The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt

Abstract

In this self-styled “new history” of Nat Turner's 1831 rebellion, Patrick H. Breen, an associate professor of history at Providence College, revisits oft-cited sources and familiar episodes, finding a fresh analytical focus in “the divisions that earlier accounts of the revolt overlooked” (p. 166). Historiographically, he argues against a crude racial determinism in analyzing responses to events, and he promises to restore “uncertainty, confusion, and moral complexity” to the study of America's “bloodiest slave revolt” (pp. 16, 1). Breen hews closely to the narrative framework that emerged from officially sanctioned inquiries conducted by Thomas R. Gray and the “slaveholding elite” of Southampton County, Virginia, 185 years ago (p. 92). Breen places Turner—a “would-be prophet” with a few trusted followers—at the head of a small, localized rebellion that pitted slaves, masters, and free blacks against each other and temporarily deranged the social relations undergirding Virginia's slave society (p. 23). Order is restored with Turner's capture, the recording of his “confessions,” and the rebuilding of consensus around a “hegemonic” narrative that damned the rebel leader and exonerated all but those most directly involved with the uprising. Breen employs the Gramscian concept of cultural hegemony to explain the white vigilantes' relatively swift capitulation to an official narrative that minimized the threat and reaffirmed the state's authority in matters of crime and punishment.