Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond by Mark Ames Page B

seems likely he is—then it deflates one of the few recognizable African-American heroes of the pre–Civil War period and forces us to consider the dismal reality of a three-thousand-strong freed-slave population that actually didn’t plot to rebel against the slaveholder ever. Now, Stuckey’s romantic description, “That a conspiracy on so large a scale should have existed in embryo during four years, and in an active form for several months, and yet have been so well managed, that, after actual betrayal, the authorities were again thrown off their guard and the plot nearly brought to a head again—this certainly shows extraordinary ability in the leaders, and a talent for concerted action on the part of slaves generally with which they have hardly been credited,” is almost agonizing to read. And yet Stuckey’s framing of Denmark Vesey’s Rebellion,” designed for a contemporary audience, was bound to look foolish someday, as all heroic, romanticized accounts of a flattering reality eventually do.
    The whites in Charleston certainly believed in the slave rebellion plot, just as fiercely as they believed in the normalcy and virtue of their slave-based civilization. The single-day hanging of thirty-four blacks may be the largest mass state execution in American history—proof that the fear was real and deep and proof of their undying dedication to maintaining slavery. As was the case in other real and imagined slave rebellions, South Carolinians didn’t blame slavery for inspiring the slave plot, but rather outside influences and the mental derangement of Africans.
    As Edwin Holland, then editor of the Charleston Times wrote, “Let it never be forgotten, that our negroes are truely the Jacobins of the country; that they are the anarchists and the domestic enemy; the common enemy of civilized society, and the barbarians who would, IF THEY COULD, become the DESTROYERS of our race.” If they could, that is.
    Of course the complete opposite was true, the whites were destroying, and had destroyed, the black race. Yet such sentiments among whites were normal, mainstream. It was extreme and unrealistic to be for total abolitionism; it was normal, indeed respectable, to mass-hang black slaves on the belief that they were genocidal racists. The actual causes of rebellion are always avoided by the most respectable people—rebellion is always the fault of outsiders and evil. Postal workers rampage post offices not because something is wrong in post offices, but because Hollywood puts bad thoughts in their heads or because some postal workers are just lunatics with a penchant for snapping.
    Vesey’s example reminds us that the slaveholders felt most threatened by the freed slaves who lived among them. It’s obvious their very existence reminded both whites and slaves that slavery was a condition, not a necessity or a favor. It reminded everyone that there was nothing inevitable about slavery, and therefore, perhaps, nothing normal about it either. A free black gave slaves hope, a model to aim for.
    Who are the freed slaves among us today, and who our are bonded slaves? How are they treated by our ruling class? How do they treat each other? While we know that freed slaves were a threat to slaveholders for a variety of obvious reasons, they also were as much a threat to slaves. The envy and spite that freed slaves living in the South must have inspired among captive slaves is almost unimaginable—and something we’d rather not face today, as it muddies our simple moral framing of that time. Yet this division and resentment between bonded and freed slaves not only helps explain how authorities in South Carolina were able to coax their slaves into turning on Vesey (some, it seems, needed little coaxing), but it also should remind us of our own craven, submissive behavior today, in far less obvious manifestations. Moreover, it is easy to imagine freed slaves taking on some of the prejudices of the whites, in order to curry