ABSTRACT
Textbook writers, who admittedly lack the space for detailed biographical digressions, tend to construct generic slave rebels, who usually grace a single paragraph in the chapter on the cotton kingdom. (Imagine drafting a single paragraph that could say anything intelligible about George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln!). But my research into the life of Denmark Vesey led me to understand just how different a leader he was than either Gabriel, who based his revolt on secular, artisan republican principles, or Nat Turner, who appealed to the New Testament's Book of Revelations. Although as deeply religious as Turner, Vesey drew from both the Old Testament and African spirituality to produce a truly revolutionary theology. Most scholars have been inclined to argue that Vesey used Charleston's African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church to reach out to urban, Christianized blacks, while employing Gullah Jack Pritchard, an East African conjuror, to enlist plantation Africans in his cause. But I have come to believe that no such dichotomy existed in Vesey's world. As Rob Forbes observes, the “religion constructed by worshippers at Vesey's African Church was a capacious vehicle, capable of appropriating seemingly contradictory elements, from a variety of Christian, Jewish, and African traditions.”
