Slavery and the Political Touchstones of a Young Republic

Abstract

Slavery and the Political Touchstones of a Young Republic Tamika Nunley Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship. By Christopher James Bonner. America in the Nineteenth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 254 pages. Cloth, ebook. Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition. By Bronwen Everill. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020. 328 pages. Cloth, ebook. Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner’s Community. By Vanessa M. Holden. Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. 182 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. The World Colonization Made: The Racial Geography of Early American Empire. By Brandon Mills. Early American Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 259 pages. Cloth, ebook. The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States. By Derrick R. Spires. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. 352 pages. Cloth, ebook. In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History. By Christopher Tomlins. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2020. 372 pages. Cloth, ebook. During the past decade, a resurgence of scholarship examining nineteenth-century politics and abolition has broadened to emphasize the actions of the enslaved and the articulations of Black political strategies. Though this literature lies beyond the conventional chronological boundaries of early American and Atlantic history, its robust ideas concerning political resistance and the afterlives of revolutions, as well as its assessments of commercial and cultural currents crossing the Atlantic, should be of considerable interest to scholars of early American history. In particular, recent work on the early nineteenth century using various modes of analysis—including speculation, literary history, and Black radical intellectual traditions—shows the myriad ways that slavery, resistance, and moral reform [End Page 135] shaped early American politics. Both the methods deployed and the historical trajectories uncovered by these scholars should prove generative for early Americanists and Atlanticists in future framings of their inquiries. Above all, recent scholarship has shown the vitality of Black political engagement. In In the Matter of Nat Turner, Christopher Tomlins uses a “speculative” approach, deploying a skillful reading and imagining of the sources, to offer a compelling retelling of Nat Turner’s life, beliefs, and intellect as well as the political significance of his rebellion. Tomlins begins with a treatment of how Turner appears in public memory, literature, and history. This approach allows the reader to think through the origins of the assumptions that shape how historians interpret Turner and the rebellion. For instance, as Tomlins shows, historians C. Vann Woodward and Eugene D. Genovese were influenced by novelist William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner in that they acknowledged the significance of the rebellion but remained largely dismissive of Turner as a credible historical figure and depicted him as a “hate-driven madman” (22).1 Tomlins reads the mediated testimony of Turner’s court deposition as a window into his biblical hermeneutics. He depicts Turner as not a fanatic but as an evangelical Christian who experienced sanctification and daily edification in preparation for holy war and makes the essential intervention of taking the theological interpretations of the enslaved seriously. More specifically, he shifts the focus from the conventional emphasis on Exodus and the Old Testament to the book of Luke in the New Testament. This move—away from drawing parallels between the enslaved and Old Testament Israelites and toward recognizing the self-image of Nat Turner, enslaved rebel, as sacrificial Christ figure—invites a level of analysis and complexity that the field desperately needs to understand the spiritual dimensions of resistance. According to Tomlins, “Turner is living entirely in sacred space and time, beyond Armageddon, his calling—at last clarified—to fight the final battle against Satan” (61). For Tomlins, the profoundly spiritual dimensions of Turner’s vision expose the problems with how scholars usually conceptualize resistance, which typically refers to the range of responses enacted by the enslaved to challenge enslavers and slavery itself, rather than to the epistemological foundations of resistance and their implications for broader debates. As Tomlins shows, responses to Turner even among white Virginians were far...