Early life
Manuscript transcripts of testimony at the 1822 Court proceedings in Charleston, South Carolina and its Report after the events make up most of what is known of Denmark Vesey’s life. The Court judged Vesey guilty of conspiracy in a slave rebellion and had him executed by hanging.
The court reported that he was born into slavery about 1767 in St. Thomas, at the time a colony of Denmark. He was called Telemaque; historian Douglas Egerton suggested that Vesey could have been of Coromantee (an Akan-speaking people) origin.[5] Biographer David Robertson suggested that Telemaque may have been of Mande origin, but his evidence has not been generally accepted by historians.[6]
Telemaque was purchased at about age 14 by Joseph Vesey, a Bermudian sea captain and slave merchant. After a time, Vesey sold him to a planter in French Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti). When the youth was found to suffer epileptic fits, Vesey took him back and returned his purchase price to the former master. Biographer Egerton found no evidence of Vesey having epilepsy later in life. He suggests that Vesey may have faked the seizures in order to escape the particularly brutal conditions on Saint-Domingue.[7]
Telemaque worked as a personal assistant and interpreter in slave trading to Joseph Vesey, including periods spent in Bermuda, and was known to speak French and Spanish in addition to English. Following the American Revolution, the captain retired from the sea and slave trade, settling in Charleston, South Carolina. Telamaque had learned to read and write by the time he arrived in Charleston, and was already fluent in French and English.[8] Charleston was a continental hub connected to Bermuda’s thriving merchant shipping trade. The center of the Lowcountry’s rice and indigo plantations, the city had a majority-slave population and thriving port. Vesey “hired out” Telemaque as a skilled carpenter, and he joined other artisans in the city, many of them free people of color who had their own community in the city.
Freedom
On November 9, 1799, Telemaque won $1500 in a city lottery. At the age of 32, he bought his freedom for $600 from Vesey. He took the surname Vesey and the given name of Denmark, after the nation ruling his birthplace of St. Thomas. Denmark Vesey began working as an independent carpenter and built up his own business. By this time he had married an enslaved woman. Their children were born into slavery under the principle of partus sequitur ventrem, by which children of a slave mother took her status. Vesey worked to gain freedom for his family, and tried to buy the freedom of his wife but her master would not sell her.[9] This meant their future children would also be born into slavery.
Along with many other slaves, Vesey had belonged to the Second Presbyterian church, and chafed against its restrictions on black members. In 1818 he co-founded a congregation of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME Church), organized in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as the first independent black denomination in the United States. The AME Church was supported by leading white clergy in Charleston. In 1818 white authorities briefly ordered the church closed, as under the slave code, black congregations were not supposed to worship after sunset. The church attracted 1848 members, making it the second largest AME church in the nation.[10] City officials always worried about slaves in groups; they closed the church again for a time in 1821; the City Council warned that its classes were becoming a “school for slaves” (under the slave code, slaves were prohibited from being taught to read).[11] Vesey was reported as a leader in the congregation, drawing from the Bible to project hope for freedom.