Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion: The Environment, The Event, The Effects (review)

Abstract

184CIVIL WAR HISTORY was a wider difference between the white and the black man than in Arkansas. I labored hard, but I was a nigger and that was enough with the Yankees, and I preferred to be a slave with my old master, where I could be respected as such, than to be a free man among white men in a free state." As the new historiography on "free state" negrophobia approaches the end of its first decade, the point seems to have been made. Perhaps it is time historians, armed with studies like Mr. Berwanger's, returned to establishing with a great deal more precision than formerly just where—in terms of white northern social groupings—the strength resided that favored full civil equality for black Americans. Berwanger, for instance, places great emphasis on the results of popular referendums that excluded blacks from four western states; all together, negrophobia triumphed by 174,000 to 45,000 votes—or by a resounding 79.5 per cent. I for one would like to know more about that important 20.5 per cent minority than I think all the historians of western abolitionism have yet chosen to tell us. Robert R. Dykstra University of Nebraska Nat Turner's Skve Rebellion: The Environment, The Event, The Effects . By Herbert Aptheker. (New York: Humanities Press, 1966. Pp. iv, 152. $4.00.) Herbert Aptheker, Marxist historian and theoretician, has turned back to his master's essay, written thirty years ago, to produce what purports to be an intensive look at Nat Turner's rebellion. The essay itself examines the context of the uprising and its impact as well as the actual event. An appendix reprints Turner's "Confessions" which, as Aptheker points out, is practically the only, and unquestionably the most authoritative, source for the Turner rebellion. Unhappily the long essay-introduction adds little to existing knowledge. Scholars of southern and Negro history like Staudenraus and Elkins canvassed the material after Aptheker but published first, with the result that Aptheker's essay is stale and stilted. In fact, his own American Negro SZaue Revolts, published in 1943, covered essentially the same ground as this essay. The so-called myth of the Virginia legislative debate of 1832, apparently signifying the last gasp of the antislavery movement in the upper South, received monographic treatment from Joseph Clarke Robert in 1941 and a lucid restatement in Stanley Elkins' Skvery in 1959 (pp. 209-211). The slave unrest and the pinched southern economy have also been familiar ground for historians for many years. Aptheker firmly believes that Turner, symbolic of the rising black masses, almost single-handedly produced the southern turn toward a tighter control over slavery. This is a distortion in degree which ignores the process which had been transforming the South during the previous dec- BOOK REVIEWS185 ade, a process shaped by a multitude of economic, political, intellectual, emotional and technological factors. Of these, fear of rebellion, and the climactic Nat Turner uprising in particular, was important, but it was an importance leavened by other forces. It is unfair to compare the work of a historian and a novelist, but the almost simultaneous appearance of William Styron's novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, merits a word about the two treatments. Using tools not available to the scholar, Styron captures the essence of southern plantation life and black-white relationships in a way that throws additional light on the period and the people. In the novel, Turner becomes a man. In the historical essay, the South and its slaves are overweighted with statistics and interpretation which fall short of explaining the event and its impact, and the man who caused it. Leslie H. Fishel, Jr. State Historical Society of Wisconsin The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Shvety in the North. By Arthur Zilversmit. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. Pp. viii, 262. $6.95.) Professor Zilversmit has put into convenient form a summary of the growth of abolitionist opinion and legislation to end slavery in the northeastern colonies and states. The first half of the book sketches the nature of slavery in this area and the well-known procession of men in the colonial period who argued...