Debating Slavery After the Southampton Insurrection: A Crisis among North Carolina Slave Owners, 1831–1832

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the varied and unexpected responses among slave owners in North Carolina after Nat Turner's Insurrection in Virginia in 1831. It argues that their response was not political and economic as was the case in the famous debates carried out in the Virginia legislature at the same time. Instead, North Carolina slave owners engaged in a wide-ranging public and private debate over the morality of slavery that had its roots in a statewide discussion of abolition that began in 1829. The 1831–1832 debate in North Carolina debate focused on how slavery had failed in the recent slave conspiracies turned up in North Carolina, and how slavery could be made to function and survive by creating a stable and just society rooted in both inequality and morality. That, North Carolina slave owners hoped, would bring an end to the continuous war between white enslavers and enslaved African Americans that had been publicly exposed by Turner's revolt and subsequent conspiracies discovered in North Carolina.