A Family Affair: Black Family Networks and the 1822 Vesey Conspiracy

Abstract: In 1822, white authorities in Charleston, South Carolina, discovered a major uprising among the city's free Black and enslaved population. After more than 100 people were arrested for their roles in the putative plot, sixty-seven people were convicted and either executed or banished from the country. While the episode, known as the Denmark Vesey conspiracy after the uprising's ringleader, is well-known to historians more generally, we know much less about how it affected the lived experiences of Black Charlestonians and how it influenced Black family networks. Although we know that women and sometimes children participated in slave insurrections like Vesey's conspiracy, we do not know how rebels used kinship ties to mobilize their resistive movements or what kind of precise impact violent resistance strategies had on Black communities in early America more broadly. Yet when analyzed through Black family networks, the conspiracy reveals how people used familial connections to spread insurrection and protect themselves from enslaver violence. Notwithstanding the use of these relationships to protect against chattel slavery, the conspiracy itself became another obstacle to their fight for freedom.