Volume 17, Number 7 · November 4, 1971
Black Conspiracies
By Eric Foner
Denmark Vesey: The Slave Conspiracy of 1822
edited by Robert S. Starobin
Great Lives Observed Series, Prentice-Hall, 185 pp., $5.95
The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation of Source Materials
by Henry Irving Tragle
University of Massachusetts Press, 485 pp., $15.00
Nothing in the study of American slavery is more ironic than the extent to which analysis of that institution has had to depend on white sources. Slaves themselves left few if any written records, and historians have been only partially successful in reconstructing the slave experience from folklore and oral tradition. The student of slave rebellions faces two further disadvantages. Whites had no desire to advertise these events and often suppressed essential historical records. At the same time they frequently succumbed to panic and greatly exaggerated the size and scope of projected uprisings. As a result, evidence on crucial points is often lacking and information that does exist must be used with extreme care. The new documentary collections describing two of nineteenth-century America's most important slave conspiracies, the plot by Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822, and Nat Turner's rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831, perfectly illustrate these historiographical dilemmas.
Review, 3245 words
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