Denmark Vesey

Denmark Vesey was born around 1767, most likely on the island of Saint Thomas in the Danish West Indies. He was purchased as a young man by the Charleston slave captain Joseph Vesey, who used the boy's labor on his Caribbean trading voyages through the 1780s and 1790s. In 1799 Denmark Vesey won the East-Bay Lottery and used the fifteen-hundred-dollar prize to purchase his own freedom from Joseph Vesey for six hundred dollars. He spent the next twenty-two years as a Charleston carpenter.

He was a class leader at the African Methodist Episcopal Church of Charleston — the second AME congregation in the South, founded in 1818 in the wake of Richard Allen's denominational founding (also placed in this archive). The Charleston city authorities harassed the AME congregation throughout its early years; it was raided repeatedly and forcibly closed in 1822.

By early 1822 Vesey had organized — across the Charleston AME congregation and the network of skilled enslaved laborers connected through it — a planned uprising calculated for the night of the fourteenth of July 1822. The plan called for armed seizure of the Charleston arsenal, the killing of slaveholders, and escape by sea to Haiti — where Vesey had been in confidential correspondence with President Jean-Pierre Boyer's government.

The plan involved approximately nine thousand enslaved laborers across Charleston and the surrounding plantations — by the contemporary estimate of the Charleston Court of Magistrates and Freeholders, the largest organized slave conspiracy in U.S. history.

It was betrayed by an enslaved domestic worker named George Wilson in late May 1822. Vesey was arrested, tried before a tribunal that the U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Johnson — sitting in Charleston — later declared unconstitutional in its procedures, convicted, and hanged on the second of July 1822. Thirty-four other conspirators were executed in the weeks that followed.

He is honored here as the carpenter and AME class leader whose planned uprising would have taken Charleston in 1822.