The Denmark Vesey Affair: A Documentary History

A vast collection of documents that illuminate one of the most
sophisticated acts of collective slave resistance in the history of the U.S.

In
1822, thirty-four slaves and their leader, a free black man named Denmark
Vesey, were tried and executed for ＂attempting to raise an
insurrection＂ in Charleston, South Carolina. In The Denmark Vesey Affair,
Douglas Egerton and Robert Paquette annotate and interpret a vast collection of
contemporary documents that illuminate and contextualize this complicated saga,
providing the definitive account of a landmark event that played a role in the
nation’s path to Civil War. The editors ultimately argue that the Vesey plot
was one of the most sophisticated acts of collective slave resistance in the
history of the United States.

A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall
M. Miller

Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining
the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National
Endowment for the Humanities.

Douglas R. Egerton, professor of history at Le Moyne College, is the author of Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America. Robert L. Paquette, executive director of The Alexander Hamilton Institute in Clinton, New York, is coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas.