The primary sources in this activity were written in 1740 and 1822. They contain racial language that reflects the dehumanizing attitudes of white slaveholding society at that time. Some of that language appears in document excerpts exactly as it was written.
This language is presented because it is part of the historical record - not because it is acceptable. Reading it in that context is different from saying it aloud. You are not expected or asked to repeat any of it.
If anything you encounter is difficult, you can speak with your teacher.
You are about to examine real documents from one of the most consequential trials in American history. Along the way, you will identify what laws were broken - and ask whether those laws were just in the first place.
Choose how you would like to play:
Everything you read in this activity comes from one of two public domain primary sources:
An Official Report of the Trials of Sundry Negroes, compiled by Lionel Henry Kennedy and Thomas Parker, Charleston, 1822. Kennedy and Parker were the prosecutors and judges at the trial - the same men who sentenced Denmark Vesey to death.
An Account of the Negroe Insurrection in South Carolina, published in London, March 1740. This is the primary eyewitness account of the Stono Rebellion of 1739, written by a white colonist one month after the event.
Before examining any documents, you need to understand what it means that the people who wrote the trial record were also the people who prosecuted and executed Denmark Vesey. Answer both questions below to unlock the documents.
To understand the laws used against Denmark Vesey in 1822, you must first understand why those laws were written in the first place. The answer begins eighty-three years earlier, on a Sunday morning near the Stono River.
"On the 9th day of September last being Sunday, which is the day the Planters allow [slaves] to work for themselves, some Angola Negroes assembled to the number of Twenty, and one who was called Jemmy was their Captain; they surprised a Warehouse belonging to Mr. Hutchenson at a place called Stono; they then plunder'd it of its Arms and Ammunition, and killed Mr. Robert Bathurst and Mr. Gibbs... they increased every minute by new Negroes coming to them, so that they were above Sixty, some say a hundred, on which they halted in a field and set to dancing, Singing and beating Drums to draw more Negroes to them."
The rebellion was suppressed by the militia that same afternoon. Approximately 25 white colonists and 40–50 enslaved people were killed. In the aftermath, the South Carolina General AssemblyThe colonial lawmaking body of South Carolina, made up entirely of white property-owning men. moved quickly to pass new laws.
The Negro Act of 1740 - passed directly in response to Stono - became the legal foundation for everything that happened to Denmark Vesey 82 years later. You cannot understand Vesey's trial without understanding this moment.
The Stono Rebellion produced new legislation within a year. The Negro Act of 1740 restructured how South Carolina dealt with enslaved people, free Black peopleIn 1822 Charleston, there was a significant community of free Black residents - people like Denmark Vesey who had purchased their freedom or been manumitted. The Negro Act applied to them as well as to enslaved people., and accusations of insurrectionInsurrection: an organized uprising against the established authority or government. Under South Carolina law, merely conspiring to plan one was a capital offense..
"...it shall be lawful for any two justices of peace, and any number of freeholders, not less than three... to examine into all treasons, insurrections, and other crimes and offenses which shall be committed by slaves... and their judgment shall be final and conclusive. No appeal shall lie from the judgment given by such court."
In 1822, this law was still in effect. It meant that Denmark Vesey and his co-defendants were tried by a special tribunalTribunal: a court or panel convened for a specific purpose. The 1822 court was not a regular court - it was assembled specifically to try Black defendants under the authority of the 1740 slave code. - not a regular court - with no jury, no appeal, and judges who also served as prosecutors.
The 1740 Act had originally been written for enslaved people. By 1822, it was being applied to Denmark Vesey, who was a free man - a property-owning carpenter who had purchased his freedom over two decades earlier.
The formal charge against Denmark Vesey was conspiracyConspiracy: an agreement between two or more people to commit an illegal act. Crucially, under South Carolina law you could be executed for conspiracy to commit insurrection even if the uprising never happened. to commit insurrection and murder. The court's introduction to the trial record described his alleged plan:
"Denmark Vesey, a free black man, was the individual who was first accused, and who, after a patient hearing, was adjudged guilty, and executed. His extensive acquaintance with this city, the character he bore with the Whites for intelligence and integrity, gave him great influence among the Black population of this place... He was in the habit of reading to them passages from the Old Testament... pointing out the fancied analogy between the situation of the Jews and that of the Negroes."
Vesey was charged not for a completed act of violence, but for organizing, planning, and attempting to recruit people to an insurrection that was discovered before it began. His reading of scripture aloud to Black Charlestonians was cited as evidence against him.
Vesey helped found the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in 1818. White authorities demolished it after the 1822 trial, seeing the congregation itself as a threat. Black Charlestonians rebuilt it. That church is still standing today on Calhoun Street in Charleston. It is known as Emanuel AME Church, also called Mother Emanuel. On June 17, 2015, a gunman entered a Bible study meeting there and killed nine people. The building Vesey's community was once forbidden to gather in became the site of another attack, 193 years later, on people gathered to read scripture together. The thread from 1822 to 2015 is direct.
Notice what the court emphasizes as suspicious: Vesey's intelligence, his influence, his literacy, and his reading of the Bible. These were the behaviors the prosecution pointed to as evidence of guilt.
Much of the evidence against Vesey came from testimony by other enslaved people. The 1740 Negro Act permitted the court to use this testimony differently than a standard court would. Below is an excerpt describing testimony about Rolla Bennett, an enslaved man who was one of Vesey's alleged lieutenants.
"The evidence against Rolla was clear and unambiguous... he had been pointed out by several witnesses as one of the principal leaders of the conspiracy, who had been most active in enlisting recruits, and had even, under the sanction of his master's name, visited the country negroes and engaged many of them... The witnesses on whose testimony he was convicted were not confronted with him, as is usual in criminal courts."
The phrase "witnesses were not confronted with him" means accusers could testify anonymously without being identified to the defendant. The court itself acknowledged this deviated from normal criminal procedure - and allowed it anyway.
The court also allowed testimony from enslaved people who were promised leniency in exchange for naming others. Historians note that after initially convicting a smaller group, the court then dramatically expanded the number of defendants when informants began naming more people under pressure.
Denmark Vesey defended himself at trial. Because the record was written by his prosecutors, his direct words are filtered through their account - a reminder of the source bias you studied at the start. However, one piece of testimony records what Vesey said in his own words, as reported by a white witness named Benjamin Ford.
"Denmark Vesey frequently came into our shop which is near his house, and always complained of the hardships of blacks - he said the laws were very rigid and strict and that the blacks had not their rights - that every one had his time, and that his would come round too - his general conversation was about religion which he would apply to slavery, as for instance, he would speak of the creation of the world, in which he would say all men had equal rights, blacks as well as whites."
Vesey argued that "all men had equal rights, blacks as well as whites" - language drawn directly from the Declaration of Independence, written 46 years earlier. The court used this argument as evidence of criminal conspiracy. The same words that justified the American Revolution were treated as justification for a death sentence.
The 1822 trial record includes an appendix that is rarely discussed - the trial of four white men who were also charged under South Carolina law. The charge was inciting slaves to insurrectionIncitement: encouraging or provoking someone to commit an illegal act. South Carolina law made it a crime for white people to encourage slave uprisings - a recognition that white people could also threaten the slave system from within..
"...four white persons were indicted for attempting to excite the slaves to insurrection... the punishment affixed to this offence by law, is fine and imprisonment, at the discretion of the court... The jury returned a verdict of Guilty against all four defendants."
The four white men - William Allen, John Igneshias, Andrew S. Rhodes, and Jacob Danders - were convicted of the same essential offense as Vesey: working to undermine the slave system. Their sentences were fines and short jail terms. Vesey was hanged.
The same legal system - the same year, the same city - produced two wildly different sentences for what was legally the same category of crime: inciting resistance to slavery. The difference was race.
Vesey was hanged on July 2, 1822. The trial did not end the legal consequences - it accelerated them. The South Carolina legislature passed sweeping new restrictions in the months that followed.
Three significant legal changes followed directly from the 1822 trial:
Free Black sailors from other states or countries were to be jailed whenever their ships docked in Charleston. If the captain failed to pay their jail costs, the sailors could be sold into slavery. This law targeted the communication networks Vesey had allegedly used.
The legislature made it much harder for enslaved people to purchase their freedom or be set free by their owners - directly responding to the fact that Vesey himself was a formerly enslaved man who had bought his freedom.
The state funded a new military arsenal in Charleston to house weapons and a permanent guard force. This building later became the Citadel military college. Its founding was explicitly tied to the fear of another Vesey.
You have now read the documents. Here is the critical legal question: if the Vesey trial happened today in an American court, which landmark Supreme Court decisions would it violate?
But there is a second, harder question built in: most of these cases were decided after 1822 - some by more than 140 years. That gap between when rights were denied and when they became enforceable law is itself a major historical lesson.
The Bill of Rights (1791) technically existed during Vesey's trial. But until the 14th Amendment (1868) and a series of Supreme Court decisions in the 20th century, most of those rights only protected people from the federal government - not from state courts like the one in Charleston. This is called the incorporation doctrine. It means that in 1822, South Carolina was not legally required to give Vesey a jury trial, even though the 6th Amendment existed.
For each landmark case below, read the description, then decide: does the Vesey trial violate it, and does the timing matter?
You have examined eight stations spanning 83 years of law, rebellion, and resistance - from Stono in 1739 to landmark Supreme Court cases decided over a century later.
Primary Sources (Public Domain):
Kennedy, Lionel H. and Thomas Parker. An Official Report of the Trials of Sundry Negroes. Charleston: James R. Schenck, 1822. Available at the Library of Congress: loc.gov/item/90107205 and Internet Archive: archive.org/details/trialrecordofden00vese
"Account of the Negroe Insurrection in South Carolina." Published London, March 1740. Reproduced in Mark M. Smith, ed., Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt. University of South Carolina Press, 2005.
To Learn More: Search "Denmark Vesey" at TeachingHistory.org and the Library of Congress "Today in History" archive for September 9 (Stono) and July 2 (Vesey's execution).