Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County by David F. Allmendinger Jr.

Abstract

Reviewed by: Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County by David F. Allmendinger Jr. Marjoleine Kars Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County. By David F. Allmendinger Jr. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pp. [xiv], 416. $49.95, ISBN 978-1-4214-1479-9.) Over the years, scholars have expressed much uncertainty about Nat Turner and his 1831 rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, because of the thin evidentiary base that was largely generated by slaveholders. Anonymous newspaper reports by journalists and judges, brief trial transcripts, and a pamphlet, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831), published by Thomas R. Gray, have been the principal sources. Scholars have disagreed over the scope of the uprising, Turner’s motives and plans, and the reliability of Gray’s Confessions. William Styron’s interpretation in his 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner also generated both attention and controversy. Modern historical book-length treatments date to the 1960s and 1970s. Besides several collections of primary sources, there are three histories by Herbert Aptheker, Stephen B. Oates, and Thomas C. Parramore. Just over a decade ago, a collection of essays on Nat Turner edited by Kenneth S. Greenberg appeared. Turner’s rebellion is thus currently experiencing a renaissance with the publication of the volume under review and another recent book by Patrick H. Breen. Dissatisfied with our lack of knowledge about both blacks and whites who were involved in the uprising, David F. Allmendinger Jr. set out to reconstruct their lives. In the absence of significant collections of ego-documents, he spent many years mining local records, including “wills, deeds, inventories, court minutes, chancery records, marriage registers, free black registers, processioners’ returns, tax lists, [and] poll books,” linking what he found to the manuscript returns of the U.S. census (p. 302). This exhaustive research has allowed Allmendinger to admirably map the lives of white, middling Southampton County residents in extraordinary and at times dizzying detail. Convoluted family histories and connections, economic ups and downs, and even the layouts and contents of cabins and houses are all here. His research exposes in fine detail the workings of a local, kin-based economy in which slaves often made up the bulk of a white family’s wealth. Both white success and misfortune had devastating consequences for the enslaved, who were freely bartered, bequeathed, gifted, mortgaged, hired, and sold, paying with forced mobility and family separations for their owners’ striving. Turner himself had at least seven different owners, all connected by family ties, by the time he started his rebellion at age thirty-one. [End Page 154] This painstaking analysis allows Allmendinger to do three things: take a close look at Turner’s history and reassess his motives and plans beyond religious inspiration; retrace the steps of the insurgents during the rising; and carefully examine Gray’s Confessions. Allmendinger also constructs, for the first time, definitive lists of participants and victims. He finds that the rebellion was both wholly local and entirely Turner’s idea, motivated in part by shrinking opportunities for manumission. He argues that the insurgents’ movements and killings were deliberate, rather than indiscriminate, aimed at settling “old scores” and inspiring terror. As many as a quarter of the insurgents were forced to participate (p. 104). Allmendinger also assesses Gray’s Confessions, a baffling document containing two voices, Gray’s and Turner’s. Carefully reconstructing the timing of what Gray knew about the uprising, Allmendinger argues quite persuasively that the content of the Confessions was largely Turner’s, thereby refuting previous claims that the voices could not be disentangled. In all, Allmendinger has mined local records for much new information. But as one would expect, the yield disproportionately favors the white population. The author does, in the end, little to illuminate the world of the enslaved. On what experiences, beyond those of their immediate enslavement, did the insurgents draw? What discussions might have taken place in their quarters? What about the many enslaved persons who hid from the insurgents or refused to join? Only one woman was executed for her involvement. Was this entirely a rebellion of men? One cannot but think that had the author made more extensive use of the vast...