Such a man, we may be sure, was conscious of the possession, notwithstanding his black skin and blacker social and civil condition, of longings, aspirations, which the Slave-Code made it a crime for him to satisfy. He must have felt the stir of forces and faculties within him, which, under the heaviest pains and penalties, he was forbidden to exercise. Thus robbed of freedom, ravished of manhood, what was he to do? Ay, what ought he to have done under the circumstances? Ought he to have done what multitudes had done before him, meek and submissive folk, generations and generations of them, borne tamely like them his chains, without an effort to break them, and break instead his lion’s spirit? Ought he to have contented himself with such a woeful existence, and to have been willing at its end to mingle his ashes with the miserable dust of all those countless masses of forgotten and unresisting slaves? “Never!” replied what was bravest and worthiest of respect in the breast of this truly great-hearted man. The burning wrong which he felt against slavery had sunk in his mind below the reach of the grappling tongs of reason. It lay like a charge of giant powder, with its slow match attachment in the unplumbed depths of a soul which knew not fear; of a soul which was as hot with smouldering hate and rage as is a live volcano with its unvomited flame and lava. As well, under the circumstances, have tried to subdue the profound fury of the one with argument, as to quench the hidden fires of the other with water.
He knew, none better, that his oppressors were strong and that he was weak; that he had but one slender chance in a hundred of redressing by force the wrongs of himself and race. He knew too, that failure in such a desperate enterprise could have for himself but a single issue, viz.: certain death. But he believed that success on the other hand meant for him and his the gain of that which alone was able to make their lives worth the living, to wit.: a free man’s portion, his opportunity for the full development and free play of all of his powers amid that society in which was cast his lot. And for that portion, so precious, he was ready to take the one chance with all of its tremendous risks, to stake that miserable modicum of freedom which he possessed, the wealth laboriously accumulated by him, and life itself.
It is impossible to fix exactly the time when the bold idea of resistance entered his brains, or to say when he began to plan for its realization, and after that to prepare the blacks for its reception. Before embarking on his perilous enterprise he must have carefully reckoned on time, long and indefinite, as an essential factor in its successful achievement. For, certain it is, he took it, years in fact, made haste slowly and with supreme discretion and self-control. He appeared to have thoroughly acquainted himself with the immense difficulties which beset an uprising of the blacks. Not once, I think, did he underestimate the strength of his foes. A past grand master in the art of intrigue among the servile population, he was equally adept in knowledge of the weak spots for attack in the defences of the slave system, knew perfectly where the masters could best be taken at a disadvantage. All the facts of his history combine to give him a character for profound acting. In the underground agitation, which during a period of three or four years, he conducted in the city of Charleston and over a hundred miles of the adjacent country, he seemed to have been gifted with a sort of Protean ability. His capacity for practicing secrecy and dissimulation where they were deemed necessary to his end, must have been prodigious, when it is considered that during the years covered by his underground agitation, it is not recorded that he made a single false note, or took a single false step to attract attention to himself and movement, or to arouse over all that territory included in that agitation and among all those white people involved in its terrific consequences, the slightest suspicion of danger.
In his underground agitation, Vesey, with an instinct akin to genius, seemed to have excluded from his preliminary action everything like conscious combination or organization among his disciples, and to have confined himself strictly to the immediate business in hand at that stage of his plot, which was the sowing of seeds of discontent, the fomenting of hatred among the blacks, bond and free alike, toward the whites. And steadily with that patience which Lowell calls the “passion of great hearts,” he pushed deeper and deeper into the slave lump the explosive principles of inalienable human rights. He did not flinch from kindling in the bosoms of the slaves a hostility toward the masters as burning as that which he felt toward them in his own breast. He had, indeed, reached such a pitch of race enmity that, as he was often heard to declare, “he would not like to have a white man in his presence.”
And so, devoured by a supreme passion, mastered by a single predominant idea, Vesey looked for occasions, and when they were wanting he created them, to preach his new and terrible gospel of liberty and hate. Thus only could he hope to render their condition intolerable to the slaves, the production of which was the indispensable first step in the consummation of his design. Otherwise what possibility of final success could a contented slave population have offered him? He needed a fulcrum on which to plant his lever. He had nowhere in such an enterprise to place it, but in the discontent and hatred of the slaves toward their masters. Therefore on the fulcrum of race hatred he rested his lever of freedom for his people.
As the discontented bondsmen heard afresh with Vesey’s ears the hateful clank of their chains, they would, in time, learn to think of Vesey and to turn, perhaps, to him for leadership and deliverance. Brooding over their lot as Vesey had revealed it to them, they might move of themselves to improve or end it altogether, by adopting some such bold plan as Vesey’s. Meantime he would continue to wait and prepare for that moment, while they would be training in habits of deceit, of deep dissimulation, that formidable weapon of the weak in conflict with the strong, that ars artium of slaves in their attempts to break their chains—a habit of smiling and fawning on unjust and cruel power, while bleeds in secret their fiery wound, rages and plots there also their passionate hate, and glows there too their no less passionate hope for freedom.
Everywhere through the dark subterranean world of the slave, in Charleston and the neighboring country, went with his great passion of hate and his great purpose of freedom, this untiring breeder of sedition. And where he moved beneath the thin crust of that upper world of the master-race, there broke in his wake whirling and shooting currents of new and wild sensations in the abysses of that under world of the slave-race. Down deep below the ken of the masters was toiling this volcanic man, forming the lava-floods, the flaming furies, and the awful horrors of a slave uprising.
Nowhere idle was that underground plotter against the whites. Even on the street where he happened to meet two or three blacks, he would bring the conversation to his one consuming subject, and preach to them his one unending sermon of freedom and hate. It was then as if his stern voice, with its deep organ chords of passion, was saying to those men: “Forget not, oh my brothers your misery. Remember how ye are wronged every day and hour, ye and your mothers and sisters, your wives and children. Remember the generations gone weeping and clanking heavy chains from the cradle to the grave. Remember the oppression of the living, who with heart-break and death-wounds, are treading their mournful way in bitter anguish and despair across burning desert sands, with parched soul and shriveled minds, with piteous thirsts, and terrible tortures of body and spirit. Weep for them, weep for yourselves too, if ye will, but learn to hate, ay, to hate with such hatred as blazes within me, the wicked slave-system and the wickeder white men who oppress and wrong us thus.”
Ever on the alert was he for a text or a pretext to advance his underground movement. Did he and fellow blacks for example, encounter a white person on the street, and did Vesey’s companions make the customary bow, which blacks were wont to make to whites, a form of salutation born of generations of slave-blood, meanly humble and cringingly self-effacing, rebuking such an exhibition of sheer and shameless servility and lack of proper self-respect, he would thereupon declare to them the self-evident truth that all men were born free and equal, that the master, with his white skin, was in the sight of God no whit better than his black slaves, and that for himself he would not cringe like that to any man.
Should the sorry wretches, bewildered by Vesey’s boldness and dazed by his terrifying doctrines, reply defensively “we are slaves,” the harsh retort “you deserve to remain so,” was, without doubt, intended to sting if possible, their abject natures into sensibility on the subject of their wrongs, to galvanize their rotting souls back to manhood, and to make their base and sieve-like minds capable of receiving and retaining, at least, a single fermenting idea. And when Vesey was thereupon asked “What can we do?” he knew by that token that the sharp point of his spear had pierced the slavish apathy of ages of oppression, and that thenceforth light would find its red and revolutionary way to the imprisoned minds within. To the query “What can we do?” his invariable response was, “Go and buy a spelling book and read the fable of Hercules and the Wagoner.” They were to look for Hercules in their own stout arms and backs, and not in the clouds, to brace their iron shoulders against the wheels of adversity and oppression, and to learn that self-help was ever the best prayer.