Journal of Southern History

James O'Neil Spady and his collaborators present this volume as a work of what Manisha Sinha calls "reparative history," dedicated to emphasizing the fugitivity and liberatory intent of the 1822 uprising in Charleston, South Carolina, on the occasion of its two-hundredth anniversary (p. xiii). Two sets of essays place the Denmark Vesey affair as an event within a broader Black radical tradition of cosmopolitan antislavery and abolition, reaching from slavery's origins in early modernity to the present moment of racial reckoning in the United States led by Black Lives Matter.

Resistance and fugitive direct action are the watchwords of the first set of essays. Bernard E. Powers Jr. links the uprising to the shockwaves produced by the Haitian Revolution in the Greater Caribbean world of news, rumor, and radical discussion that the late Julius S. Scott termed a "common wind" of networks made up of stevedores, sailors, and other "masterless men and women" (p. 37). Slavery's attack on belonging, family, and community were, for Spady, key forces driving Vesey and others to conspire against their enslavers. Jumping ahead to 1831, Anita Rupprecht and Cathy Bergin turn to the Tortola slave conspiracy as another instance of antislavery direct action in the Atlantic world. Moving northward, Lucien Holness explores a radical freesoil tradition among Black communities in southwestern Pennsylvania. Wendy Gonaver's contribution looks at the historical memory of armed slave resistance on St. Simon's Island, Georgia, in 1862, particularly accounts of this incident by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Susie King Taylor.

Memorialization and the politics of commemoration are the subjects of the second group of chapters. Songs make up a counterhistory of slave resistance, and William D. Jones looks at the lyrics Black singers used to memorialize Jean St. Malo, a Louisiana maroon killed by a white militia in 1784. Shawn Halifax and Terri L. Snyder examine commemorations of the 1739 Stono Rebellion in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Crossing the Atlantic, Samuel Ntewusu focuses on the Feok festivals held in Builsa towns and cities in northeastern Ghana as rites that celebrate resistance to slave raiders. Questioning historian Michael P. Johnson's hypothesis that white interrogators invented a "nonexistent plot" attributed to Vesey, Robert Paquette situates the leader as a Black Christian intellectual whose church membership informed his resistance to slavery (p. 184). Douglas R. Egerton brings the lives of enslaved rebels' wives and children to the fore in his essay, which centers the fate of women such as Vesey's wives Beck, Dolly, and Susan and several of his many children, including Denmark Vesey Jr., Randolph, and Robert. A final essay by Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle traces contested public memorials to Vesey from 1822 to the present, including a 1976 portrait that hung in Charleston's Gaillard Municipal Auditorium and the 2014 monumental statue in Hampton Park.

In total this collection does much to reframe the 1822 uprising as one episode akin to others in a dynamic Black Atlantic, African diaspora, and Age of [End Page 770] Revolutions framework. Returning to the idea of a reparative history, the volume is as dedicated to restoring the circumatlantic dimensions of the uprising as it is to reinstating Vesey himself within radical history. As a whole this volume does much to question Michael P. Johnson's essay "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators," which casts Vesey as a possible "fall guy" for the Charleston conspiracy court's rumor-fueled inquest, and characterizes Vesey as more akin to a medieval European heretic than an Atlantic Revolutionary freedom fighter and liberation preacher (William and Mary Quarterly 58 [October 2001], p. 971). Fugitive Movements: Commemorating the Denmark Vesey Affair and Black Radical Antislavery in the Atlantic World does not reinscribe a heroic...