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Denmark Vesey's Bible: The Thwarted Revolt That Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial. By Jeremy Schipper. (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford, U.K.: Princeton University Press, 2022. Pp. xxxiv, 181. $26.95, ISBN 978-0-691-19286-4.)
In 1822, Denmark Vesey, a formerly enslaved man living in Charleston, South Carolina, fomented an ill-fated insurrectionary plot against slavery. Subsequent court records make clear that Vesey was convinced (and successfully convinced others) of the incommensurability of slavery and Christianity. Perhaps more important, Vesey found in the Bible justification for the violent overthrow of the system.
In Denmark Vesey's Bible: The Thwarted Revolt That Put Slavery and Scripture on Trial, Jeremy Schipper offers a novel account of the Vesey plot through a close reading of extant court records, sermons, newspapers, and personal papers. Much of this material implies that Vesey appealed to biblical texts to justify his use of violence, but the particulars of his antislavery theology remain shrouded in mystery. Schipper hopes to reconstruct something of the biblical verses and interpretations that Vesey might have relied on in support of a general slave uprising.
Part of Schipper's challenge, of course, was that "no writings by Vesey survive" (p. xxix). Indeed, as Schipper observes, "slaveholders' extensive writings related to Vesey from the early 1820s provide much more documentation of their own use of the Bible to condemn his plot than...