Denmark Vesey
Denmark Vesey was a free Black carpenter in Charleston who was hanged in 1822 for planning the largest slave rising in American history, on the evidence of a court that met in secret, and whether the rising was ever planned as the court described it has been argued ever since. He was born around 1767, probably on St Thomas in the Danish West Indies, was bought as a boy by a slave-ship captain named Vesey who called him Telemaque. He served him at sea and in Charleston for twenty years until, in 1799, he won fifteen hundred dollars in the city lottery and bought himself for six hundred. He could not buy his wife or his children, who belonged to other people. He worked as a carpenter, prospered, and was a founder and class leader of the African Methodist church that the city's free and enslaved Black people built in 1818 and the city harassed from the day it opened. In the spring of 1822 two enslaved men told their owners that a rising was set for the night of 14 July. The arsenal was to be seized, the whites killed, the ships in the harbour taken, and the rebels sailed to Haiti, whose president had been written to. The court that sat in June and July was closed, the accused had no counsel and did not hear the witnesses, and the testimony came from men who were promised their lives for it. Vesey said nothing and was hanged with five others on 2 July, and thirty-five men in all were executed and thirty-seven transported. The state's response was the point: the church was razed, free Black seamen entering the port were jailed for the duration of their ship's stay, and South Carolina's road to 1860 was a good deal shorter for it. Historians in 2001 and since have argued that the plot was largely the court's invention; Charleston put up his statue in 2014 regardless, and the church he founded is the one a white supremacist shot nine people in a year later.
- Lived: 1767 CE – 1822 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: insurgent, carpenter
