South Carolina in the United States of America was the heart of slavery. It is where half the slaved brought to the USA disembarked from the slave traders' vessels. There in South Carolina the first shots of the civil war were fired and nine people were murdered at the church which was co founded by Denmark Vesey, the black slave who plotted an uprising of slaves in 1822. This book provides fabulous insight into some of the controversies that still exist today and that many of us outside of this jurisdiction would be totally unaware of. This shows us how slavery has been portrayed in the deep south since the American Civil war, it is not a history of slavery. It tells of so many of the deluded misconceptions or down right lies in which people condone and even praise slavery and those who instigated and promoted it. This is a very worthwhile read. It is enlightening and shocking in equal measure. I highly recommend it.

The premise of this book was so interesting, but the execution was just too dense and too long. In its defense, the book was clearly well researched and the authors were up front about their conclusions. However, I found myself avoiding reading because I was just not enjoying the book. Therefore, I did not finish reading and have to give it only one star.

Like Sachiko by Caren Stilson, I have been on the hunt for a well researched multi genre mentor text on slavery. The introduction to this book promises just that:
Denmark Vesey's Garden - the first book to trace the memory of slavery from its abolition in 1865 to the present - offers historical context for this contemporary divide.

This book, on the complexity of black history in America, uses Charleston, South Carolina to tell a much larger story about race relations. This extensively researched book covers both what is known and what is normally hidden (or forgotten). Although this is not for my audience of middle level readers, this is definitely a powerful resource for my social studies colleagues who are interested in bringing into their classroom larger ideas around perspective, historic empathy and the grayness of cause and effect.

An early digital copy was provided by Net Galley and the publisher for an honest review

"Charleston offers an unusually clear window into the genealogy of social memory. It reveals how personal memories of the past coalesced into collective, social memory—the aggregation of individual remembrances. Neither white nor black Charlestonians could easily forget slavery, though some certainly tried."

The book begins with a look at the way this memory is mapped over the landscape in statues, flags, and other symbols that celebrate a myth of the chivalric, romantic Lost Cause, and suppress how that entire economy was built on the scarred backs of slaves.

It begins with Dylann Roof’s recent shooting of nine people in one of Charleston’s oldest churches—after months of careful research, punctuated by proud selfies posted on the Internet along with Confederate flags, which touched off a firestorm of reaction for and against the many symbols of the Confederacy all over the south, from those ever-present flags to enormous, expensive statues.

Early on, the authors’ claim that “modern historians’ near unanimous agreement that slavery was the central cause of the conflict,” might be seen as a simplification of the fundamental divide between the Founding Fathers, as exemplified in Thomas Jefferson’s belief that the new republic ought to be a nation of yeoman farmers, and Alexander Hamilton, who saw the republic’s future success lying in manufacturing and trade, or industry.

The point that most historians I’ve read caution moderns to keep in mind is that slavery was fundamental to Jefferson’s romantic yeoman farm dream, for as those early pilgrims and explorers discovered, *somebody* has to do the backbreaking work of turning land into food, homes, cities. And Jefferson was A-okay with that work being done by slaves; meanwhile, the north was moving firmly away from slavery as it became industrialized.

This divide only grew as the republic grew. For this book, the authors focus in on the history of Charleston, which was the largest center of the slave trade. They begin with the history of Denmark Vesey, a slave who managed to win his freedom in a lottery, but who couldn’t afford to free his family. Desperate and angry at a system that guaranteed him no justice or rights, he organized an uprising that resulted in the arrest of over a hundred slaves, many of whom were tortured, and thirty-four (along with Vesey) executed.

Thereafter comes a grim history of policing slaves in case of real, or even imagined, slave risings. Slaves could be punished or killed for imagined “crimes”—the only problem being that their labor is lost. Slaves outnumbered whites by a margin, increasing white fears of slave revolt, and so governmentally sanctioned groups as well as local lynch mobs roamed around seeking “uppity” slaves.

Not all landowners were vicious on the surface. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison all talked up slavery as a benevolent system, positing the (white) male owner as father, and slaves as permanent children. According to the authors, James Henry Hammond, after seeing to it that petitions about slavery were declined by the Congressional House of Representatives, wrote in a masterpiece of hypocrisy, “Our patriarchal scene of domestic servitude is indeed well calculated to awaken the higher and finer feelings of our nature.”

Easy to feel benevolent when you are waited on hand and foot by silent, submissive slaves!

That sense of superiority comes to life in the early chapter, as the story of the Civil War is summarized from the black Charlestonian point of view, ending with snide, superior, and horrified newspaper accounts of blacks being able to congregate in places that had previous been reserved to whites, such as the race track and public parks.

So began the difficulties of Reconstruction. The authors’ careful, well-documented account can be summed up by the reflection that white politicians were forced to accept that black people could now vote. And so the Jim Crow era began, as money and effort was spent on erecting monuments to famous Southerners such as Calhoun, in salute to the once-glorious past.

Subsequent chapters illustrate how nostalgia for those gracious and chivalric days before the Civil War lived on after those who lived through it began dying off, as for blacks, segregation deepened and sharpened—which included divisions among African American citizens.

The authors also delve, with plentiful personal accounts, into the problem of teaching, distortion of, and erasure of black history. Some of the erasure was not due to whites covering up what’s inconvenient in extolling their grand view of the chivalric pre-Civil War South: many older blacks did not want their progeny hearing about their lives as slaves, or poking into their roots, deeply buried as they were in slavery.

Meanwhile, as tourism was on the rise during the early twentieth century, tourists were treated to white-written fictions about the faithful, loyal “mammy” and other sanitized views of the past. But counter to those, scholars and artists of various sorts began to delve into history to find the truth; the spirituals the blacks sang were hailed as a remarkable form of music in their own right, and at least one scholar studied Gullah, the slaves’ own language, which mixed English and African vocabulary. Meanwhile groups rose who performed black music—which included whites.

The authors takes some time with the vexed question of how primary sources are handled when gathering information. The authors furnish plenty of data on the manner in which early scholars obtained oral accounts from aging former slaves; leading questions being one issue, and another, these frail elderly folk out of sheer self-preservation telling these white visitors what they wanted to hear, and not necessarily the truth.

The second half of the book illustrates the difficulties of ending segregation, and the cultural and social cost as well as the political and economic, spinning out in eddies around symbols, such as the portrait of Denmark Vesey to hang in City Hall. This struggle in the mid-seventies, a handful of years after the school system finally agreed that American History from the black point of view might be worth of study, exemplified the fractures that reach back to those early days. Meanwhile, black tourism was on the rise, which meant a strong interest in black history, which dovetails into celebrations and reenactments.

The authors wind up the account by bringing it back to Dylann Roof’s cold-blooded massacre, and Denmark Vesey’s place in history, acknowledging that though tour guides now speak frankly about the black’ slave experience—unheard of a decade or two ago—it’s clear that someone like Roof can stand at the terminus of the Middle Passage and not see the site of so much human suffering, but a place that once trumpeted the dominance of the whites.

It’s a terrific book, academically sound, full of quotations from primary sources, and indicative of how far the city of Charleston has come, but how far it still needs to go.

The last third is entirely notes and an impressive bibliography.