What Hath God Wrought (24 page)

When it was all over, the most famous comment on the Missouri crisis came from seventy-seven-year-old Thomas Jefferson:

These sad words have often been quoted out of context. Jefferson wrote them in a letter to John Holmes, a Maine Republican who had recruited northern supporters for the compromise. Now Holmes found himself in political trouble for not having fought for the Tallmadge amendment. Holmes showed the letter around, as Jefferson expected he would, to vindicate his conduct as saving the Union. Holmes’s invocation of the patriarch’s authority worked; he saved his career. Assessing Jefferson’s state of mind at this time is not easy. He certainly feared that emancipation, if imposed from outside, would be a disaster for the South. He also worried about the political party he had founded and its continued hegemony. Yet he found other contemporaneous events cheering. He felt extremely pleased with the acquisition of Florida and was encouraging Monroe to acquire Texas as well.
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The prospect of the North uniting and using its greater population to force a resolution of the slavery problem upon the South worried Jefferson and his fellow southern politicians for two reasons. Not only did it threaten emancipation, it posed a real danger to the Jeffersonian Republican political ascendancy. Such a united North might use its power for other purposes too, promoting economic policies contrary to southern interests. The stronger the federal government, the greater the potential danger if it fell under hostile northern control.

Nowhere did politicians show more acute awareness of this danger than in Jefferson’s home commonwealth. There a collection of Old Republican politicians known as the “Richmond Junto” controlled state politics and influenced opinion through Thomas Ritchie’s
Richmond Enquirer
. These politicians worried not only about the declining influence of the South as a section but more particularly about the declining influence of Virginia. Once “the Prussia of the American confederation,” Virginia was no longer even the most populous state; New York had taken the lead and would hold it for over a century. Prompted by declining fertility of the soil, too many of Virginia’s sons and daughters migrated out of state—about a million of them in the antebellum era, by far the most from any state. By 1850, 100,000 former Virginians would live in Kentucky and Tennessee; 150,000 in the Old Northwest. These numbers do not include their children, lost to the Old Dominion. In 1820, cotton had already replaced tobacco as the country’s leading export. The Virginia dynasty of presidents had clearly come to an end with Monroe. Like some embittered New England Federalists, the politicians of the Richmond Junto sought refuge from their declining national influence behind the barricades of state rights.
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In 1820 the Virginia House of Delegates passed two resolutions affirming state rights, one denouncing the Tallmadge amendment and the other denouncing John Marshall’s decision in
McCulloch v. Maryland
. In 1821, Marshall would provoke another jurisdictional confrontation with Spencer Roane in the case of
Cohens v. Virginia,
affirming the right of the U.S. Supreme Court to hear criminal appeals from the highest state courts when a federal issue is involved. This was one more judicial humiliation for state rights as the Virginians understood them. Once again Spencer Roane took up the cudgels in the public press, this time writing under the pen name of a seventeenth-century defender of English liberty, Algernon Sidney.
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But in the hands of the Virginians of the 1820s, the strict construction of the Constitution, which Jefferson had originally conceived as a defense of liberty, was becoming identified with the defense of slavery. The transition can be observed in a volume called
Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated
, published in 1820 by John Taylor, a planter, philosopher, and statesman of Caroline County, Virginia. Over the years, Taylor had been a prolific exponent of Jeffersonian Republicanism of the old school. He had attacked the Hamiltonian doctrine of “implied powers”; he had subjected to searching criticism John Adams’s defense of an aristocratic component in government; he had maintained the superior virtue of agriculture as compared with commerce, manufacturing, and finance. While Republican nationalists had waged war and established banks, Taylor had kept alive the flame of pure limited government. Like Spencer Roane invoking Sidney, Taylor respected the tradition of the English “commonwealthmen” who had protested against the growth of government power, executive influence, and finance capitalism in eighteenth-century Britain; like Jefferson, he synthesized their views with Enlightenment faith in individual rights. It has been well said that Taylor treated political theory as “a mode of indignation.”
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His discernment of the conspiratorial power of high finance anticipated Charles Beard’s analysis of the Constitutional Convention. Not surprisingly, Taylor’s new book denounced John Marshall’s
McCulloch
decision as well as the depression-induced proposals for more tariff protection; he charged that both of these were power grabs by the moneyed interests.

Like many southern thinkers of his generation, Taylor had earlier expressed regret at the introduction of slavery. But now he marshaled his intellectual weapons against efforts to tamper with the institution. He denounced the Tallmadge amendment, along with other attempts to broaden the interpretation of the Constitution, as hypocritical frauds designed to subject the South and the country as a whole to a conspiracy of bankers, manufacturers, and government pensioners.
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The Virginia legislature rewarded the author with election to the U.S. Senate. John Taylor of Caroline showed how the Old Republican political thought and strict constitutional construction now provided a rationale for the new proslavery Radicalism. (The name Radicalism was intended to connote a friend of the constitution, for it was taken from the Radical party in France who defended the charter granted by Louis XVIII.)
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Virginians, however, were not the only ones to ponder carefully the meaning of the Missouri controversies. John Quincy Adams entered the most perceptive, profound, and far-sighted of such contemporary reflections in his diary on November 29, 1820:

When Adams’s prophecy came to fulfillment, Abraham Lincoln too saw the hand of God in it, for as he pointed out in his Second Inaugural, “If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?”
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VI

Denmark Vesey, a free black man in his fifties, practiced the carpenter’s trade in Charleston, South Carolina. A man of the world who could read and write, and who spoke several languages, Vesey had led a life of adventure and excitement. He spent his childhood in slavery on the island of St. Thomas, in what was then the Danish West Indies, and as a youthful sailor visited Africa as well as various Caribbean ports. At the age of fourteen he had been sent to the living hell of a sugar plantation on Haiti; luckily the French planter found the boy unsatisfactory and returned him to the slave dealer for a refund. In 1785, Vesey had come to Charleston, where like many other enslaved urban workers he was allowed to hire his own time so long as he turned over most of his earnings to the man who owned him. Late in 1799 Denmark Vesey got lucky again: he won fifteen hundred dollars in the lottery, enough to buy his freedom and open a carpenter’s shop of his own. He joined a free Negro community in Charleston County that numbered 3,615 persons in 1820. Vesey worked hard and saved his money; by 1822 his net worth was eight thousand dollars. A proud man, Vesey hated the whites for what they had done to him and his people. Charismatic, determined, and by some accounts ruthless, he meant to do something about it.
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During the Missouri Controversy, southern spokesmen accused the slavery restrictionists of encouraging, inadvertently if not on purpose, the violence of insurrection. Such fears were not altogether groundless. To the alarm of southern whites, blacks living in the District of Columbia, both slave and free, crowded into the galleries of Congress to listen to the debates.
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By word of mouth as well as by print among the literate black minority, news of the Missouri debates and their criticism of slavery spread through African American communities. Among those who took an interest was Denmark Vesey, who cherished a copy of Rufus King’s speech denouncing slavery in the name of natural rights.
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But Vesey had other sources of inspiration too. Informers claimed he originally scheduled his revolt for Bastille Day: July 14, 1822. Firsthand reports circulated in South Carolina of the only successful slave uprising in history, the Haitian Revolution of the 1790s. Most important of all, Vesey had his Bible with the Book of Exodus. Vesey was a class leader in the local African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church. When preaching religion, he usually came around to the injustice of slavery.
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Vesey’s leading co-conspirators included an awesome African-born conjurer named Gullah Jack, a number of craftsmen and sailors, and two trusted household servants of the state governor. Vesey’s lieutenants visited the countryside to make recruits on the plantations, but it is difficult to know the extent of their success; his claim that nine thousand were ready to rise was surely an exaggeration meant to steel the nerves of his urban followers. Their plan, as investigators later pieced it together, relied on complete surprise and simultaneous coordinated actions for success. It called for attacks on the city’s arsenal, gun stores, and other places where weapons were held; these were known to be guarded lightly if at all. Taking their masters’ horses, some rebels would form a cavalry unit. All whites in the city were to be killed, along with any blacks who refused to join the cause. To those who expressed moral qualms, Vesey invoked a God of wrath. Charleston should suffer the fate of Jericho: “And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old” (Joshua 6:21). Revolution was not for the faint of heart.
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As the size of the conspiracy grew, so did the risk of revealing it to someone who could not be trusted. On May 25, 1822, a slave informed his master that a conspirator had attempted to recruit him. The authorities began an investigation. But so tight was the conspirators’ security and so convincing their denials that for weeks the investigation went nowhere. On June 14, a slave who had been sent out as a spy reported back that the Hampstead neighborhood AME church was the center of the conspiracy and that the rising was now slated for midnight June 16. Galvanized, the authorities mobilized troops, forestalled any action by would-be rebels, and commenced a serious crackdown. A special tribunal met in secret. Suspects were held without bail. Vesey himself was not apprehended until June 22, when about to flee the city; Gullah Jack, not until July 5, as he was attempting to carry out the uprising.

Such is the story the investigating tribunal claimed to uncover. The special tribunal arrested 135 persons, of whom 35 were executed, 43 transported and sold (an especially severe punishment for those who left families behind), 15 tried and acquitted, and 38 questioned and not charged. Four white men were convicted of encouraging the rebels and sent to prison. Two slave and two free black traitors to the plot received handsome rewards for informing. Vesey himself and most of his principals remained faithful to their cause and met their deaths with courage. The last words of one of them, Peter Poyas, were “Die silent, as you see me do.”
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This silence, and the fact that the conspirators had the chance to destroy evidence, makes the historian’s task difficult. Two prominent contemporaries criticized the tribunal for procedural irregularities: South Carolina’s Governor Thomas Bennett and Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court William Johnson, a Charleston resident speaking in his private, not judicial, capacity. Some slaveowners refused to believe in the involvement of their own bondsmen and defended them before the tribunal earnestly but in vain.

Modern historians have reached differing conclusions about the investigation and trial.
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Some believe the tribunal’s findings, so far as they went, substantially accurate, but others question the credibility of the coerced confessions and view the tribunal’s prosecutions as revealing more about white fears than black intentions. Surely Vesey was indeed at the center of an antislavery cell in the AME church, but the form his movement took, the extent of his contacts, and the specifics of their plans we shall never know for certain. If Vesey and his fellows had been simply victims of white paranoia, it is hard to see why they steadfastly went to their deaths silently instead of protesting their innocence. The congregation of Charleston’s African Methodist Episcopal church know enough to have revered Vesey ever since as a hero of resistance to oppression. Whether he planned to massacre the whites of Charleston or not, Vesey faced his executioners convinced that he died in a “glorious cause.”
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