, people can collude in a false story, where people can be tortured and isolated and made afraid, such that they invent false stories and then coordinate. Coordinate those false stories with others. But what my book argues is that a lot of that is mistaken and starts with when we appreciate the power of the personal relationships among the enslaved, not just in the Ned Marc Vesey case, but in other cases, too. And. And in the various fugitive cases within the city, the way in which people highly value the others that they love, and the way in which they're willing to keep secrets for each other, dangerous secrets that can get people corporately punished and, you know, perhaps even killed, sold away from one's family. All those things we appreciate, those leading into the arrests, we then have to think, okay, well, how do those relationships get challenged and how do they change and what loyalties remain when people start getting detained because they have been telling each other and they have been swearing oaths that they are going to tell nobody, that they would first they would die rather than reveal anybody. And some of the earliest folks do exactly that. Bella Jack dies without naming anybody. Denmark, Vesey dies without naming anybody. Peter Poyaz dies without naming anybody. Denmar Vesey, they send people pleading with him, hey, why don't you clear your soul of sin before you die and tell us, you know, what really happened? And he says, I'm going to die in a noble cause. I'm not telling you anything. And Peter Poyaz instructs others to die silently. So they're very serious about the oath. The question, of course, could be, can somebody make them so afraid that they will betray the oath? And I argue in the book that a betrayal of this oath. And a betrayal of one's friends and relatives and acquaintances who put their trust in you would require more than merely some threat. Right. Menace itself. We need to find some sort of positive reason for the betrayals. Something has been taken away that some confidence in the relationship has been taken away, because it's clear that they're willing to sacrifice quite a lot to keep the secret and that they have a lot at stake. These are people they care about. So it becomes then, in the workhouse, in incarceration, the story becomes one of a rhetorical, A discursive battle between the enslaved and the slavers over the truth of the story, about. First about telling the story at all. And then when one tells anything about the story, telling incomplete truths or withholding parts that are dear, you know, that are. That feel and extra menacing that somebody I care about might get harmed if I were to mention that they were at this meeting. And so there's that kind of dance, that power struggle that plays out in the. In the workhouse. And there's. There's numerous dramatic events in it. But probably the best example, one of the best examples, there's a lot of them, but one of them is Mondeguel himself. Mondeguel is one of the core organizers, and he's initially silent, and he. You know, he's trying to keep that silence. And after he. And then a man named Charles Drayton, also enslaved, is convicted, these two men have an exchange in which Charles Drayton declares to him, like, look what you got me into. I'm. I'm convicted to die now. I'm going to die for this Monday, Gel says to him, kind of echoing Peter Poyaz, who has already been executed days earlier. And that's what we have a right to expect, given that we were trying to launch a war for freedom. That's not an exact quote, obviously, but essentially what he says is that that's what we have, and that's what we can expect and to keep quiet. But Charles Drayton decides to start talking, and he makes an agreement overnight with the court to report on not only the case, but to elicit more information from Mondegale. And the two men are housed together without Mondale realizing that Charles Drayton is now going to be reporting out whatever secrets he can learn from Monday. And. And he does that. And Monday, Gill, not knowing that, sits in his cell for a couple days, watching, it would seem, probably some of the people that he. He was withholding, their names. Suddenly they're coming into the workhouse, and. And he he may well be aware of a lot of that. And I argue in the book that at a certain point, Mona Days is making his own decision. Okay, I'm going to talk. And he decides to also become a witness. And, you know, Drayton was a friend of his, Charles Drayton. They were friends. They had trusted one another with the most dangerous of secrets, with their lives. And Drayton had sat in front of him, beside him in the cell, presumably the two of them going to die together silently as they had watched Peter Poyas do, Denmark, Vesey do, and Gullah Jack do. But that wasn't the case at all. His friend Charles Drayton was betraying him. And so now Charles Drayton, the faithless one, is going to apparently survive. And he, Monday Gel, who is keeping the secret, is going to die. And so are all the people that Charles Drayton had managed to get him to talk about. They're now at risk. And I argue that the betrayal is probably a bit too much for them. And there's really not much left of the movement's core promise of solidarity, of standing together, of a war for freedom. And so Mondegill decides to tell his story.
- [46:06]
A
And so what do you hope people take away from your book?
- [46:09]
B
I think that freedom is bigger than 1776, that it's more ancient than 1776, that these enslaved people, they don't need the Declaration of Independence to have a desire for freedom. That it's. It's ancient within West Africa, within East Africa, and there's unfreedom in. In the various parts of Africa, as well as in the Americas, but it's very different. It's highly commodified in the Americas. It's not only lifelong, perhaps, but intergenerational. So one of the big takeaways would be that the United States is not the sole progenitor of freedom discourses. And that's maybe not an entirely welcome message in the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, but it's nonetheless a message I'd like readers to think about in coming away from this book. But also the book spends a lot of time recovering the events as a social movement. And that these men and women build a practice of solidarity before the movement even emerges. And the movement appears out of that. There is mutual care within the community, and they build a movement out of that. And that that matters because the court tries to suppress our ability to see that through this racist theory, that only a nefariously, a nefarious motivation by a freed black man could possibly delude these enslaved people into trying for their freedom. When we realize that it's a social movement, we realize that they are motivating one another and that there's a lot of people who are involved in recruiting and generating the plan, not just Denmark Easy. We can. We can see not just this event more clearly, but. But other like events. I would suggest that historians could, I would hope, look at this event and that it might help raise new questions about other such events and the look past the charismatic personality to the community itself and its dignity in its own humanity.
- [48:16]
A
And where should people go when they finish your book and they want to learn more about you and the work that you do?
- [48:21]
B
So, yeah, one of the things that we're doing, doing out of the. That the book is contributing to is a website project, and that website is available right now. It's called mapping black charleston.org and mapping black charleston.org is an effort to share the mapping projects that are at one of the hearts of this book and also to continue to develop them, to develop them as a kind of archive of black life in the city and in. In that period. I'm working with a local partner, Dr. Bernard Powers, retired history professor emeritus from the College of Charleston and the director of the center for the Study of Slavery in Charleston. And we're building this website as a way to continue the mapping. Right. There's more information on that map right now than there is in the book. There's continuing development, more sites, and we're going to do. We're doing an entire demographic analysis of the distribution of the enslaved that'll ultimately be on that map. Map to. So that page, certainly one place I would ask people to go. And of course, my. My own university website at soca University of America. Yeah.
- [49:28]
A
And we've only really scratched the surface. So is there anything that we haven't covered today that you want future readers to know?
- [49:36]
B
Yeah, I think it's that the history of freedom and exploitation in the United States is woven into the story of its economic development and its political culture, and that the freedom portions of our political culture are not entirely the production of Anglo Europeans or Europeans at all in the United States. Obviously that's part of it, but that freedom aspirations are broader and that exploitation is more deeply woven into American history. And a lot of Americans might want to appreciate. And in this 250th anniversary declaration of Independence, that strikes me as an important message to ask us all to continue to think about. And. And two, then that the movement at Charleston in 1822 demonstrates a lasting and enduring desire for freedom within Black communities in the United States that goes way back and actually predates what will become known as the abolition movement.
- [50:42]
A
Wonderfully said to the listeners out there. If you have any interest in early American history, resistance history or black history, definitely consider grabbing a copy of Take Freedom. You will not be disappointed. It is a finish in one sitting book. Thank you Dr. Spady.
- [51:01]
B
Thank you very much. It's a pleasure.
- [51:03]
A
My thanks again to Dr. Spady for spending his time with me. I couldn't think of a better way to end this special summer series of conversations than a discussion about agency, freedom and the power of community. Be sure to tune in next week where I will resume the normal Gilded Age series. Thanks peeps. I'll see you next time. Thanks for sitting down with me as I explore this chapter of American history. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and share with your friends. I look forward to our next cup of coffee together.