A seven-foot bronze of Denmark Vesey, holding a Bible in one hand and a bag of carpenter's tools in the other, has stood on a black granite plinth in Hampton Park since its dedication in February 2014. Vesey was a Charleston carpenter who had won $1,500 in a lottery in 1799 and used it to buy his freedom. He was hanged on 2 July 1822 for organizing a planned uprising of enslaved people, modeled on the Haitian Revolution, to take the city and sail to Haiti. Two enslaved participants revealed the plot before it began. Authorities arrested 131 men, 67 were convicted, and 35, Vesey among them, were hanged. The back of the plinth names three of his lieutenants, Gullah Jack Pritchard, Peter Poyas and Monday Gell.
After the executions white Charlestonians tore down the African Church where Vesey had worshipped, whose congregation became Mother Emanuel after the Civil War. South Carolina began jailing visiting free Black sailors while their ships were in port, a state act created a 150-man Municipal Guard for the city, and in 1829 the state built an arsenal, the Citadel, which took in military cadets in 1843.
A committee to build a monument formed in 1996. Ground was broken in 2010, and the Colorado sculptor Ed Dwight made the figure. It went to Hampton Park after advocates agreed not to place it across from the John C. Calhoun monument in Marion Square. The base was vandalized in May 2021, and the restored monument returned in March 2022.
Getting there
32.8000, -79.9553
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