Next month, two holidays with origins in the United States Civil War will occur one after the other in the Mountain State. On June 20, West Virginia will celebrate its birthdate, while the day prior, commonly called “Juneteenth,” represents the liberation day of the last American-held slaves in 1865.
The upcoming event provides the perfect opportunity to tell the story – or perhaps the mystery and story combined – of Denmark Vescey.
Why now? Because June 19 also represented the opening date of his trial – one of the great miscarriages in the history of the American justice system. To this day, historians do not agree on whether or not the crime he was accused of even took place.
A South Carolinian named Joseph Vescey purchased him in 1781 and they moved to Charleston in 1783. After winning a $1,500 lottery in 1799, approximately $52,000 in 2025 dollars, Denmark Vescey emancipated himself. He spent $600 to free himself and the rest to start his business.
Over the next 20 years, Vescey dedicated himself to building his own business. Possessing a remarkable talent for carpentry, Vescey emerged as one of the most sought after and also one of the most prosperous tradesmen in Charleston.
From the reputation he built in business and also his ability to read and write, Vescey emerged as a community leader. He, along with Morris Brown, founded the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, known affectionately through history as “Mother Emmanuel.”
Vescey like any free person of color in Charleston, even the few slave owning people of color there (a phenomenon documented by Carter G. Woodson, a Howard University and West Virginia State College academic, among others.) encountered the rigid social barriers designed for social control. Vescey found restrictions on his family, which were still owned as slaves. Officials also monitored and hounded his church.
The free market, however, gave Vescey his opportunity for success and a platform for leadership.
No longer completely synonymous with the word “capitalism,” champions of the free market also often led the rhetorical barrage against slavery. Well before Adam Smith published the first free market gospel, Wealth of Nations, he penned The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
In it, he wrote “there is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not . . . possess a degree of magnaninity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving.” Smith wrote of slaveowners that their “levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished.”
Smith also speculated in Wealth of Nations that the labor of a slave cost the owner significantly more than that of a free laborer. In Robert William Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross: the Economics of American Negro Slavery, the authors cited research and conclusions by Hinton Rowan Helper that demonstrated how the Southern embrace of a slave economy over that of a total free market had led the South to relative economic destitution in a number of metrics.
The French economic philosopher and second great free market thinker, Frederic Bastiat, placed slavery in the category of “legalized plunder,” in this case the wrongful appropriation of a person’s labor through depriving that person of liberty.
He went on to explain that when people effect a “conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder” one major consequence occurs when citizens face “the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.” This happens because of the inherent immorality of plunder.
And once a society loses the ideal that “the way to make laws respected is to make them respectable,” great evils can occur.
The 1840 writings of Bastiat almost certainly provoked the proto Marxism embraced by slavery’s most hysterical (not in the humorous sense, of course) defenders, such as George Fitzhugh. They saw the free market as their enemy because it rejected slavery, so they saw the movement opposing the free market as their ideological ally in authoritarianism.
Most people remember Denmark Vescey not as a great tradesman, businessman, or community leader, but for something far different. Vescey suffered accusation by Charleston authorities of having spent years carefully crafting a massive plot involving hundreds of black men and women in the region to rise up, burn the city of Charleston, and massacre every white individual possible.
To generate evidence and build a case, the city Court of Magistrates employed tactics that would have made Lavrenti Beria proud. Evidence came from the broken minds and bodies of over 100 swept up and taken away to have information tortured from them. That evidence fueled that era’s version of a show trial that both sent men to their deaths and also made a powerful political point.
As a figure like Beria would know, the mouths of tortured people will often give whatever evidence is desired from them. That evidence ended up convicting Vescey and 35 others of a capital crime, which resulted in the death by hanging of each.
Interestingly the Official Report produced served as the almost unquestioned foundation of narratives from both the most hardened slavery supporter and also the most committed abolitionist. The former wished to use “proof” of a great conspiracy as proof of the violent degeneracy of even a successful, educated, and religious black man such as Vescey. The latter focused on the notion of a heroic spirit in the enslaved worth liberating.
At this point in history, it’s difficult to say whether a conspiracy truly existed or not. The Official Report, based on evidence gathered by torture, offers nothing that a researcher can trust. Looking at the general nature of humanity, including the fact that a conspiracy of hundreds to commit revolutionary and violent acts, does not tend to remain secret over a period of years, would seem to point to the Vescey case as one imagined by officials to remove the best of all arguments against their defenses of the continued need for slavery – Vescey himself.
Either way, one can see through the story of Denmark Vescey what the free market offered a man even in a state of oppression and what a government and social system dead set against a free society and market would do to tear that same man down while ending his life in the process – just because his very life proved the justification for the system in place to be an utter lie.
