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This chapter describes the Denmark Vesey insurrection scare, the most significant challenge the paternalist movement faced during its insurgent phase. Charleston stood as the central staging ground and ideological epicenter of the paternalist insurgency. At the same time, nowhere was the movement better equipped to defend itself than in Charleston. Given the nature of the attack on paternalism that came as part of the public reaction to the discovery of the Denmark Vesey insurrection plot during the summer of 1822, the movement needed all the strength it could muster to stand its ground.

This chapter examines the reaction of local whites to the Denmark Vesey insurrection plot. The reaction emerged from the information the Charleston public received at the time and the resulting widespread acceptance of the idea that the dangerous plot described in reports issued by Charleston's official investigators had, in fact, matured in Charleston that summer. Whites who defended an alternative version of the scare during the summer and fall of 1822 quickly lost credibility with the Lowcountry public. As Lowcountry whites contemplated the implications of a successful insurrection their midst, their leaders debated the appropriate means of making sure that no future plot could come to fruition. As part of this debate, whites of various persuasions offered both their diagnoses of the scare and proposals to prevent future plots. This public discussion over causes and preventative measures quickly revealed the sharp conflict that emerged between local authorities and the paternalist movement that escalated as the scare and the ensuing reaction unfolded.

This chapter explores the refusal of the South Carolina legislature to adopt many of the draconian control measures recommended by Charleston-area leaders in response to the Vesey scare. Lowcountry leaders then reacted to the legislature's moderation with the formation of an aggressive voluntary organization, the South Carolina Association, charged with protecting the interests and safety of white Charlestonians. The association quickly emerged as the vanguard of proslavery radicalism in the lower South and a sworn enemy of the paternalist movement.

This chapter examines the question of authenticity surrounding Paul Bowles's Denmark Vesey. Featuring music by Bowles set to a libretto by Charles Henri Ford, Denmark Vesey incorporates racial politics and Marxist allusions. Its language and music emphasize Africanisms and African American folklore, much of it thoroughly researched and, in Bowles and Ford's minds, authentic. This chapter first considers “authentic” representations of blackness in Denmark Vesey before discussing some of the opera's prominent themes, including Love versus Hate and the use of animal masks. It also explores Denmark Vesey's evocation of Communist-style revolution, paying particular attention to the conflicts and the gradual alliance between blacks and the Left as elements that set up the context of the opera. Finally, it analyzes the demise of Denmark Vesey due to the loss of the score and explains how Bowles and Ford achieved a distinctive result in their integration of race and politics as well as their bridging of race and labor unrest of the 1820s and 1930s.

This chapter traces the influence of the Haitian Revolution throughout the long nineteenth century on fugitive slave narratives and the development of the gothic romance in the nineteenth century. By “fugitive” I mean to highlight the absence of such narratives from critical histories of the form, and the ways in which they fail to conform generically to traditional slave narratives such as Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. By identifying the fugitive narratives of Gabriel Prosser, of Denmark Vesey, and of Nat Turner, I want to highlight their importance to an emerging form of the romance in the period and the inseparable associations with the Haitian Revolution. Attending to both geography and genre at once illustrates that the slave revolution in Saint-Domingue functions as a specific political subtext and produces a clear generic template for the gothic romance in the United States.

This chapter explores South Carolina’s developmental policy and reform agenda in the post-War of 1812 era, arguing that public works and the labor of state slaves were part of a broader project seeking to produce both the state as well as liberal subjectivity. As the chapter argues, while South Carolinians were influenced by broader governing trends throughout the Atlantic world, their experience was directly shaped by the everyday practices of the state’s enslaved majority, who they absolutely relied upon. Subsequently, leaders broadened their vision of the state to accommodate the violence required for its maintenance.

The Civil War made Thomas Wentworth Higginson a writer. It gave him scenes and characters as well as a field of action that featured himself and hundreds of former slaves. With increasing radicalism he had become devoted to the elimination of slavery, and war came just in time to make violent means acceptable and save Higginson from treason. In 1854 he had tried unsuccessfully to rescue the fugitive slave Anthony Burns from a Boston jail and in the process probably became an accessory to murder, though he was never charged. In 1859, he served as one of the Secret Six who funded John Brown's raid on the arsenal at Harper's Ferry. On the eve of war, he began an historical investigation into slave insurrections, and he published pieces on Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, pieces that sought to transform Southern demons into Northern heroes.

Nat Turner, a comic book written by Kyle Baker, is about the life of African American slave Nat Turner and his infamous 1831 slave insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia. Aside from its incredibly violent story, the book seems to be, as critic Marc Singer suggests, an attempt by Baker to “jazz up slavery.” Baker draws on Thomas Gray’s 1831 The Confessions of Nat Turner, rather than the now considerable body of historical and creative work devoted to Turner and his raid, as the text of his book. This chapter offers a reading of Nat Turner to analyze Baker’s visual rendering of the fugitive slave narrative form through a strategically violent aesthetic that takes issue with Gray’s 1831 account. In particular, it examines how Baker reinvents the basic rhetorical premises of the slave narrative with Nat Turner. It also cites the example of Denmark Vesey and his failed insurrection in Charleston, South Carolina, to demonstrate the legacy of the respectability/morality required by the nineteenth-century slave narratives.

Samson is a popular subject in biblical scholarship on the use of the Bible in art, literature, and popular culture, although this scholarship tends to focus on Samson in White European and White American art and literature. The introduction explains how Samson becomes identified with people of African descent in American literature. It discusses the biblical story of Samson and the lack of physical descriptions of Samson in the Bible. It provides examples of the racialized uses of Samson in poetry, sermons, speeches, narratives by enslaved persons, court records, and newspapers. It offers some possible reasons why the biblical story of Samson may have become associated with African Americans.