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James O'Neil Spady, "Take Freedom: Recovering the Fugitive History of the Denmark Vesey Affair" (UNC Press, 2026)
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
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Dr. James O'Neill Spady
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. James O' Neill Spady about his book titled Take Recovering the Fugitive History of the Denmark Vese Affair, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2026. This book takes us to the relatively early 1800s, specifically to Charleston in the United States, looking at what, as the subtitle suggests, is often called the Denmark Vesey Affair. Like what is actually happening here. Right. Any sort of term or event that's called a fair usually means that there's maybe some controversy over what actually happened and what kind of information do we have about it. And that is very much the case here. We're going to be talking about what happened, how we know, what sorts of records we do and don't have, and perhaps reinterpreting or adding nuance to perhaps some kind of overly generalized myths that might usually be told about this moment. So, James, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. James O'Neill Spady
Oh, yes, thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you start us off please, by giving us a brief introduction to yourself and then also kind of what the existing story is of the Denmark Vese affair.
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Dr. James O'Neill Spady
Sure. Yeah. I'm James O' Neill Spady. I have a PhD in American Studies and I teach at SoCo University of America in Orange County, California. This is my third book, if you count the edited volume. And for a long time I've been aware of this case because I've written a lot about South Carolina and the Lower south in general. And I guess the top line way to describe it, you pointed to part of it really? Well, it's being called these days the Denmark Visa Affair. And that's because there's sort of two parts of the story. The one part has been traditionally thought of under the moniker Denmark Visa conspiracy or rebellion. I'm calling it an uprising against enslavement. And the other part is the general controversy and the investigations and the politics within the state of South Carolina and the city of Charleston. My book, this book really focuses on retelling that core story, the story normally termed the Denmark Vesey Uprising or well, Denmark Vesey conspiracy or rebellion that I'm calling an 1822 uprising movement in Charleston at the time. But the classic story focuses on the charismatic leader, the man whose name is in the. In the term we usually use to refer to it. Denmark Vesey was a free Black man in 1822 when he was executed for this uprising. He had been trafficked into South Carolina as a slave sometime in the 1780s and he had purchased his freedom in 1799 and had been free for 22 or so years up until the point of the uprising movement in 1822. So he was a free man. He was carpenter, he was a religious man, he had had adopted Christianity. And he was outspoken, he's reputed to have been quite outspoken in anti slavery feeling and, and thought within the town. And the classic story focuses on him and talks about him as well. The charismatic individual that he apparently was. He was rather large person of imposing intellectual, capable of argument and outspoken. And so his political ideology, one partly drawn from Haiti and some historians handling, is partly drawn from the American Revolution and its libertarian tradition. It's partly that political ideology and partly religious ideology of Moses in the Exodus. And that's the classic story.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that gives us a helpful sense of what people might be familiar with. But obviously the fact that you're calling it the classic story that we're already talking about, kind of what terms do we use for this, is suggesting that that's maybe not the whole story. So why did you decide to write a book investigating this classic story that You've just described.
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Dr. James O'Neill Spady
Well, because the classic story was met with a serious critique in. In 2001 that cut to its heart, namely assailed the court records, trials, the testimony that are the core archive that we use to be able to tell any story at all. An historian, Johns Hopkins named Michael Johnson, published an essay that essentially argued that the. The court records are manufactured, that the court invented the whole thing in order to hang Denmark VZ and destroy the. The black church in town and to. And they create invented the archive in order to cover their tracks. And so I was in the midst of. I was in the early stage, actually, of writing my dissertation at the time, and I was planning in part to write about Denmark vey as part of a larger problem that I was analyzing. And I didn't quite know what to think of it. After that, controversy erupted, and I took all the Denmark visa material out of my plan and returned to it years later to tell this different account. So the classic tale. How do you tell this story if you can't use the court records? So fundamentally, I had to think about how reliable, if reliable at all, are the court records. And so the heart of my research was both methodological and archival in the sense that I felt I needed new methods and I felt I needed to find archival materials that might help clarify whether the trial records are faked or not. So I came up with basically a few methods. But for the trial record, the key one was a real forensic examination of the documents. What kind of condition were they in, and what can we learn about their conditions of production from the condition that they're in? Who created them? It's actually not known who created them, or at least not until my book, not definitively. It had been, I think, assumed for generations that the court had produced those records. But in actuality, they're stored in the legislative papers of the state government, not in judicial papers, private or public. And so there's a question as to how they got there and who made them. In the book, using handwriting evidence and direct evidence from the records of the Governor of South Carolina, I show that it was a man named Christopher Ginoret who had been specifically hired. He was an employed bank clerk at the time in Charleston. He also happened to live at the time right across the street from Denmark Vesey. And he was a meticulous clerk. And I argue in the book that he made it a very precise reproduction of the 1822 court records, which were themselves a complete chaotic jumble. And that's why the records look so chaotic now, because he just loyally went page by page through the pile of papers he received and copied them. They were out of sequence. They were elliptical and sloppy and probably on scraps of paper of various types. And he put them together, and with a very professional hand. It looks like a professionally put together court record at the level of its orderliness and the handwriting, but that orderliness belies the chaos that was in the original, now lost copy.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's really helpful as an introduction to what you are specifically doing with this book, because that gives us tons of things to discuss further, and obviously the court records will be part of that. But I think it's also important to discuss the fact that one of the ways you've approached this question of, like, hang on, what can we know if we have to be suspicious of the court records is in some senses, it seems like you sort of zoomed out of the courtroom. Right. We don't spend the whole book in the courtroom.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
We look at a bunch of things before beforehand, to have that context to interpret. Well, why even do we get the point of being in a courtroom? How can we make sense of the information people are or are not disclosing at that point?
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
If we just start there, it'd probably be pretty hard to figure out. So maybe we should talk a little bit, kind of before we get to any sort of uprising, trial, anything like that. You talk a lot about the black community in Charleston and sort of the ways in which they live, communicate, travel around. This is obviously not an environment where black Charlestonians kind of get to do whatever they want. Right. This is very much a situation for many of unfreedom, but that there is a lot of communication, that there is a lot of local knowledge of how everything works, where the water is, how to move around. Can we talk about that kind of expert, embodied knowledge?
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Dr. James O'Neill Spady
Yeah, absolutely. You're absolutely right. I spend relatively little time in the courtroom and a lot of time in the community. And a key reason for that, of course, is at the heart of the trials will be this community. They will be defending each other, they will be accusing each other. They will be mourning each other in the heart of the trials. And so in order to sort of understand better what was going on, I wanted to see its roots, I wanted to see its context. And there are a variety of ways to do that, one of which you're alluding to Charleston is a peninsula. And if you visit Charleston today, what you'll see is a very urban space. It's thoroughly built up, brick and asphalt and concrete as we would expect in a modern city. Charleston in 1822 was a peninsula, and parts of it were built up, but it was heavily penetrated by marshes, tidal marshes. It was on daily flooded for mill ponds. There were three large mill pond complexes on the west side of the peninsula, and there were creeks that ran through it and ended in tidal marshes. All around the edges of the peninsula, water penetrated to. Modern Charlestonians would be surprised how far into the peninsula water routinely, daily penetrated into the peninsula, up to really close to places like king street, at the absolute heart and spine of the peninsula. And these places, this geography was the geography of black labor. This is not only where the black community in the city lived, but they built it. They built the dams that powered the mills. They built the mills, they filled the marshes that became land for reclaimed land for new building. They dug tunnels for sewers. They built seawalls. They fished, they gathered clams and oysters, the creeks. And they worked on the ships. Charleston is a harbor. They worked on the boats. They worked with the stevedores loading and unloading equipment. They were cooks. So the ground. The geography of Charleston is very familiar to the black community of the city and the larger region. And I viewed that as one of the really important things to reconstruct and recover. There is no map of Charleston in 1822, Map of the city itself. There are various maps of parts of the region that feature Charleston from a zoomed out perspective. But I felt that if we wanted to understand what the community was experiencing in 1822, we really needed to understand where the community was, how it was laid out. I mean, where the black community was within the city, within the peninsula, what it was like to be there so we could do things. Like, at one point, a very key point in the book, there's a reference to a night meeting of several of the uprising organizers. And all it says is that they met at night under Mr. Duncan's trees. This is in the court records, doesn't tell us anything about what that means. And of course, that's an indicator of local common sense. Right? In other words, everybody in the courtroom knew what that meant. We don't know what it meant because we're not them and we're not alive then, and the tradition has been lost. So part of my goal in researching the book was to reconstruct all of those contexts so that we would know what where Mr. Duncan's trees are, so that we would know where the different streets are that are referenced so we'd know where Monday gill's shop was. Monday Gel was a West African enslaved man who had been brought in in the early part of the 1810s, the OO's first decade of the 19th century. And he's an Igbo, and he's telling people to come to his shop whenever they want to hear the news of the development of the uprising. The people that he's recruiting, where is that shop? If we find out where that shop is, does it tell us anything meaningful about what the black community knew about the geography and how they used it? And in the end, in the book, I argue that it does. It shows us how intimately well they understood the community layout and what was possible in different places. I think it was quite a surprise to me to discover that Mondegal's shop is right next to the City Market, one of the most crowded and busy locations in the city. You would think for people planning an uprising against slavery, they would want to be far away from such a place, but there they are in the middle of the day having conversations, even outside and back of the shop at one point. So they obviously feel a certain safety in the midst of that very crowded part of the city.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah. That's really interesting to be able to kind of put together, especially given today's world of like. Of course, we have maps of everything. Right. The reminder that that was not always the case is, I think, definitely helpful to believe, literally set the scene. Right. And can we talk a little bit more about the kind of social aspect of this? So we know sort of where things are from this reconstruction? What do we know in terms of how people in the community are talking to each other, relating to each other? Like, what's the sort of social transmission of this kind of information that's happening?
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Dr. James O'Neill Spady
Yeah, yeah. So the first chapter of the book is entitled Amarita's Yard, and Amaritta Emerita Laroche, she's enslaved to the Laroche family. They have an urban home, and they have a plantation outside the city. And she's going back and forth between that plantation and the urban home with her mistress. Or her enslaver. And Amarita to get a sense of this social setting that you're asking about. It's really central here. Amarida in her yard. In the court records, we learn that she's making meals and hosting her current husband and her former husband. And they are best friends, these two men. And they are meeting at her yard where she is making meals for them in the midst of their workday. During those meals, a man named Rola Bennett is recruiting Joe LaRoche to join the insurrection, to join the uprising movement. They're as they describe, as Joe LaRoche describes it, their bosom friends, Roll of Bennett and he, as their mutual friends and relations describe it. There's no enmity between them because of the fact that Amaretto was once married to Joe LaRoche and is now married to Rolla Bennett. And it's that kind of milieu that is super intriguing, right? And very revelatory of a. Of a social, cultural, emotional maturity within the community where they. They stick together. And those affections are. Are. Are a heart of how they do the organizing and. And what the entire movement is about. There's one way to think about this uprising as a charismatic leader with a political and a religious ideology. But the way the. What the book asks us to do is to not claim not to believe that all that is irrelevant, but rather look at relationships like this. Amarita Laroche in her yard and other women like her hosting these men and the relationships they have. Because another way to think about this is that it's a. It's about love and commitment. It's about a diverse coalition of workers who have all these family members and relations who are enslaved or endangered by slavers, even if they're free. Denmark Vesey is free. But big portions of his family and his friends, they're all enslaved. So there's a love at the heart of it. There's a set of relationships at the heart of it. And so that chapter sets the tone for the book not only by talking about someone like Amarita LaRoche, but also looking at the practices of fugitivity in the city, the ways in which the enslaved use not just the geography, but also their family relations, their friendly relationships as well. They're the motivators for doing things like running away from a new enslaver after one's been sold or running away at all, or after some sort of abuse incident, running away. They. I show in the ads that they. They run back to family members when they run. And their enslavers know It. So there's a. There are then at the center of all these incidents, these running away incidents, there are relationships that also fuel the uprising movement. They fuel its ability to keep secrets because one has sort of a, if you will, a fugitive ethic of not betraying people's dangerous secrets. One knows that one's neighbor's daughter is a fugitive and is there in the house with them, perhaps. And you don't tell the people that, that a person runs to. There are others all around them. Charleston is crowded. So there's an ethic of keeping such dangerous secrets and that feeds over into the, into the uprising movement. So at the heart of it then, is this community love, a kind of mutual solidarity, almost a fugitive ethic of mutual support.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And this is something you discuss obviously in the book pretty directly as you're doing here, and also something you talk about in the book as being kind of a reason why we should maybe shift our understanding of what happened as well as the words we use for it. Because, of course, there is keeping of secrets, as you've just described. But there are all of these networks, right? There are all of these relationships, and not necessarily things are happening like in the dead of night, whispered in back alleys, like maybe some of it. But as you mentioned, right. Sitting in a yard is also a huge part of this. So you discuss this as being perhaps key reasons why we should think of what happened, what the origins of this were, and the organization of what happened in 1822 as being more of a rising rather than a conspiracy. Can we talk a little bit about kind of those terms and why that makes a difference?
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Dr. James O'Neill Spady
Absolutely. It's a great thing to have noticed in the manuscript. So in the manuscript archive, the accused and the detainees, they describe the uprising with a few different terms. One of them, they sometimes call it the business. This is sometimes called the society. And those are terms that are more coded for a sort of public consumption. Right. You're often in public talking about it, and so you refer to the business or will you come to the society. But there's another term they use that would have been more dangerous to say in public, since it's a crime to discuss, even discuss, an uprising. And that's the rising. They. They describe it as the rising. And that contrasts really sharply with a term like conspiracy. Of course, conspiracy is a term of law. It's. It's the, it's the white supremacists term for it. It's. It's a criminal, felonious act to kill and assault and destroy property and people. And that's not a term, of course, that the enslaved are using to describe it. And it speaks to the different ways in which we can narrate these events. And it's the reason why I don't use a term like conspiracy in the book. And I've chosen to use the term uprising. I thought, to use the term rising, but it doesn't ring as easily to a modern ear as the word uprising does, which is essentially the same meaning. Uh, so as a rising, what we have then, is the development of a determination within the community that they had only one way out of enslavement. Not only one way out of enslavement left, but. And we can talk about that, too, why it's the only one left, but. But only one way, really, to maintain what little they have. They obviously have these loving relationships. They have children. Some of them have parents and grandparents. If they were born within. Within South Carolina. They have their country friends and acquaintances and relations. People say other Igbos, in Monde Gel's case, there's a whole Igbo community within Charleston and some of the other enslaved from Africa who were born in Africa and trafficked into Carolina. They also have sort of country natives in common in the city. These are valuable relationships, and slavery threatens them all, and it threatens everything they care about. So they come to a point, and that's part of what the book tries to explain exactly. Why did they come to this point all of a sudden in 1821 and 22, where the rising is their only alternative to the dangers of even continued enslavement? What is it about slavery that might yet get even crueler? Right. Not just that they might get sold, but makes it even urgent enough that one would turn to organizing armed rebellion, which is obviously dangerous. They all know it's dangerous. In 1797, Denmark greasy may well have witnessed the hanging of a person who was accused of trying to raise an uprising against slavery.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah. So then why do it? Like what? What made this the only option left?
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Dr. James O'Neill Spady
Yeah. Well, they've been trying lots of other things. The fugitive example I gave earlier of running away was certainly one. Some of those runaways fled the state. Right. Others fled dozens or 100 miles or more to get to Charleston or to other places nearby in order to be with loved ones and to be in more familiar territory after they'd perhaps been sold away from the city. But there were other things they had been doing to try and improve their life and produce meaning and to have the enjoyment of a loving community of relations and Friends. One example, a key example, of course, is the production of the creation of the African church in 1817. Frustrated with the white Methodist church that Africans and African Americans had been attending, with policy changes and prejudices there, the African American community forms its own church. It'll be referred to as the African church. It'll be loosely associated with the African Methodist Episcopal Church, originally founded in Philadelphia. And it's a big deal. There are, by the end of 1818, several thousand African American members, according to Methodist records of the African church, about almost 4400 people. And that's a big change, such a sudden change. And those numbers create sort of three congregations. There's a main church they build with the support of it should be set a small group of white philanthropists within the city, too. They build their own church on what's known as the Charleston Neck, just north of the city limits, but very much within the city orbit. It's part of. Part of the town, really, and eventually will be absorbed into it. And they also have, on Anson street, within the city limits, a smaller congregation and a third one on what's called Cow alley, sometimes Philadelphia Alley, really close to the heart of the wharf complex on the east side of the peninsula within the city. They have these three congregations, and they're under frequent attack, it seems, by the. By certain factions of the white population. Part of the white population supports the church. Another part of the white population is very contemptuous of it, and they assault and arrest attendees on a couple occasions in mass so that that church is under threat. They also have, as a way to try and produce a better life for themselves. They have what Denmark Vesey had the opportunity to buy their own freedom. But beginning in 1820 and 1821, Charleston is taking the state of South Carolina, rather, is taking steps to end the opportunity for enslaved people to buy their freedom or for their slavers to, on their own authority, emancipate them, to manumit them. And so by 1821, just before the organizing really commences, the opportunity to buy oneself and buy one's freedom or be manumitted by an enslaver who. Who is willing to do it, is closed off by law, and they've lost that. And then there's a couple other small things. One is, in 1818 and 1819, there's the panic, financial panic, that creates some economic dislocation. That probably means that Charleston slave owners were hiring out their slaves, which is to say they no longer have as much work for people. So they send them off the plantation or off their Property to go find work in the city somewhere and. And remit wages back to the. To the master. It's one of the ways Charleston has a kind of flexibility that allows it to ride out economic storms like that. But it also means rupturing black communities. It means sending parts of the family, maybe all the men on a given plantation into the city, depriving their families of loved ones and friendships. And then lastly, there's the effort to colonize to Liberia, what will become Liberia and Sierra Leone colonies on the western coast of Africa. In late 1821, a shipload of people leaves Charleston harbor for Liberia and Sierra Leone. And, you know, you can't just choose to go. Your masters have to be willing to let you do that, obviously. And if you go, you're leaving behind your community, you're leaving behind possibly family members in exchange for a tenuous effort at freedom in a completely foreign place. So not a terribly great bargain. And in the fall of 1821, the black community watches as scores of its community members make this departure. And it's not hard to imagine what a sad departure it would have been for the community. It's actually a moment, too, in which someone asks, apparently, according to the trial records, Denmark Vesey, why he didn't go. He's a free man, after all. And he reportedly says that he decided to stick behind so he could see what he could do for his, you know, fellow black Charlestonians and his family, his fellows. So there's, there's, there's these opportunities, but they're all really fraught. They're. They're a bad way to solve slavery's dilemma. The core problem, the core contradiction, how to be fully human in a society that does not allow you to be. It doesn't give you the right to. Where there's a large portion of the population that refuses to recognize your right to simply live, that doesn't care a wit for your social or family relations.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely a situation where by 1822, there don't seem to be, as you said, really any sort of good options. So what actually happens? Right. What is organized as this uprising and what are the sort of immediate outcomes?
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Dr. James O'Neill Spady
Yeah. So working through their friends and acquaintances and people they think might be useful, they try to, beginning in the fall, it seems possibly as late as Christmas time, they seem to already be, to some degree, mobilized, a small group of them by Christmas time of 18:21. And it's person to person conversation is Denmark Vesey's going around talking to people colored Jack clearly is Peter Poyas is Mondegil, eventually will be. And they, they propose, you know, to. To take the city. There's a lot of phrases that are used, different phrases used in the. In the records. Sometimes it's described as to fight the whites. Other times it's to take the city or take the country from the whites. And hence the title of the book, in essence, take Freedom. What they're talking about is taking the freedom that the city clearly will allow them to have in no other way. They have been left with only this. If they are to defend their community against the possibility of people being sold away, they. They'll need to take more drastic action if they don't want to remain slaves forever. So they, they. They work through the community. They work through those community ties, such as Joel LaRoche and Rola Bennett in Emma Riddle LaRoche's yard. They work in the yards of others of the women. Sally Howard will eventually testify about conversations that happened in her yard that she overheard. She'll do it later when. And the investigation is underway, and she starts to get scared that they're continuing to talk about uprising while the investigations and the arrests are already underway. And she thinks they're going to get them all in trouble. And so she. She does. She tells. They're in general, trying to work quietly through the fugitive ethic of keeping dangerous secrets, through friendships and acquaintances and the friends and friendships of their acquaintances. So it works that way.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
No, you're saying arrests are happening. Like, what happens. This. This doesn't work out the way that it's planned, right?
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Dr. James O'Neill Spady
Yeah, it doesn't. It doesn't work out. They. They decide they. They work out in an elaborate, flexible, very plausible plan. And because I've mapped out the city and I can show where the locations are they're talking about, the book features a rather detailed discussion, as you know, of the feasibility of their plan. And it's quite feasible. It's quite astute, really. They understand where the weapons are on, they understand how to get them, and they're using these relationships to try and station people close to those weapons caches. So when they have their surprise attack in the middle of the night on a Sunday, they'll be able to quickly grab the weapons and the gunpowder, kill a few of the critical people, military commanders, political people within the city, perhaps, and launch a surprise attack that they hope will result in their freedom. What happens is, as they're recruiting people, they're trying to work only with folks they know they can trust. But on a couple occasions, the planners, the Organizers, the recruits, they talk to people they really shouldn't have talked to. The first such incident is when a man named William Paul, who's part of the uprising movement. He speaks to a man at the Charleston waterfront on the east side of the peninsula, who he doesn't even really know, a guy named Peter Perleau and another enslaved man, and says to him elliptically, basically, do you know that some of us are planning to do something for our freedom soon? And Peter Pirlot is shocked and probably afraid that someone may be overheard and that he could get in trouble. And he immediately says, I'm perfectly satisfied with my condition and I'm grateful to my master. And he parades off. And Peter Perlow will tell. He'll debate it for a couple days. He'll get some advice, and then he'll tell the story. And William Paul is arrested. William Paul tries not to tell anybody anything. Eventually, he leaks out a little bit of information. For the most part, though, the city isn't sure what to make of his stories. They arrest some people who successfully convince them that they don't know what they're talking about, that there's no there there. There's no uprising. I don't know what you're asking me about. And they. They keep William Paul in. In prison, though. And then a second group, Joe LaRoche and Rola Bennett, the bosom friends who've been talking in Amerina laroche's yard, they decide that they should tell this another enslaved man, George Wilson, about what's about to happen. It's just a couple days now before the uprising is slated to begin, and they're concerned about their friend George Wilson, who's kind of a religious mentor to them. And they know he won't be involved, or at least they suspect it. They won't want. He won't want to be involved, but they. They want to warn him. And they tell him, reportedly, that he'll want to get out of the city because something big is going to happen. And they don't tell him directly, but he picks up their meaning. He apparently weeps and asks them not to be any part of it. They say it's too late to stop it now. And then George either convinces Joe or announces to Joe on his own that he's going to go. And Joe decides to go as well. And those two men give reports. And so, speaking to those two people, George Wilson and William Paul, folks that they really should not have been trusting with this dangerous secret because they are compromised in other ways. Rather, William Paul Speaking to Peter Perlo and Joe LaRoche and Rola Bennett speaking to George Wilson, those two men, it was a good idea not to speak to them, and they did. And the second report in particular precipitates the waves of arrests. Scores of people are arrested, 35 are hanged through a series of trials that run from mid late June all the way through July and into early August.
- [38:43]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
And so now we're in the courtroom right now we have these records about tribunals to ask questions about. So can you tell us more kind of what records we do have? What do we not have? How much can we trust them?
- [38:58]
Dr. James O'Neill Spady
Them, yes. And this is where knowing who created the records matters a lot. And being able to examine the conditions of the papers, the nature of the ink and the writing and the stains and the tears and the way in which it was stored, I physically examined them at a very close level, measuring pages and line counts and things like this. This is where it matters. Because what I'm able to establish is that there's a space between the official report that the court itself publishes in October of 1822. There's some distance and there's some distinction between that published official document and the manuscript archive that is in the state papers in Columbia, South Carolina, the legislative papers. It matters because the story, the official story, is that Denmark Vesey was absolutely the center leader, he was the charismatic head, he was the intellectual originator of the entire movement. And the court publishes that in their official report. They say it was impossible for such a movement to be generated without some such man at its head. And they, they condemn Vesey as a. A deluder of more ignorant people when they sentence him. But when you look at the manuscript material, which the official report is based on, and it republishes a lot, but not all of the manuscript record. When you look at the manuscripts, you realize that there's more ambivalence to that. There are other people that are named by those who testify as the head of the uprising. Gullah Jack is named a couple times Monday. Gel is once Peter Poyaz. Denmark Vesey is not named universally as an overall head. And gradually too, you can see when you realize the manuscript is a little bit different from the public archive and can be used to cross examine it from the public report. You can realize too that there are a lot of diverse contacts going on that Denmark Vesey isn't any part of, and that they're organizing diversely across the community, that the Igbos are organizing with the Igbos and that the East Africans are organizing the East Africans. And that Gullah Jack is not only organizing with East Africans, he's organizing with the Gullah people, the outside of Charleston and within Charleston. And Dan Morphizi can't even speak the languages of a lot of those people. He probably doesn't know most of them. So it becomes much less plausible when you can read the manuscript archive and believe that it's not fake and see that it's a copy that's been created in this great credible way to hold in essence, exactly that contrast with the public report, then you understand you've got a different story on your hands. When they are hauled into the city jail and the workhouse for the trials and for detention, the men are at first attempting to keep their secret and defend their friends. And several of them, you know, go to their deaths without naming anybody. Gradually, isolation in the. In the. In the workhouse, in prison, and watching friends and acquaintances go to their deaths begins to weaken the resolve of some of the. Some of the members of the movement, and they begin to tell their own version of the stories. But they do it, I argue, even when they do start telling stories, they don't just make up any old story about anyone randomly. They. They also try to protect people. They tell incomplete stories. And one of the things they do that's super interesting is they heap blame on Denmark Vesey. And I say it that way because in a couple cases they get called out for lying and putting something on Denmark Pisi that he didn't do and that others know he didn't do. And why do that? And why he blame on someone like him or Peter Poyaz or Golachak. It's because when the real torrent of testimony begins in about the second week of July, those men are all already deceased. What I argue in the book is that there's no further harm they can do by blaming Denmark Vesey. The court wants to hear them blame Denmark Vesey. Anyway, they're about to demonstrate it themselves when they write about him and he's deceased. So, for instance, I call it Jack Monday. Gel blames Denmark Vesey for writing a letter that they were going to have and did have sent to Haiti in hopes of getting some kind of assistance or at least let warning them they're hoping to flee to the. To the island. In reality, Mondegale himself had written it, and he's made to admit that fact in court. And he pleads basically that, you know, he didn't think any. Any harm could come from it. He was only Trying to make sure that he would get a chance maybe to. He felt he wouldn't get any reprieve if he admitted to such a thing. So he blamed Denmark Veasy.
- [44:44]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So in some ways, almost there's a yes, we're testifying. Yes, you've worn us down, but we're still not going to give you everything you want.
- [44:51]
Dr. James O'Neill Spady
Yes, exactly. And importantly, it works. The court itself declares that it doesn't know the whole story in its published report, but it argues it doesn't matter anymore, that they've executed enough people, they've intimidated enough people, they've banished enough people from the country or the state forever on pain of death if they return that, and that they've exposed the leaders as betrayers to such a degree that they've made their point and they've suppressed the movement. But they acknowledge that they don't know and that there are people out there, that there must be people out there that were part of it. And they don't know who they are. They don't know what the roles were. And that is expressly. Because a lot of these folks just don't tell them everything they know. Denmark Veezy, as I mentioned, goes to his grave without naming anybody. Gullah Jack does. Peter Poyaz does Peter Poyaz really boldly declares to people in the prison, reminding them that they had taken an oath to go to their graves in secrecy and that he's. That's what he's going to do. And essentially watch me do it and you do the same. And that's exactly what he then did. So they're getting early on in the trials, they're getting these very bold commitments to the oath of secrecy, protecting the community, protecting what's left of the movement. But it gets worn down. Yeah. And some of the men begin to betray each other. Especially a guy named Charles Treyton betrays Monday Gel really badly. He secretly turns evidence for the trial court. And without telling Monday, Gale elicits a whole lot of information from him that he immediately turns over to the. To the tribunal. And Monday Gill watches as people he's been talking to Charles Drayton about her start turning up in the workhouse. And I argue that he figures out that Charles Trayton has betrayed him and that perhaps Charles Drayton will survive and he will go to his grave keeping a secret that is already out. And so Monday Gel starts to tell his story. But he leaves names out. Sometimes he refers to people just generally and says that he can't remember their names, but they're Supposedly people he spoke to. So it seems clear that he's also trying to, even as he talks, keep names out. William Paul, when he speaks to the court, he pleads with them not to take up, as he puts it, any of the women because they don't know anything. But there are eight women that are named in the court proceedings, and many of them were witnesses to conversations or in the next room, nearly separated by boards of wood from where a mass meeting is going on in a house like Denmark Vey's. So it seems it's certain that they knew something the women did. And Amarita Laroche at one point is described as having carried messages between the plantation in the back country outside the city and the city itself for the uprising.
- [48:07]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So this is really interesting then, to get a sense of kind of what's happening in these sorts of tribunals. And as you said. Right. That the court itself is kind of like, well, there are still some things we don't really know, but kind of we've decided that we're going to sort of call it here and be done is these sorts of reasons, kind of what they cannot find out. Is that why you think maybe we tend to remember this history as with the name Denmark Vesey, even though it isn't just him.
- [48:36]
Dr. James O'Neill Spady
Yeah. So he is. This is an important point because Denmark Vesey is obviously a really significant figure within the king community, and he's. He's one of the leaders of the movement. That's clear in the records. But I argue that he's not the sole leader. And I argue that he has. He. The events carry his name essentially because he was the court's fall guy. As well as being an actual leader, he was also the person that they freighted with all the blame because the. The tribunal refused to believe that enslaved people could do this kind of planning and organizing and that they could keep such a secret and that they could harbor such a desire to kill their enslavers and take their freedom. So this story that it's all about Denmark Vesey originates with Lionel Kennedy and Thomas Parker's official report published in October of 1822, and to an extent, too, James Hamilton, the mayor, the intendant of Charleston, who was also part of the proceedings. And it's convenient because they're blaming a free black man and they're hostile to black freedom. They're blaming a free black man, and they've spent the previous years trying to close down pathways to freedom, just like the one that Denmark Vesey had used in 1799 to buy his own freedom from his Charleston enslaver. So that's where it starts, and it's partly true. Denmark Vesey is a remarkable, dynamic individual, and he is part of the organizing a key part, a central part. But he's part of a coalition of people, others, who have skills and social connections that he doesn't possess among the Igbos, say, or the East Africans. And so he. He needs them, and he knows that, and they know they need him. And so they're. They're working together, I argue, more as a coalition, which is why some of the men identify Gullah Jack, perhaps as well, explicitly identify Gullah Jack as the leader, the leader of the movement. And still others identify Mondegill perhaps as the leader. And still others, Peter Poyaz, because there's actually a coalition of different cells, if you will, who are working together. And we've been told, we've been taught to think of it as being solely about Denmark Vesey and that that does a few things that are good and a few things that are obscuring, that are counterproductive. The good things are, you know, we get to see this incredible individual, Denmark Vezi, and his commitment, even in his own freedom, to his fellow enslaved people and his own enslaved family members and his community and his desire to risk his life to try and take freedom for all those people. It, of course, obscures, though, the roles of all these others, and it obscures the way in which this is not the story of a heroic, charismatic leader, leader as the sole genesis of a movement, but rather it is a genuine social movement that comes together at a moment of desperation, where every other option for freedom seems to suddenly be closed off. It's a very local story. It's a community story. I mean, there's no particular reason to think of 1822 as a moment for revolution. It's not like there's a wave of revolutions across in that particular year against slavery or in general. Instead, what we have is a set of local circumstances and a set of global examples, one of them, the most important being Haiti. And they are aware of Haiti. And in some ways, their own revolution may well have been modeled on lessons from Haiti. Right? Because Haiti's when slaves in Haiti take the reins in the revolution on the north plain of HAITI and in 1791, it's a smallish, smaller group. It's not like it's organized throughout the entire colony. It's a smaller group, and they have these night gatherings, the Boh Kaiman ceremony, as it's called, and they take a Blood oath of secrecy, and they launch a surprise attack. And in that surprise attack, they convince others this is their opportunity to take freedom. And that blossoms up into what we know as the Haitian Revolution, a revolution from below. A revolution in which some of even the black and people of color in the colony of Haiti are not necessarily all that committed to slave, to ending slavery, but the slaves make them do it through their own mobilization. In some ways, the plan in Charleston is not all that different. A smallish group of well planned assaults would capture weapons, perhaps light the city on fire and take the city from the whites, as they put it, reportedly, and. And perhaps launch a larger revolution, perhaps flee to Haiti itself. The Haitian government was, would be, would welcome. Had publicly announced that they would welcome slave refugees that found their way to their shores, make them citizens.
- [53:56]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, yeah. So very interesting indeed to think of this as a local story, but not just a local story. So thank you for helping us understand kind of beyond the generalized myth that we might usually attach.
- [54:10]
Dr. James O'Neill Spady
Yes, well informed, that's for sure.
- [54:11]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, yeah, that might be attached to this moment. And obviously this is something, as you mentioned earlier, you've kind of had your eye on for quite a long time. You know, you're on. This is, as you said, book three, but been something you've been working on for a while or at least thinking about. So what might you be working on now that the book is out in the world? Anything related or not you want to tell us a little bit about?
- [54:35]
Dr. James O'Neill Spady
Oh, sure, yeah. I do have another book that I'm working on, but that project is still sort of gelling together exactly what themes it will have. But what I'm actively working on right now was this morning will be this afternoon are a couple, a few projects. The one most germane to this is an extension of the mapping that was done for the. For the book itself. As I mentioned, I reconstructed the city, but that reconstruction is ongoing. We produced a map, a Digital map using ArcGIS software of the city of Charleston as it appears to have stood in 1822, using manuscript archives, city directory, the city newspapers, the court, the trial records and other manuscripts to locate places within 1822 Charleston to get a sense of exactly what streets existed which didn't. And we're expanding and continuing that development. So it's. And we're putting it online. The idea is to create a public educational project for the city of Charleston. It'll be virtually available for anyone in the world. It is right now it's at a website called mapping black charleston.org and@mapping black charleston.org what you'll find right now is the bare bones map. It's the updated version of maps that are in the book, rendered digitally. One can zoom in. One can compare the current city to the historic city. You see the current layout of Charleston with the historic map, the reconstruction laid out over it. And that's going to continue. We're going to do things like identify the concentrations of enslaved people within the city. A very difficult thing to do. Triangulating different records. We're going to be able to show through zones where there were more and where there were fewer enslaved people. And we're going to create tours. We are actively right now creating a pair of tours, self guided tours, handheld devices. One can walk the city of Charleston and learn the story of the 1822 uprising movement, learn the story of black women's lives within the city and other topics as they develop. It's a thing I'm developing with local partners in Charleston.
- [56:54]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that certainly is very related to the book. And so while that's in development, of course listeners can read the book we've been talking about titled Take Recovering the Fugitive History of the Denmark Vesey Affair, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2026. James, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [57:13]
Dr. James O'Neill Spady
Oh yes, thank you very much. It's a real pleasure and always fun to talk about this work. Of course.
- [57:17]
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