Vesey and Gordon's Righteous Insurrection: The Legacy of Denmark Vesey's Natural Rights Revolution in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856)

Abstract:African Methodist Episcopal Minister Denmark Vesey's Natural Rights philosophy influenced Harriet Beecher Stowe to argue for violent revolution as a means of social protest. Stowe's enslaved revolutionaries assert that the natural right to freedom guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence made slavery immoral and that justified violence was a necessary evil to gain one's liberty. Stowe's second novel represents a departure from William Lloyd Garrison's non-resistance Abolitionist philosophy and adopts a militant form of social protest. Stowe echoes Douglass's use of African-American revolutionaries Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner to argue that the enslaved had the inalienable right to throw off their bonds through their own volition. Vesey's attempted revolt is an example of an honorable rebellion in which violent resistance serves as a means to achieve an enlightened Lockean natural state in which all oppressed black men and women are free, equal, and independent.