Was Denmark Vesey Framed?

Charleston brings up feelings of both excitement and dread.  Parents might want to consider ways to prevent their children from engaging with history,  It can seem pretty harmless, but someday they will be old. Even if they lead a very soft life, they will sometimes experience what one of my Teaching Company lectures calls the “terror of history”.  Beneath the moonlight magnolias southern hospitality veneer of Charleston, I knew it would be there, so I persuaded Evie that we should dive right in.

“Black history” or whatever you want to call it, can sometimes seem like a special topic, but that does not really work in Charleston where the majority of the population was black well into the 20th Century.  That was the starting point of the walking tour led by Franklin Williams of Frankly Charleston.  As we and another couple sat in the verandah of the visitor center, he pointed to the bricks and asked us “Who do you think made these bricks?”

The area of Charleston that we then walked around used to be a black neighborhood, but it has since been gentrified.  In the antebellum era, a free black had to establish that he had a trade in order to be allowed to live there.  When Mr. Williams was asked who it was that lived in the nicer small house, he talked about the mulattos-the master’s sons, who wanted to emulate the master class.

I had to really suppress opening my mouth very much.  I could not resist asking him if we were going to be passing where the Grimke sisters had lived.  Angelina and Sarah Grimke had grown up in a wealthy Charleston family and became outspoken abolitionists and woman’s rights advocates.  Angelina married Theodore Weld and they lived in Fort Lee, NJ for a while.

Anyway, the story that Mr. Williams has about them is that they became alienated when their brother who owned their half-brother(a present from dad) had him beaten.  The house was not part of the walking tour, but maybe we will see it when we take the motorized version.

Skipping ahead, we had a great conversation at the end of the tour in a park that had a statue of John Calhoun on a column about fifty feet high.  Mr. William told us that when Calhoun died the neighborhood partied for three days in celebration.  The statue was not originally on a column, but it was raised up because it kept getting defaced.  There was also an obelisk to Wade Hampton erected at the behest of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.  When it comes to Hampton and the UDC don’t get him started.

The most interesting discussion was on Denmark Vesey, who was known as the leader of a vast conspiracy to stage an uprising in 1822,  Mr. Williams has a theory that Vesey was framed and the conspiracy was looking for an excuse to crack down on the relative freedom of blacks in Charleston and tighten up the regime.  Mr. Williams says that he is almost alone in this view, but you can find some scholarship that would support it.

Mr. Williams is largely self-taught as a historian.  Originally he was a tour bus driver finding himself getting more and more upset as he listened to the tour guides giving a sanitized version of events.

He has a great personality for his role.  If you are visiting Charleston, his tour is really an ideal first stop.

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Peter J Reilly grew up during the Civil War Centennial.  He early established himself as a neo-abolitionist when with great puzzlement he asked his father how it could be that Robert E Lee was considered a hero.