Conspiracy and Credibility: Look Who's Talking, about What: Law Talk and Loose Talk

Abstract

TEVOLTS and rumors of revolt were important part of experience and institution that came to be known as American egro slavery. Contemporaries outside ambit of immediate threat, and certainly those who came later in time, often have expressed doubt about shape and substance of slave revolts, especially when something less than bloody scheme most feared actually occurred-which was almost always. Even Nat Turner's Revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831, deadliest of slave uprisings in United States or its colonial predecessors, left many doubting what upstart blacks had intended to do in full.1 Of rumored rebellions few stand more prominent in what historian Michael P. Johnson has designated the pantheon of rebels against slavery (p. 915) than Denmark Vesey's plot in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1821 and 1822. Prosecution resulted in thirty-five black men executed at gallows and forty sentenced to exile. Whether what authorities charged in punishing convicted was wholly complete and correct troubled contemporaries near and far, as well as those who have looked back on events through lens of history.2 As often in such cases, opinion has ranged from grandest of conspiracies in scope and strategy to position Johnson has taken in arguing that so-called Vesey Conspiracy was an insurrection that, in fact, was not about to happen; that Denmark Vesey and other men sentenced to hang or be sold into exile were not guilty of organizing insurrection; that, rather than revealing a portrait of thwarted