"Novelistic Evidence: The Denmark Vesey Conspiracy and Possibilistic History"

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American Literary History, Volume 27, Number 1, Spring 2015, pp.26-55 (Article)

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Novelistic Evidence: TheDenmark Vesey Conspiracyand Possibilistic HistoryCarrie Hyde*

Précis

The recent historiographical controversy about the reality (or unre-ality) of the conspiratorial plot allegedly organized by DenmarkVesey in 1822 Charleston, South Carolina, raises crucial questionsabout the quality and nature of linguistic evidence. The allegedconspiracy has been much discussed by historians, but the eviden-tial problems it highlights—the juridical status of conspiratorialtalk, the recollected nature of oral testimony, and the perspectivalbias of written records—also make it a uniquely instructive testcase for ongoing debates about historicism in literary studies. Thisessay uses the interpretative impasse in Vesey scholarship to reexam-ine literary criticism’s own ambivalence about the evidential value oflanguage, which underwrites its fetishization of both contextualiza-tion and the hyper empiricism of quantitative methods. I argue thatthe linguistic character of conspiracy as an inchoate crime requires adifferent method of analysis, one that attends to the historical impactof linguistic performatives. Conspiracies are plots above all else; theyshare more with the novel as a possibilistic form of history than withthe empirical rehearsals associated with criminal jurisprudence.Understood thus, the methodological moral of the Vesey controversyis as germane to literary critics as it is to historians: we need to stoplooking for material actions behind every plot, and address the veryreal consequences of the possibilistic histories they concretize—possi-bilities that reflect and transform cultural assumptions even if/whenthey are never enacted.

*Carrie Hyde is an assistant professor of English at UCLA. She is completing abook on the extralegal development of citizenship before the FourteenthAmendment (Civic Longing), and working on a new genealogy of evidence. Herwork has appeared in ELH, American Literature, and J19.

American Literary History, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 26–55doi:10.1093/alh/aju072Advance Access publication December 3, 2014© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]

Etymologically speaking, the word “evidence” pertains to thevisible world. Derived from the Latin word for “to see” (videre), theterm “evidence” is underwritten by the materialist assumption thatvision affords the most direct—and most reliable—basis for knowl-edge (“Evidence, n.”). Within the interpretative framework of modernlaw, this tacit preference for physical forms of proof almost seems togo without saying. “Immediate real evidence,” which is made presentto the senses of the court, “is of all proof the most satisfactory and con-vincing,” as William Best observes in an influential mid-nineteenth-century treatise on evidence (251). Oral testimony cannot approximatethe authority of tangible evidence: the “evidence furnished by a viewof the ‘res’ or thing itself” (Wigmore 13)—termed “real evidence”by Jeremy Bentham and others (Treatise 146).1 As the term itselfsuggests, some types of evidence are considered more “real” thanothers—and “things” offer a seeming self-evidence that tends to eludeoral testimony (which is referential and indirect).

The threat of fabrication haunts the conceptualization of testi-monial evidence. Witnesses do not have perfect memories or neutraldispositions. Even the most detailed and well-intentioned testimoni-als cannot escape the interpretative work of reconstruction. The banagainst admitting hearsay might be seen as a specialized expressionof underlying anxieties about the reliability of testimonial evidencemore generally; things that are merely overheard lack the evidentialpriority of things overseen. The injunction that “You must not tell atale of . . . what you heard one say” (663)—to recall a formative1681 precedent on hearsay in Colledge’s Trial—registers a basic dis-comfort with the recollected and performative dimension of testimo-nial evidence. Oral proof “is but a makeshift” (170), Bentham arguesin An Introductory View of the Rationale of Evidence (1843). ForBentham, written evidence is preferable to oral testimony, becausethe materialization of testimony through writing gives it the perma-nence of a thing. “Barring criminal falsification, written evidence,being permanent, expresses itself as itself at all times. Of oral evi-dence, the identity vanishes as soon as it is exhibited. The nextmoment it, or rather what professes to be it, is no longer original evi-dence, but unoriginal, hearsay evidence” (171). If Bentham’sremarks about the relative reliability of written evidence seem a littleoptimistic, it is because he focuses on the self-consistency of thedocument (over time) rather than its representational consistency(with the event described).

Evaluating the reliability of testimony is one of the basicchallenges of adjudication, but these assessments assume specialsignificance in cases of inchoate crime such as conspiracy andattempt, where there is usually little if any physical evidence. Astypes of crime, conspiracy, and attempt are distinguished by their

American Literary History 27

extraempirical concern with criminal intent, rather than criminalaction. Although conspiracy and attempt each entail discrete acts—verbal agreements between two or more people, and active (albeitunsuccessful) efforts or preparations—they derive their criminalityfrom the unrealized intentions of their actors. “Attempt liability,” aslegal philosopher Claire Finkelstein emphasizes, “seems to violatewhat we might call the ‘deeds principle’: the requirement that punish-ment be for something done, and not merely for something thoughtabout, wished for, or intended” (69). Conspiracy is even more pro-spective than attempt—because it does not require outward actionstowards its completion—but both derive their criminality from theirsuppositional relation to events that have not taken place.

In its early use, “conspiracy” tended to be restricted to treason-ous combinations, but with the Poulterers’ Case in 1611 “a mereagreement to commit a crime became a substantive offense” (Harno625). “The conspiring together itself constitutes an overt act,” asFrancis Sayre explains, “the criminal law does not necessarilyrequire the fulfillment of the defendant’s designs or the completionof his intended actions before liability attaches” (399). The modernreconceptualization of conspiracy effectively created a new type ofcrime, wherein the principal action—agreement—is not harmful inand of itself but is treated as if it were because it is believed toportend probable harm in the future. Although attempt is somewhatmore concrete in its concern with preparatory actions, attempt too ispeculiarly suppositional. The earliest modern theory of criminalattempt, established just four years after the Poulterers’ Case in a1615 case on dueling prosecuted by Francis Bacon, claimed as“ground infallible” that “the conspiracy, combination, or practicetending” to a capital offense is punishable even when the crimeitself “be not acted” (“Case of Duels” 1041, emphasis added).Taken together, the legal reconceptualization of conspiracy andattempt extended the charge of criminality to its incipient stages,making it possible to treat the formal inception of a plot as a crimein itself.

What happens to the empirical foundations of evidence whenthe criminal allegation has less to do with what actually occurredthan with what might have happened? If testimony based on rumorand talk alone is usually deemed inadmissible, what counts as evi-dence when plotting is the principal crime? How do you tell thehistory of actions that are imagined but never enacted—of an eventthat concerns dispositions of mind rather than matter? One thatinvolves possible futures rather than definite pasts?

What type of methodology is commensurate to studying some-thing as ephemeral as conspiracy? My answer, here, is disciplinary innature. Taking a cue from the peculiar episteme of fiction—the

28 Denmark Vesey Conspiracy and Possibilistic History

virtual histories it both enacts and archives—I argue that conspiracy,as an inchoate crime, shares more with the novel as a possibilisticform than with the empirical rehearsals typically associated withcriminal jurisprudence.

Conspiracies, after all, are plots above all else. As Peter Brooksnotes, “plot” in the sense of a “scheme or conspiracy” is closely at-tached to its literary use, “the organizing line of plot is more oftenthan not some scheme or machination . . . . Plots are not simply or-ganizing structures, they are also intentional structures, goal-orientedand forward moving” (12). Plots obtain their persuasive power fromthe speculative histories they allow us to treat as if they were real—even as their virtuality frees us from the exigent circumstances thatwould follow the physical enactment of the scenarios they envision.Needless to say, novelistic and criminal plots are extraordinarily dif-ferent on a host of levels. Perhaps most importantly, conspiratorsnever intend for their plots to remain plots, even if nothing comesfrom the initial act of combination the desire to realize the envisionedoutcomes is what inspires them from the beginning. Despite theirconstitutional differences, however, they raise similar evidential chal-lenges on a historiographical level. The prosecution of an allegedconspiracy would be all but unthinkable without the speculativemode of possibilistic historiography (if/then) that the realist novel ex-ploits.2 The adjudication of conspiracies depends upon a novelisticform of evidence that is more suppositional than descriptive: virtualin its form, secular in its causality, and possibilistic in its historicity.3

My interest in what follows is not with the legal protocols thatenable courts to demonstrate mens rea (guilty mind) in the absenceof a completed criminal act, but with how the epistemic similaritiesbetween conspiracies and novelistic plots can help us to expand theway we think about the historical and evidential status of languageacts more generally. Constituted by the verbal agreement to commit acrime rather than its physical enactment, conspiracy, I argue, offersan invaluable limit case for thinking about the historiographic impli-cations of the linguistic “performatives” (actions) that J. L. Austindistinguishes from “constative” (descriptive) statements in How toDo Things With Words (3, 6). Conspiratorial talk is self-referential; itis the thing to which it refers. Yet unlike performative speech acts suchas marriage vows—which create conditions that subsequently can bedescribed in the indicative: they are married, they were married—conspiracy’s prospective investment in the possible disables ontologi-cal characterizations of what is or was. Conspiracies may begin with averbal agreement, but they do not end in that moment. Their signifi-cance is rooted in things that may or may not come to pass. They donot conform to the logic of the simple past tense.


Without naturalizing the methodological tendencies of eitherhistorians or literary critics, this essay uses the legal concept of con-spiracy, and the notion of linguistic action it entails, to highlight theblind spots of the referential approach to text-based evidence that isoften perceived to be integral to (and constitutive of) historical rigor.I use the interpretative problems posed by one of the mostcontroversial slave conspiracies in North American history—theinsurrectionary plot Denmark Vesey allegedly organized in 1822Charleston, South Carolina—to explore the limits of two of themethodological legacies of the evidential subordination of words tothings. First, a residual skepticism of the quality and evidence provid-ed by language, which I discuss in relationship to the “hermeneuticsof suspicion,” as Paul Ricoeur famously termed the distrust of themanifest content of a text (33). Second, the fetishization of the index-ical capacity of language, and the corollary assumption that thecultural value of a text is determined foremost by its relationship toother things—an assumption that governs the dominant historicistmode of symptomatic reading: contextualization.

In a disciplinary climate intimately shaped by the institutionalmarginalization of the humanities and the qualitative methods ofanalysis with which it traditionally has been associated, words, itsometimes seems, are not particularly meaningful unless they aretypical, representative of something larger—be it a certain time,place, idea, or genre. If “context is not optional” (573)—as RitaFelski laments in her critique of the historicist turn in “ContextStinks”—it is in part because of the tacit assumption that literature’scultural significance lies in its ability to reflect and comment uponbroader historical phenomena (phenomena that seem relatively im-portant and real, because their existence is not limited to one text).The contextual approach to literature thus institutes, as methodology,an assumption traditionally associated with the historian’s morefunctionalist interest in language. As Joan Scott observed in “TheEvidence of Experience,” “historians’ rhetorical treatment of evi-dence and their use of it to falsify prevailing interpretations, dependson a referential notion of evidence which denies that it is anythingbut a reflection of the real” (776).

Scott’s charge is perhaps less true of subsequent work inhistory, whose polemic (if not its method) was inflected by the lin-guistic turn. However, the critique of “correspondence theories ofverification” holds new relevance for literary criticism as it has beenreconfigured under the sway of empirical models of historical, scien-tific, and statistical evidence (Clarke 38).4 As historian Brian Connollynotes, many of the “most forceful assertions” of a “positivistic, empiri-cist orientation toward the archive” actually have appeared in “recentliterary criticism, variously called ‘surface reading,’ ‘distant reading,’


or descriptive reading” (175). Franco Moretti’s “distant reading” isperhaps the most strident of these, but it is not as anomalous as it ini-tially might seem (1). Despite the novelty of its tools—data-miningand statistical analysis—its object is traditionally historicist: to addressthe “collective system” of the literary field (4). Distant reading uses theprestige of numeracy—both the fantasy of the neutrality of numbersand the sheer quantity of evidence—to turn literature into a system andanalysis into a science.5 In so doing, it also reinforces residual anxi-eties about the epistemic impoverishment of the words we trade in asliterary scholars.

In suggesting the methodological value of the legal category ofconspiracy as a model for a performative understanding of the histo-ricity of language, I am not arguing for a recuperation of “conspiracytheory” (White 1), which is distinguished by a zealous confidence inits ability to decipher the hidden forces and agents that secretly or-chestrate history. Instead, I argue that our skepticism of language,conceived as rhetoric (albeit deserved in many cases), prevents usfrom appreciating the concrete historical impact that words so oftenhave—even when their literal claims are misleading or manifestlyuntrue. To understand conspiracies and other speculatively plottedhistories we do not need more rhetorical skepticism, but less: weneed to extend some of the confidence we have in the historiographi-cal significance of empirical developments to our experience of lan-guage and the virtual realities it constitutes.

In what follows, I argue that historiographical assessments ofthe Vesey conspiracy have not paid sufficient attention to the linguis-tic constitution of conspiracy as an inchoate crime. This oversighthas led recent scholars to look for the wrong type of evidence and tomake unqualified conclusions on the basis of its absence. Rather thantreat the official records of the Vesey conspiracy as objects forviewing something else (namely an objectively reality in the past),I suggest that we can learn more about conspiracy as an evidentialproblematic and more about the historical work of language by ac-cepting a certain degree of epistemic uncertainty. Instead of asking ifthe rumors reflected “real” and imminent insurrectionary plans, wecan more profitably ask how something that was not an “event” inany traditional, empirical sense was able to have such a decisiveimpact on the history of slavery and emancipation. The answer, I willsuggest, has to do with the power of the subjunctive to emplot andconcretize possible histories—possibilities that reflect and transformcultural assumptions even if they are only imagined.6 Attending toofficials’ reliance on the subjunctive—formulations that designate“what might have been” instead of “what is,” or, in the case ofhistory “what was”—I set aside the question of the reality or


unreality of the Vesey conspiracy, to address the forms of fabricationinherent to conspiracies as prospective, unfinished histories.

1. Indexicality and the Historical Indicative

The conspiratorial plot organized by (or around) DenmarkVesey in 1822 has become a focal point in recent historiographicaldebates about slave resistance. The conspiracy—which takes itsname from its alleged leader, a free black carpenter who purchasedhis freedom with the winnings from a local lottery in 1799—is oftentouted as “what would have been the largest slave insurrection” inUS history (if the Charleston authorities had not arrested the develop-ment of the plot in its incipient stages [Bass and Poole 25, emphasisadded]). There has never been much agreement about the precisescale of the alleged plot: the official printed accounts of the investiga-tion include estimates ranging from 600 to 9000 conspirators.7

Despite (or perhaps because of) these inconsistences, the conspiracyhas lent itself to richly counterfactual speculation. “[A]ll seemed tofeel that a great crisis had been passed,” William Wells Brown re-marks in his discussion of Vesey in The Black Man: His Antecedents,His Genius, and His Achievements (1863), “And indeed, their fearsseem not have been without ground, for a more complicated plan foran insurrection could scarcely have been conceived. And many wereof the opinion that, the rising once begun . . . might have sealed thefate of slavery in the south” (148, emphasis added). For Brown, whosaw his book as a way of “vindicating the negro’s character” (6), thisuse of the modal auxiliary (or subjunctive formulation) “might have”is just as effective as the conditional perfect, “would have.” Since noinsurrection occurred, the probability of its success is less importantfor Brown than the affirmation of its possibility on a characterologicallevel.

The abortive status of the Vesey conspiracy, it might be said,has redoubled its political significance: allowing it to stand in for thecountless emancipatory plots that were never realized, discovered, orrecorded. The hypothetical character of this “would-be revolt,”however, has also led several critics to question if there was, in fact, areal and imminent conspiracy—or if the allegations were, instead, thedistorted suppositions of panicked and designing officials. RichardWade’s “The Vesey Plot: A Reconsideration” was the first to pursuethis line of argument. For many previous scholars, Vesey’s “plotdemonstrated the latent urge for freedom that lay beneath the regimeof bondage,” but Wade takes this “latency” as proof that “no conspir-acy in fact existed, or at most that it was a vague and unformulatedplan in the minds or on the tongues of a few colored townsmen”


(150). Wade immediately qualifies his categorical insistence on theunreality of the plot, allowing that it may have existed albeit in anephemeral form, in the “mind” and on the “tongue.” The distinctionis an exceptionally vexed one, because these immaterial realms arethe realms of conspiracy. This tension may be one reason whyWade’s qualification is so convoluted (what is an “unformulatedplan”? Isn’t a plan a formulation?). By the end of the piece, Wade’sattempt to reinstate the facts is hard to distinguish from speculation.“Thus Charleston stumbled into tragedy. The ‘plot’ was probablynever more than loose talk by aggrieved and embittered men” (160).What separates Brown and Wade is not method but genre. Wadetrades heroism for tragedy, in a more disenchanted emplotment of apossible history (that is recast here more narrowly in the evaluativeterms of probability).

Wade’s argument did little to shift the consensus about Veseywhen it appeared in 1964, but it recently has found an afterlife ofmuch greater proportions in the historiographical controversy spurredby Michael Johnson’s influential reappraisal of the conspiracy,which appeared in 2001. Johnson’s piece began as a review of threenew books on Vesey, but it became a far-reaching indictment of“heroic interpretations” of Vesey, which—in an eagerness to recoveremblematic narratives of slave resistance—place undue faith in theallegations of Charleston officials (Co-Conspirators 916). Puzzled by“impossibly prescient testimony” in Edmund Pearson’s new transcrip-tion of the manuscript records of the conspiracy, Johnson decided toconsult the manuscripts himself (928n44). What he found was trou-bling: there are “more than 550” instances where Pearson adds, omits,or changes words in his transcription of the manuscripts—and, evenmore importantly, the manuscripts differ substantively from the con-temporary printed accounts of the conspiracy (upon which scholarshad long relied, [926, 925]).8 Among other things, The OfficialReport (1822) “creates the illusion of trials by . . . chopping up con-tinuous witness testimony to make it appear to have been given in thetrials of specific defendants” (934). These discrepancies leadJohnson to impugn the authority of the printed accounts (and thescholars who have relied upon them)—but he does not stop there.Johnson resuscitates Wade’s argument, concluding that “Vesey andthe other condemned black men were victims of an insurrection con-spiracy conjured into being in 1822 by the court, its cooperativeblack witnesses, and its numerous white supporters and kept aliveever since by historians eager to accept the court’s judgments whilerejecting its morality” (971).9

Johnson’s article was explosive. The University of NorthCarolina Press decided to pull Pearson’s error-riddled transcript frompress, and the three authors who Johnson had panned along with a


number of other historians immediately hit back.10 The subsequentissue of The William and Mary Quarterly included a 67-page forum,“The Making of Slave Conspiracy, Part 2,” which gave the chastisedreviewees, along with six other historians, a chance to respond toJohnson. The issue also included a new piece by Johnson, where heextends his arguments to the study of slavery more broadly. “As weseek to learn more about the lived history of enslaved peoples andtheir enslavers,” he proposes, “perhaps the Vesey conspiracy canprovide a caution against wishful thinking and an inducement to readevidence with renewed skepticism” (“Reading Evidence” 201).Johnson’s warning has not gone unheeded. Although many disagreewith his specific conclusions about Vesey, the essay has found manyproponents—and it has shaped the way subsequent critics approachVesey and other insurrectionary scares. As Philip Morgan suggests,if “Vesey has been largely a blank slate onto whom historians haveinscribed their predilections,” “historians should reconsider . . . otherconspiracy scares in the light of Johnson’s essay” (161,164).

Johnson’s reassessment of the controversy offers an instructivereminder of the challenges of documenting slave resistance, as wellas the sense in which the historian—like the judge—is called upon torender judgments on the basis of limited evidence. However,Johnson’s central claim ultimately is just as unqualified as the schol-ars he chastises. Although he acknowledges that the manuscripts arenot “verbatim records of what witnesses said” (“Co-Conspirators”921), he presumes still to be able to deduce the real state of affairs in1822 Charleston, concluding that “an insurrection . . . in fact, wasnot about to happen” (916, emphasis added). Johnson treats theabsence of reliable evidence as positive proof that no conspiracyexisted; it is not as if the manuscript records contain correspondenceor memos that reveal a concerted scheme to frame innocent men.Like Wade, Johnson trades an incautious faith in the allegations foran equally unqualified skepticism. Thus, we go from the assumptionthat there definitely was an insurrectionary plot in 1822 Charleston tothe equally categorical insistence that there was no conspiracy. Thepolarizing terms of the Vesey controversy have put critics in the over-determined position of choosing between enslaved insurrectionaryagency and manipulative white fictions. There seems to be no middleground.

The debate over Vesey continues. As James Spady observes ina rejoinder to Johnson nearly 10 years later, “there is no consensusyet on what the heightened skepticism about the court documentsmeans for interpretations of the 1822 events” (288). Nevertheless,there is relative agreement on one front: “conspiracy scares” demanda “renewed” or “heightened skepticism.”11 Like the “paranoid formsof knowing” (23) that place an “apparently boundless faith in the


efficacy of exposure” (to recall Michael Warner’s recasting of EveSedgwick’s influential critique of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” inTouching Feeling [2003]), conspiracy and suspicion seem to go handand hand.12 Nor should this come as much of a surprise. As BrunoLatour half-jokingly argues in “Why has Critique Run Out ofSteam”, “social critique,” and “conspiracists” are not all that different(228): “of course, we in the academy like to use more elevatedcauses—society, discourse, knowledge-slash power, fields of forces,empires, capitalism—while conspiracists like to portray a miserablebunch of greedy people with dark intents,” but there is “somethingtroublingly similar in the structure of the explanation, in the firstmovement of disbelief and, then, in the wheeling casual explanationscoming from out of the deep dark below” (228). Latour’s solution tothe skeptical logic of critique is not faith, but a “stubbornly realist at-titude” that deals with “matters of concern, not matters of fact” (231).“To the fact position, to the fairy position,” he suggests, “why notadd a third position, a fair position?” (247). Fairness, needless to say,is hardly value neutral, and it preserves the problematic juridicallogic that haunts critique. Nonetheless, Latour’s provocation ishelpful, particularly if we understand the “realist attitude” in relation-ship to the epistemic protocols of realism, whose virtual worlds areonly intelligible by virtue of the “willing suspension of disbelief forthe moment,” to recall Samuel Coleridge’s influential discussion of“poetic faith” (316) in Biographia Literaria (1817). My point is notthat we should place our “faith” in the officials or take their accountsat face value, but that we can only understand the impact that theseaccounts had in the antebellum US by understanding the interpreta-tive protocols that shaped the way they were read: the evidential strat-egies through which they recast the possibility of insurrection as animminent fact, inviting readers to indefinitely extend the (temporary)suspension of disbelief. The official accounts proved exceptionallyforceful because they were presented as real. As Wade emphasizes,“An Account conveyed a special authenticity because the testimonyand confessions purported to be as ‘originally taken, without evenchanging the phraseology, which was generally in the very wordsand by the witnesses’” (149). Official Account, in other words, pre-sented itself as something more than the account of officials; itclaimed to be a compilation of first-hand testimony.

To emphasize the evidential challenges that the Vesey archiveposes is not to give up on the possibility of narrating enslaved resis-tance, or to suggest that race made no difference in a controversy thatboth reinforced and troubled the structural inequities of antebellumslavery.13 As historian Robert Paquette emphasized in response torecent debates about the validity of the Vesey conspiracy, “historiansof slave rebellion have shown that, whatever their sources, rumors of


a general emancipation somehow denied or kept from the slaves haveproven to be one of the most potent precipitants of organized slaverevolt in the history of the Americas” (192). Whether or not the alle-gations were true, many believed them to be true, and this fact alonehad substantive consequences. “Even if Vesey’s plot had been thefabrication of anxious white South Carolinians,” as Robert Levinepoignantly argues in Dislocating Race and Nation (2008), “the pub-lished version of the trial transcript itself, ironically enough, providedWalker and other African Americans with a model of resistance inwhich black revolutionism and community were conceptualized bothwithin and beyond the U.S. nation” (73). In ways that authoritiescould neither fully anticipate nor control, the written accounts pro-jected a possibility of slave insurgency that challenged the norms ofchattel slavery.

2. “Whatever Might Have Been Their Plans”

Conspiracies do not publish their proceedings from day to day;and unsuccessful conspiracies, especially if they are composedof illiterate men, leave no record behind them.—LondonQuarterly, 1862

The story goes something like this: Sunday, 16 June 1822,found Charleston surrounded by vigilant patrols. That night, it wassaid, was the time appointed for a rumored insurrection. Accordingto a retrospective account of the conspiracy published by IntendantJames Hamilton Jr., city officials had been on the alert since 30 May,when a plantation owner told Hamilton that one of his “confidential”slaves, Peter, had repeated the details of an alarming conversationthat had taken place at the fishing market the weekend previous:another slave (William, who was later said to be one of Vesey’srecruiters) asked Peter, “Do you know that something seriousis about to take place? . . . many of us are determined to right our-selves . . . we are determined to shake off our bondage . . . manyhave joined, and if you will go with me, I will show you the man,who has the list of names . . . ” (Account 4). Peter left William “in-stantly” to avoid suspicion by association (4). He never saw thelist of names, but the reported conversation was enough to set every-thing into motion. Hamilton immediately assembled the city councilto hear Peter’s testimony and to examine William. Although Williaminitially denied the conversation, he confessed the next morning. Aweek later William provided additional details, “fear[ful] that hewould soon be led forth to the scaffold” (Account 6). He said thatthe plot “was very extensive, embracing an indiscriminate massacre


of the whites, and that the blacks were to be headed by an individual[Jack Pritchard, also known as Gullah Jack], who carried about him acharm which rendered him invulnerable” (Account 7).

Days later, another slave—who gave information under apledge of secrecy (like so many of the witnesses subsequently exam-ined by the ad hoc court)—seemed to corroborate William’s confes-sion. He claimed that on that appointed Sunday, a force assisted by“the people of San Domingo and Africa” would “march up and seizethe arsenal and guardhouse” and “sweep the town with fire andsword, not permitting a single white soul to escape” (Account 9).Officials acted quickly. Militias were detached for guard duty. Thecity waited expectant, in a state of “great excitement” and “muchalarm” (Account 10).

Nothing happened. “[T]he night passed off without any thinglike commotion or disturbance” (Account 10). Strangely, however,the uneventful passage of the night only hastened the actions of au-thorities. “No development of the plot having been made on Sundaynight, and the period having passed, which was fixed on for its explo-sion, it now became the duty of the civil authority to take immediatesteps for the apprehension, commitment, and trial of those againstwhom they [the city council] were in possession of information”(Account 10). Drawing on a 1740 act concerning the governance ofslaves, the city council formed an ad hoc court of two magistratesand five freeholders. One hundred thirty-one persons were arrested andtried in two sets of court sessions, which ran from June 19–27 andJuly 10–26. Of those convicted, 35 men were hanged and 37 were sen-tenced to exile outside the US (“Co-Conspirators” 924 and 967n203).

This, in any case, is the narrative of events presented inHamilton’s An Account of the Late Intended Insurrection (1822)—and subsequently elaborated by the presiding magistrates of the courtsessions, Lionel Kennedy and Thomas Parker, in An Official Reportof the Trials of Sundry Negroes (1822). Written by the city officialwho commenced the investigation and by the magistrates who issuedthe verdicts, Account and Official Report are hardly neutral or disin-terested histories. Nor, for that matter, are the manuscripts—whoserelative “authenticity” Johnson and Wade idealize—free of theseproblems. Neither of the extant manuscripts are unmediated, origi-nary sources.14 At best, the manuscripts are “revised versions of thewords witnesses uttered, words filtered through the ears and pens be-longing to one or more unknown clerks” (“Co-Conspirators” 921).At worst, they were created and/or revised with an eye toward theirpossible utility as a means of legal persuasion. In either case, they arenot disinterested records: Governor Bennett submitted the manuscripttranscript to the South Carolina House of Representatives on 28November 1822, “with a view to furnish the information requested in


a revision of the Laws governing that class of our population”(“Message 2”)—and three weeks later, the Negro Seaman Act waspassed, requiring the imprisonment of black sailors while their shipswere docked in Charleston.15 The manuscripts are not the secretedtranscripts of the court that executed Vesey. They are official docu-ments that were used to authorize and intensify the coercive regimeof chattel slavery in South Carolina—and their intimate relation tothe state is part of what helped ensure their preservation in the statearchives of South Carolina.

In the archive, written documents replace spoken words anddemonstrative gestures, and print creates worlds at the same timethat it represents them. As conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleckelegantly observes,

What is absolutely essential for the constitution of history is thefirst act of writing it down. The prior reality is transformed intothe status of written history, and with this transformation thedifference between the unique past events and the linguisticform that they subsequently assumed also takes on fixed shape.The epistemological consequences of this are not inconsider-able: epistemologically, the linguistic form of a history nowgains precedence over the earlier relations between events andtheir linguistic articulations. (663)

In the case of the Vesey affair, the significance of this observation isnot only that the “prior reality” cannot be determined from thewritten records, but that for all practical purposes these documents(and the individuals who wrote them, as well as those who interpret-ed them) have been the primary actors in the aftermath of the trialsand executions that followed the investigation into the alleged con-spiracy. In this respect, I agree with Johnson. Strictly speaking, theofficials who authored the extant records are the authors of the Veseyconspiracy. Whether or not they were responding to an imminent in-surrectionary threat, they plotted the conspiracy as we now know it.

3. “Altogether a Matter of Conjecture”

Vesey and the other suspected conspirators were tried for an“attempt to raise an insurrection,” under section 17 of SouthCarolina’s 1740 “Act for the Better Ordering and Governing ofNegroes and Other Slaves.” The Act, as the magistrates remark intheir introduction to Official Report, is “of a peculiar and localcharacter” and its provisions “depart in many essential features, fromthe principles of common law, and some of the settled rules of


evidence” (vi). The Act does not specify what constitutes an “attemptto raise an insurrection”; it only states that those convicted of it shall“suffer death” (7: 402). Although attempt is usually understood toentail decisive “acts of preparation” (at the minimum), the court pre-sented almost no physical evidence of insurrectionary preparations(“Case of Duels” 1044). “No weapons (if we except thirteen hoop-poles) have been discovered; nor any testimony received but of sixpikes, that such preparations were actually made,” Bennett observes(“Copy of a Letter from the Governor”). The magistrates suggested thatthe poles “found concealed” near a meeting place frequented by theaccused were the raw materials for the pikes mentioned in the testimony(Official 32). Official Report recasts these everyday objects as dormantweapons by stressing the suitability of the poles to the violent purposefor which they were allegedly intended: “twelve well selected poles,neatly trimmed and smoothed off” (32, emphasis added). The suitabil-ity of the poles is taken as evidence of conspiratorial discernment; thepoles become the inert embodiment of unrealized intent.

The magistrates add conjecture to insinuation, using the polespresented to the court to suggest how much more evidence mighthave been found if the plot had not been interrupted:

[the poles] were brought before the court: how many more mayhave been carried there [the farm near the meeting place], andwere afterwards removed, destroyed, or effectually concealed;or how many more would have been carried there had the plotnot been discovered, is altogether a matter of conjecture; butcertain it is that twelve or twenty poles were more than requisitefor only six pike heads, and as those six pike heads have notbeen found, there is no reason for disbelieving the testimony ofthere having been many more. To presume that the Insurgentshad not arms because none were seized, would be drawing aninference in direct opposition to the whole of the evidence.(Official 32, emphasis added)

The magistrates refuse to take the physical evidence at face value.The poles are never just poles—they are latent props of destruction,whose real purpose only can be inferred from witness testimony. Thedisproportionate reliance on testimony helped the court to shift theemphasis away from what had actually transpired to what might havehappened (if the conspiracy had not been discovered)—and from theincomplete evidence before them to the evidence it wished it had.Thus, in quick progression, the poles multiply (“twelve or twentypoles”), morph (into six pikes), and disappear (“removed, destroyed,or effectually concealed”). They become a probabilistic indication ofinnumerable weapons: which were either secreted in the past, or


which would have been developed in an alternate future (had it notbeen for the investigation).

Numbers in the Vesey archive are not the standard of empiricalcertitude; they are an uneasy register of uncertainty and epistemologi-cal distress. Twelve actual poles becomes 20 likely poles in OfficialReport, and these illustrative poles become an unrepresentative ex-ception in Bennett’s epistolary parenthetical, “(if we except thirteenhoop-poles).” The poles in Bennett’s letter have grown by one, butthey have also dwindled in significance. This sort of inconsistency istypical of the official accounts. Even the number of conspirators wassubject to equivocation. Although Official Report includes testimonyfrom a witness who had heard about (but never saw) “a list with9,000 names upon it” (75), the magistrates suspect that this numberwas “greatly exaggerated, and perhaps designedly so” (25)—asentiment echoed by Bennett, who estimates that the number ofconspirators “may a little exceed 80” (“Message 2”). Kennedy andParker bracket the question of the number of conspirators, explainingthat

As Vesey, from whom all orders emanated, and perhaps towhom only all important information was conveyed, diedwithout confessing any thing, any opinion formed as to thenumbers actually engaged in the plot, must be altogether conjec-tural; but enough has been disclosed to satisfy every reasonablemind, that considerable numbers were concerned. (Official 27)

“Considerable numbers,” mutable weapons (or rather weapons-to-be), approximations are at the heart of the Vesey archive.Narrative supersedes fact, and isolated details are offered instead of acomprehensive history.

Vesey’s silence conditions this conjectural turn, but his confes-sion is not entirely absent from Official Report. Like the poles (thatwould have been pikes), it takes the hypothetical form of an inferredproof. When Vesey heard his sentence

the tears trickled down his cheeks; and it is not improbable if hehad been placed in a separate cell, he might have made impor-tant discoveries; but confined as four of the convicts were inone room, they ‘mutually supported each other; and died obedi-ent to the stern emphatic injunction of their comrade, (PeterPoyas.’) ‘Do not open your lips! Die silent as you shall see medo.’ (Official 45, emphasis original)

Vesey’s emotion is taken as evidence of his guilt. The tears become asubstitute for the unequivocal disclosure that the magistrates desire.


Framed with a double negative (“it is not improbable”), the supposi-tions build: “if he had been placed,” “might have made.” Kennedyand Parker lead the reader into a counterfactual “separate cell,” whereVesey, unsupported by his co-conspirators, can finally admit the guiltthat the magistrates already infer. Kennedy and Parker do not specu-late on the content of this imagined confession. They do not requiresuch details, even in a hypothetical form. The tears are enough, fortheir reading is selective and willful.

4. “Deep as the Grave”

The ad hoc court that tried Vesey and the other alleged would-be insurrectionists enjoyed exceptional interpretative authority. Therace of the accused men allowed Charleston authorities to circumventthe strictures of judicial procedure. As Peter Hoffer argues in TheGreat New York Conspiracy of 1741 (2003), “conspiracy was an oldcategory of English law to which slavery gave new urgency andscope. . . . Conspiracy was a perfect way for a government to controlvarious suspect groups” (23). In the Vesey case, the magistrates treatthe alleged conspiracy in the most punitive terms possible, by recast-ing what was at most an insurrectionary plot as if it had been a morefully-fledged “attempt”—a distinction they elide by construing it asan “intended attempt” (Official 26). This qualification is even morevexed in Hamilton’s reference to it in the title of Account, where hespeaks of a “late intended insurrection.” Like the magistrates,Hamilton’s tact is moralistic; he foregrounds the internal realm ofintention and minimizes the sphere of actions and behavior—thesphere traditionally understood to be the subject of juridical manage-ment and judgment. By speaking of the plot as a “late” intention,moreover, Hamilton disavows the prospective dimension of intentionand consigns it to the past tense—as if intentions were finite thingswith identifiable beginnings and ends.

Considering the tenuous, suppositional nature of the magis-trates’ proofs, the growing skepticism about the reality of the allegedconspiracy is hardly surprising. If anything, it’s surprising that thisskepticism (with the exception of Wade’s essay) was not voicedsooner. Yet, with this renewed skepticism of the court has come anunwonted recapitulation of its methodological sensibilities. Kennedyand Parker, as we have seen, were skeptics of a sort as well. They dis-trusted all appearances of innocence, presuming to have fathomedthe conspiratorial craft it concealed. As a result, Official Report givesdisproportionate weight to incriminating testimony and even omitsthe pleas of “not guilty” recorded in the manuscript copy of evidence(“Co-Conspirators” 941). Although Johnson (and the scholarship


that has adopted his argument) comes to a different conclusion thanthe court, the approach is quite similar. For Johnson, it is the magis-trates who are cunning, and whose subterfuge we need to seethrough. One tale of conspiracy, it would seem, breeds another.16

Conspiracy, of course, is the modus operandi of the Veseyaffair, but the controversy also illuminates the conspiratorial logic ofinterpretation itself. Understood in its etymological sense, conspiracy(‘to breathe together’ or harmonize with) is arguably one of the ob-jectives of textual interpretation, for even when we disagree with atext, our interpretations attempt to explain and unfold its logic(“Conspire, v). In modern critical practice, the conspiratorial elementof interpretation often has assumed a more adversarial form than theloose etymological sense described above. Rather than working withthe text, entire methodologies have come and gone based on their ef-ficacy in working against it. Psychoanalysis, Marxism, ideologicalcritique—we are used to the idea that texts contain deceptive fictionsthat must be exposed and properly categorized.

Ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of suspicion” has found a disciplinarystronghold in literary studies. As Stephen Best and Sharon Marcusobserve, the “hermeneutics of suspicion became a general propertyof literary criticism even for those who did not adhere strictly to psy-choanalysis” (5). Nor is its prevalence surprising. The hermeneuticsof suspicion, it might be said, offers a structural justification for thepractice of literary criticism. For if texts are duplicitous, and theirmeanings are indirect and hidden, they need to be interpreted; theyrequire, in short, specialists capable of divining their true signifi-cance. Yet, however profitable the hermeneutics of suspicion may befor a field struggling to maintain its significance amid the increasingimperilment of the humanities, it is not a particularly modernconceit, nor a disciplinarily specific one. In a stunning reassessmentof the historiography of the early republic, Gordon Wood argues thatthe preponderance of conspiratorial interpretations of the AmericanRevolution since the 1970s is best understood as an idiosyncratic re-staging of one of the hermeneutic principles of the enlightenment:namely, the conviction that all phenomenon, including human behav-ior, is governed by a direct relationship between cause and effect—and that human history, as a result, is best understood through thecausal model of individual motivations.

To those who think in conspiratorial terms, things do not “justhappen”; they are “brought about, step by step, by will andintention.”. . .

The paranoid style, in other words, is a mode of causal attribu-tion . . . . It presumes a world of autonomous, freely acting


individuals who are capable of directly and deliberately bring-ing about events through their decisions and actions, and whothereby can be held morally responsible for what happens.(408–9)

Conspiracy, Wood suggests, is not so much a thing, or type of event,as it is a way of interpreting history. This turn to causality helps toexplain not only the proliferation of conspiracy theories in the eigh-teenth and nineteenth centuries, but also the formulation of inchoatecrime in the seventeenth century. Read through the lens of Wood’spiece, the new legal categories of conspiracy and attempt—crimesrooted in an understanding of individual intention and design—canbe understood as part of a more general effort to explain the naturalworld in the secular terms of causality.

According to Wood, the notion (articulated by James Dana)that “outward actions [were] determined by the will” and partook “ofthe nature of moral good or evil only with reference to their cause,”actually invited suppositions of deception: for if actions (such as theBritish colonial policies in the Americas) continually produceharmful effects, the motivations behind them can’t be benevolent(417). In this respect, “words could no longer be trusted. Only men’soutward actions could reveal their inner dispositions and exposedeceit and dissembling” (424). This distrust of language is one of thefar-reaching legacies of the Enlightenment and may be seen as anearly precursor to the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” Understandably,the simultaneous prioritizing of motive and skepticism of its linguisticexpressions had ambivalent repercussions: if conspiracies, as verbalcompacts, constitute a prosecutable crime in and of themselves, howcould their existence be verified—when the very form they took (lan-guage) was an imperfect barometer of intention? This linguistic skepti-cism, in short, is what makes the verbal crime of conspiracy sodifficult to interpret within the modern, materialist framework of evi-dence. It is also the basic epistemological quandary faced by both con-temporary and modern historians of the Vesey affair.

Scholars who discuss the Vesey controversy are thus faced witha dilemma: do we, like Johnson, simply restage the hermeneutics ofsuspicion (distrusting the words of officials, much as they distrustedall appearances of the innocence of the accused)? Or must we acceptour reliance on the texts that the court’s suspect methods produced,without presuming to be able to recover the history (or intendedhistory) they narrate? There is, admittedly, no entirely satisfactoryanswer to this question. Accepting the limits of our knowledge is noteasy, especially in academia—where the express objective is theproduction and dissemination of knowledge. But the alternative isequally unsatisfying. To presume to know not only what really


happened in 1822 Charleston, but what would have happened (if theauthorities had not been so proactive) would seem a sort of hubris.What then to do?

One interesting possibility put forward by James Sidburybegins by recognizing that the trial records “open a window onto theperception of black Charlestonians, but it is the kind of window wecan only see through if one reads with an eye towards the kind of his-torical truth one can find equally in journalism and in the kind offiction that obeys the conventions of realism” (183). Sidbury notesthat “historians have long used novels as historical sources” (184),and emphasizes that the truths they contain are “real and important . . .but they should not be confused with the kinds of proof that we at leastlike to pretend one can find in court proceedings” (183–84). This“we would like to pretend” suggests just how damaging this conces-sion is for historiography, and how remarkably tenuous the distinctionbetween historical and fictional texts (and the disciplines they uphold)really is. Sidbury is not concerned with these broader disciplinaryissues; he simply proposes a qualified approach to reality: plausibility.Sidbury argues that although the “courts, and the Vesey court in partic-ular, offer ambiguous incentives for truth-telling, they create powerfulincentives to tell stories that will be believed . . . . We can . . . havefaith that in response to the very pressures that may have induced themto lie, witnesses strove to tell plausible stories” (182). For Sidbury,“plausible” stories have a historicity of their own, because what is plau-sible or believable at any one moment is determined by the materialconditions that shape the possible and thinkable. Thus, realismbecomes a substitute for the reality that, in this case, we simply cannothope to ascertain.

Sidbury’s solution, however qualified, is not without its ownconceits. It presumes that witnesses understood exactly whatCharleston authorities were willing to believe. But, and perhaps moretroublingly, it presumes that Charlestonians were only willing tobelieve things that were inherently credible; that they were reliablejudges of what their slaves were, and were not, capable of doing. Asimilar objection can be made to James Spady’s return to the Veseycontroversy in “Power and Confession.” Adopting Johnson’s (not un-reasonable) supposition that testimony “manifestly not in a witness’sinterest is more likely to be true,” Spady argues that the earliest testi-monial reports of an impending slave insurrection were “given undersuch circumstances that they must be accepted as credible” (289).Spady addresses the possibility of strategic testimony, but he pre-serves the fantasy of interpretative mastery by assuming that thewritten accounts of the earliest testimony actually reflect whateververbal testimony was (or wasn’t) given. And he treats self-interest asif it were a mathematical equation.


“Credulity” is the readiness to believe the truthfulness of some-thing, not an expression of the inherent believability of the thing de-scribed; it is conferred from without in the act of interpretation.Modern critics have not shared the racial prejudice of the court, butcalculations of the credible are never impartial. And plausibility andcredibility continue to present the same epistemic problems as amore categorical presumption of a discernible reality. Interpretations,within this framework, become self-fulfilling prophecies: we findwhat we expect. Plausibility, in this respect, is simply a more scien-tific name for our expectations. If we are to avoid recapitulating theconspiratorial methods of the Vesey court, we must look at whatactually was said in the extant records—without presuming to knowwhether the allegations were true or credible. Setting aside suchquestions might seem to leave little to go on. Yet, it gives us muchmore: it gives us back the texts as they are—which is, after all, theonly thing we have. At first glance, an insistently textual approach tothe Vesey archive might seem willfully ahistorical, but if anything itis exactingly faithful to the defining element of the controversy: thelinguistic character of conspiracy. As Thomas Davis stresses in his re-sponse to Johnson in “Conspiracy and Credibility,” “the legal test ofconspiracy was not whether the accused would have succeeded atwhatever their alleged ‘loose talk’ suggested, or even whether theyactually would have undertaken all their ‘loose talk’ suggested. Thequestion was whether they talked as alleged. The talk, the verbalagreement itself, constituted the crime of conspiracy” (168). We maynot be able to answer even the more limited question of whether theconspirators “talked as alleged,” but recognizing the verbal characterof conspiracy throws into relief the possibilistic historicity of lan-guage, its capacity to emplot the subjunctive histories that conditionwhat was: prospective actions that people envision, discuss, andwrite about, but which, for whatever reason, are never enacted. Inconspiracy, language is the medium of history not merely a reflectionof it—or, to put this temporally, conspiratorial plots project prospec-tive futures; they do not reflect completed pasts. The point, then, isnot to compare the extant accounts of the Vesey conspiracy withsome presumptively objective (but nonetheless imagined) realityoutside of them; it is to understand the suppositional framework thatunderpins the rhetorical proofs they marshal.

This nonreferential approach to the Vesey archive can be use-fully distinguished from the notion of “surface reading” that Best andMarcus describe. An attention to the linguistic surface of a text maydisable the depth hermeneutics of symptomatic reading, but it pre-serves the conceit of text as truth.17 In surface reading, the surface issimply taken as the definitive site of objectivity. Marcus and Bestthus submit, “Where the heroic critic corrects the text, a nonheroic

At first glance, aninsistently textualapproach to the Veseyarchive might seemwillfully ahistorical, but ifanything it is exactinglyfaithful to the definingelement of thecontroversy: the linguisticcharacter of conspiracy.


critic might aim instead to correct for her critical subjectivity, byusing machines to bypass it . . . in order to attain what has almostbecome taboo in literary studies: objectivity, validity, truth” (17). Mysuggestion here, regarding conspiracy, is that the premise of objectiv-ity (and the conceit of a “minimal critical agency” [17]) is the prob-lem to begin with.

As Harriet Beecher Stowe remarks in her second abolitionistnovel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), in which theeponymous hero is Vesey’s (fictive) son, the conspirators “kept theirlists of names; and nobody knows or ever will know, how many weredown on them, for those fellows were deep as the grave, and youcould not get a word out of them” (530). Here depth is neither thesite of truth, nor the thing to overcome; it signals the basic historio-graphic predicament posed by linguistic events like conspiracy.Although Stowe assumes that the conspiracy was real, she also dra-matizes its resistance to understanding. The figure of the grave isdoubly apt in this respect. The execution of the convicted conspira-tors precluded any subsequent revelations of their intentions. We lit-erally cannot “get a word out of them”; we only have the words ofthe officials.

5. Subjunctive Histories

With no insurrectionary deeds to point to, the history of theVesey conspiracy is necessarily a history of “intention,” a speculativedrama in which actors—rather than actions—are the principal phe-nomena. As Official Report makes clear, Vesey is the interpretativemaster key to the court’s argument, even though he never confirmedhis involvement. Since Vesey had previously purchased his freedom,the emphasis on his exceptional agency helped to preserve theconceit that slaves are incapable of anything other than servility. ThatVesey was already free, and so seemed to have less to gain forhimself by revolt mystified Hamilton, who presumes that motivationsare a direct expression of self-interest (narrowly understood).Hamilton remarks that Vesey’s “followers were slaves, and for themit would not be so difficult to assign a motive,” but he struggles toimagine Vesey’s motivations (which, as Wood suggests, are integralto the logic and efficacy of conspiratorial interpretations).

Before we conclude, some notice of the probable cause of theconspiracy may be expected. As this is a matter of speculation,we shall not speak without reserve. Of the motives of Vesey,we cannot set in judgment; they have been scanned by a powerwho can do higher justice than ourselves. But, as they are ex-plained by his character and conduct during the combinations


of the plot, they are only to be referred to a malignant hatred ofthe whites, and an inordinate lust of power and booty. Indeed,the belief is altogether justifiable, that his end would have beenanswered, if, after laying our city in ashes, and moistening thecinders with blood, he could have embarked with a part of thepillage of our banks for San Domingo; leaving a large propor-tion of his deluded followers to the exterminating desolation ofthat justice, which would have awaited, in the end, a transientsuccess. (Account 29, emphasis added)

Just pages before the end of Account, Vesey’s motives seem aselusive as the confession that may have illuminated them. In order tomake his account of the conspiracy believable without a compellingaccount of Vesey’s motives, Hamilton must construct an alternativeversion of history—with the city in ashes and soaking in blood.Motives, it might be said, aren’t easily thinkable without the actionsin which they would have been embodied. To assign a motive in thiscontext is not a superfluous attempt at rationalization, but the mostmaterial way of ascribing guilt. Because no insurrection had occurred,the act of imaginative description is the only way of making the con-spiracy concretely available. Narrative construal, of course, is alwaysa part of legal persuasion, but in the case of the Vesey conspiracysuch constructions seem to be all that is left. Indeed, it is the chain ofsubjunctives—“his end would have been answered,” “if . . . he couldhave embarked,” “that justice, which would have awaited”—that offergrammatical support for a mode of narration that has no historical in-dicative to fall back upon.

Account and Report use counterfactuals (of open violence andconfessional conspirators) to help justify the preemptive disciplinaryactions of Charleston officials. The reliance on counterfactual scenar-ios suggests just how ineluctable the materialist logic of evidencereally is. Nonetheless, these counterfactual proofs should not betaken as confirmation of the counterfactual nature of the slave con-spiracy itself (a notion tacitly advanced by Johnson and others, whoassume that the allegation had no basis in reality). Counterfactuals,as Catherine Gallagher observes in “War, Counterfactual History,and Alternate-History Novels,” are “hypothetical propositions thatare contrary to the known facts of the historical record” (53). Despitetheir affinity with fiction, counterfactuals are constituted by theirrelationship to a set of “known facts.” They obtain their significancefrom the facts they eschew. And these types of facts are what theVesey affair problematizes from the start. To deem the conspiracycounterfactual would be to ignore the ontological questions it raises.Yet it is in this respect that the subjunctive grammar of the accountsis so instructive. Whereas counterfactuals have an oppositional


relation to the known—preserving the hermeneutic distinctionbetween fact and fiction in its very name counterfactual—the sub-junctive suspends expectations of empirical veracity by announcingthe virtuality of its propositions.

At times, the bent of the Vesey archive is so conspicuouslyspeculative that it is difficult to understand how the conspiracy everenjoyed a relatively unproblematic standing in historiography. Theanswer may have to do with the court’s invocation of another ambiv-alently historical discourse: Christian theology. Theology was one ofthe explicit sites of contest in the investigation. Several of the allegedconspirators belonged to a relatively new African Methodists EpiscopalChurch in the suburbs of Charleston and this religious separation wasseen as a dangerous precedent for political autonomy.18 The court’sreclamation of theology, however, did more than naturalize the unequalrelations of chattel slavery; officials used theology’s own postempiricalproclivities (its fascination with the kingdom to come) to subtendtheir precarious adjudication of evidence. The court, it might be said,needed theology to shore up its decision, precisely because of the ahis-toricity of its own evidential method.

The figure of Gullah Jack, an African conjurer who was named asa leading co-conspirator, proved expedient to this end. In the sentencepassed on Jack (which is the only sentence included in Hamilton’saccount), the court derides his purported power and reduces him, onceagain, to a contingent and vulnerable subject.

In the prosecution of your wicked designs, you were not satisfiedwith resorting to natural and ordinary means, but endeavored toenlist on your behalf, all the powers of darkness, and employedfor the purpose, the most disgusting mummery and superstition.You represented yourself as invulnerable, that you could neitherbe taken nor destroyed, and that all who fought under yourbanners would be invincible. While such wretched expedientsare calculated to inspire the confidence, or to alarm the fears ofthe ignorant and credulous, they excite no other emotion in themind of the intelligent and enlightened, but contempt anddisgust. Your boasted charms have not preserved yourself, andof course could not protect others ‘your altars and your godshave sunk together in the dust.’ The airy specters, conjured byyou, have been chased away by the special light of truth, and youstand exposed, the miserable and deluded victim of offendedjustice. Your days are literally numbered. You will shortly beconsigned to the cold and silent grave, and all the powers ofdarkness cannot rescue you from your approaching fate! Let methen, conjure you to devote the remnant of your miserable exis-tence, in fleeing from the ‘wrath to come.’ (Account 48)


The court belabors the popular belief in Jack’s invincibility to drama-tize its own authority as his executioner. The exceptional violence ofthe gesture, however, has less to do with the court’s institutionalpower over life and death, than with the ancillary suggestion that thecourt also regulates the afterlife. The secular punishment of death byhanging doubles almost imperceptibly with the “wrath to come.” Thecourt maintains the finality of its sentence by suggesting that God’sjudgment will be the same as its own.

The court usurps Jack’s role as a conjurer (“Let me then,conjure you . . . .”)—and invites the supposition of its own post-worldly authority—but it does so, oddly enough, by adopting realismas its weapon (“the special light of truth”). Indeed, the grave to whichJack is sentenced is invoked as a quintessentially realist space: onethat belies all design, plotting, and artifice. “Neglect not the opportu-nity” to confess, the court urges Jack in the final line of its sentence,“for there is ‘no device nor art in the grave,’ to which you mustshortly be consigned” (48). The grave precludes further disclosures,and its bare facticity is presented as a fitting antidote to Jack’srumored supernaturalism—and the artifice of the conspirators moregenerally. All deception, the court suggests, is for naught; the gravewill make the convicted men honest, leaving only undesigningmatter. The sentence of death, in this respect, restores to the contro-versy the very materialism that the alleged plot so manifestly lacks.The projected grave, here, has no interpretative depth. It marks theend of cognition and the eradication of interiority. Yet it is preciselythis retroactive flattening of conspiratorial agency that tacitly under-writes the authority of the official accounts. The “silence” of thealleged ringleaders is what allowed Charleston officials (and subse-quent critics) to speak for the accused.

6. Reading and the Afterlife of Form

What began with the report of a conversation at a fishing marketended with execution, banishment, and increased legislative restric-tions on black movement. As William Wiecek observes in TheSources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America (1977), “Thegreat irony of Vesey’s insurrection was that momentous constitutionalconsequences flowed from what may have been a pseudo-event” (128,emphasis added). Wiecek’s remark nicely captures the disproportion-ate juridical aftershocks of the Vesey affair—and the uncertain charac-ter of the event that ostensibly precipitated them—but his suggestionthat “Vesey’s insurrection . . . may have been a pseudo-event” onlybegins to hint at the virtuality of the alleged crime. Even if there reallywas a conspiracy to revolt, we can still definitively say that “Vesey’s


insurrection” (as Wiecek misleadingly refers to it) was essentially a“pseudo-event.” From evenir (to come, happen), events, by definition,are things that come to pass (“Event, n.”). It would thus be moreproper to say that “momentous constitutional consequences” followedfrom what was essentially a “pseudo-event.”

To analyze the Vesey archive we need not know who originallyauthored the alleged conspiratorial plot (whether it was the slaves, orthe officials who chronicled it). The rumors of an impending rebel-lion were forceful in themselves. They presented the disruptiveimage of the slave as a political agent—and this danger inhered byproxy in all the representations of the alleged conspiracy. Accordingto an explanatory note found on one of the few surviving copies ofOfficial Report, “[a]ll the copies which be found were destroyed soonafter its publication—it was thought a dangerous document for theslaves to see” (qtd. in Woertendyke 176n213). Even the adjudicatedforms of these alleged rumors were inflammatory in a region investedin the conceit of the essential subservience of the enslaved. The veryidea that slaves might rebel posed a challenge to the characterologicalfoundation of chattel slavery.

By focusing almost exclusively on the question of the validityof the alleged conspiracy, recent reassessments of the Vesey contro-versy reduce the historical meaning of the official accounts to theirreferential context and neglect the equally important question ofthe way their performative content shaped their ultimate culturalimpact—something that we can only understand by attending to thelanguage of the texts as well as their reception. As Paul Armstrongargues in a polemical defense of the value of reading in “a contextu-alist age,” “to reduce meaning to ‘meaning then’ by privileging thecontexts governing the moment of production is to rob the situationof writing of its historicity by suppressing its futurity. Ignoring atext’s unpredictable destiny in the experiences of readers yet to comerisks making the text static and ahistorical” (94). The historicity oflinguistic performatives and the historiographical value of formalanalysis may have almost gone without saying at the height of the lin-guistic turn, but with the waning of (old) new historicism and the riseof empirically oriented methodologies it bears new and more pointedemphasis. As Jane Gallop argues in a bleak prognosis of the “fate ofclose reading,” in turning away from formal analysis “we seem tohave given up precisely what the historians envied and to havesettled into a permanent position of inferiority” (184). The paradox,as Eric Slauter puts it in “History, Literature, and the AtlanticWorld,” is that “even as literary scholarship has become markedlymore ‘historical,’ it has apparently become less marketable to histori-ans” (135). The tide of the “trade deficit” between literary and histori-cal studies, to use Slauter’s evocative term (135), is not something


that literary critics can change on their own, but it is time to rethinkthe rhetorical skepticism that underwrites it.

One way to “remember Vesey” (to recall Frederick Douglass’sdirective in his 1863 speech “Men of Color, To Arms! [527]) is byrecognizing that—although language is neither objective, nor aneutral reflection of the real—the plausible worlds enacted in lan-guage have a reality of their own. The power of narrative emplotmentworks both ways; it is not essentially radical or conservative, emanci-patory or restrictive, redemptive or tragic. Its force and its dangercomes from the misrecognition it invites—a tendency to treat linguisticperformatives as referential descriptors. The only self-evidence writtenlanguage enjoys is marked indelibly by the “self” we bring to it.Interpretative objectivity is a fantasy and perhaps not as desirable a oneas we might think. What would be the use of reading if the meaning ofwords were fixed from the outset? What if the only way to understandthe “all men” of the Declaration of Independence were limited to whatThomas Jefferson meant by the phrase? In the end, maybe the (mis)in-terpretations that shape and determine the historical legacy of texts arenot limitations but assets—so long as we do not mistake textual claims,or our own interpretations, for disinterested facts.

Notes

1. William Best adopts the term “real evidence” from Bentham, who distinguishes“immediate real evidence” (in which the “the source of the evidence is made presentto the senses of the judge himself”) from “reported real evidence,” reported by awitness (Treatise 146). For an account of the ambiguities surrounding the term, seeSidney Phipson’s “Real Evidence,” The Yale Law Journal 29 (May 1920): 705–17.

2. “Counterfactualism,” Catherine Gallagher argues, is “at the heart of the modernhistorical enterprise, in which secular contingency replaces providential necessity” (54).

3. For an interesting discussion of the didactic value of hypothetical thinkingthat uses Gallagher’s essay on fictionality to distinguish “think[ing] possibilistically”(730) from the rash false certainties of “probabilistic” assumption in CharlesBrockden Brown’s Wieland, see Thomas Koenigs, “‘Whatever May Be the Merit ofMy Book as Fiction’: Wieland’s Instructional Fictionality” ELH 79 (Fall 2012):715–45. Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality,” The Novel vol. 1 (2007): 336–63.

4. Elizabeth Clarke uses “correspondence theories of verification” to describe theimpact of the linguistic turn on historiography (38).

5. As Mary Poovey observes in A History of the Modern Fact: Problems ofKnowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (1998), “numbers [have not]always seemed free of an interpretative dimension” (xii).

6. As Jonathan Culler argues in a discussion of performativity and mass media,“pseudo events” have an undeniable quasi-reality: “Whether the image corresponds


to a reality or not, the mediatic event is a genuine event to be reckoned with.” (518).See Culler’s “Philosophy and Literature: The Fortunes of the Performative,” PoeticsToday 21 [Fall 2000]: 503–19.

7. Both numbers come from Lionel Kennedy and Thomas Parker’s The OfficialReport (1822): William Paul reported that Mingo said that Peter Poyas “had a listwith 9,000 names upon it, and that he was still taking names. . . . Mingo [also] saidthat 600 men on the Bay were already down on the list in Peter’s possession” (53).

8. Among other things, Pearson “compromises the unique chronological integrityof the manuscript court record” by following the suspect organizational logic of thereports published by Charleston officials (“Co-Conspirators” 926).

9. Johnson simply reverses the critical consensus: dismissing the confessions as prod-ucts of coercion, and proposing that the truth lies in the pleas of “not guilty,” whichappear in the manuscripts but not in The Official Report (“Co-Conspirators” 941).

10. See, Robert L Paquette, “From Rebellion to Revisionism: The ContinuingDebate about the Vesey Affair,” The Journal of the Historical Society 4 (Fall 2014):291–334, esp. 294.

11. Even those who continue to be convinced by the basic validity of the allegedconspiracy have been more circumspect in their treatment of the official accounts asevidence.

12. The juridical context of conspiracy only makes this more explicit, because itexplicitly conceives of the object of inquiry—suspects—as a personified extensionof the mode of investigation, suspicion.

13. “[T]o practice other than paranoid reading,” as Sedgwick stresses, “does not initself, entail a denial of the reality or gravity of enmity or oppression” (128).

14. There are two copies of evidence, labeled “Document B House ofRepresentatives” and “Evidence Copy B.” Based on Johnson’s comparison of the twomanuscripts, he concludes that “House” is a copy of ‘Evidence” and that “Evidence”is “the earliest extant record of the court proceedings” (“Co-Conspirators” 921).

15. Records of the General Assembly, 1328. For an interdisciplinary account ofthe Negro Seaman Act and the antislavery lawsuits it inspired, see Edlie Wong’sNeither Fugitive Nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Cultureof Travel (2009): esp. 183–239.

16. As Edward Pearson (one of Johnson’s main targets) suggests, “[i]t may ulti-mately turn out that Johnson has exchanged one conspiracy for another” (141). See“Trials and Errors: Denmark Vesey and His Historians,” The William and MaryQuarterly (Jan. 2002): 137–42.

17. For Best and Marcus, “a surface is what insists on being looked at rather thanwhat we must train ourselves to see through” (9).

18. According to Douglas Egerton, Kennedy and Parker encouraged the AMEReverend “to leave the state because of the ‘strong suspicions’ against them”


(220–1). The church itself was razed in the fall of 1822. See Egerton, He Shall GoOut Free: The Lives Of Denmark Vesey, 2nd ed. (2004).

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Documents

"Novelistic Evidence: The Denmark Vesey Conspiracy and Possibilistic History"