The Denmark Vesey Affair: A Documentary History

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, ultimately arguing that the Vesey plot was one of the most sophisticated acts of collective slave resistance in the history of the United States. This is the definitive account of a landmark event that spurred the South to secession.
A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller