Turner Rebellion Research Articles

Beyond Slavery's Shadow: Free People of Color in the South

The first thought that comes to mind when thinking about free people of color in the American South before the Civil War is why they remained in a region where the “peculiar institution” and racial tension was so predominant. Warren Eugene Milteer's work reveals the complex nature of the over 250,000 Blacks in the South prior to 1861 who lived surrounded by slavery, plantations, and the slavocracy. Milteer asserts that “in the face of discrimination and exclusion” people of color “created their own churches and social organizations. Even during the height of proslavery and white supremacist attacks” (p. 6). These Blacks’ collective experiences were diverse, posed serious challenges to their safety, and were filled with discrimination, exclusion, and disfranchisement.In the past, historian Ira Berlin called these individuals of the South “slaves without masters,” but Milteer demonstrates the ways free Blacks navigated the coarse terrain of brutality, bigotry, and numerous battles to remain liberated (pp. 10–11). There has also been an array of state and local studies, biographies, and family histories that have addressed this subject matter. Milteer stresses that people of color in the South were a conundrum who oscillated between being despised and victimized, and privileged and celebrated; these conflicting realities were a common part of their “multifaceted” existence.By way of seven dense chapters, Milteer highlights the lives of people of color who were called everything from “negroes,” “mulattoes,” and “mustees” to “Indians” (pp. 8–10). In Chapter 1, “Liberty in the Colonial South,” he illustrates how, in the 1600s and 1700s, “lawmakers slowly chipped away at the rights and privileges of free people of color” (p. 19). This chapter investigates colored indentured servants, manumission issues, the fear of interracial relations, and the ways in which enslaved people manipulated imperial conflicts to achieve greater freedom. In Chapter 2, “The Revolution of Freedom,” Milteer discusses the late 1700s, including the Haitian Revolution, Quakers, Benjamin Banneker, and the Spanish and French colonies in North America. The slight advancements people of color achieved during this era make up Chapter 3, which is unfortunately titled “The Backlash.” Milteer clearly demonstrates that progress was not linear for colored people of the South. Things did not progressively get better; instead, there were hazardous social, political, and economical zigzags, and the twist and turns took a toll on them.Chapter 4, “Making Freedom Work,” examines the United States Census to accentuate the increase of free people of color from 1800 to 1830. Within this timeframe the number of free people nearly tripled, thus causing racial contention, but it also allowed colored families, some free, others enslaved, to gather and to build deeper community bonds. Milteer asserts that whites depended on the unskilled and skilled labor of people of color. Chapter 5 highlights the aftermath of the 1831 Nat Turner Rebellion, which resulted in the arrest of colored people, heightened surveillance, and new rules hindering movement, alcohol consumption, and assembly. People's homes in the surrounding area were looted for valuables, yet those in states far from the Virginia epicenter, like Louisiana and Arkansas, were untouched by the Rebellion.Chapter 6, “Resisting Radicalism,” starts with a vignette on Pierre Casanave, addresses the population increase of free people, and ends with institution building and the defending of rights, which many historians have reserved for the aftermath of slavery. Chapter 7, “Preserving Freedom in a Divided South,” details the Civil War Era and the battles free people fought to keep their liberty and property. The Confederates tried to force people of color to act in their interest, and they reacted with violent retribution when Blacks resisted.The book's conclusion briefly tells of Hiram Revels, the first US senator of color, who finished the term of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Mississippi. Revels's ancestors were free for generations in America, and Milteer deemed him “no ordinary man” and “a man of privilege” (p. 250). The author explained that free people of color post-slavery were leaders in their communities and fought against Jim Crow policies. Overall, Beyond Slavery's Shadow answers vital questions, offers a new approach to studying free people of color, and provides an examination wide enough to show their varied experiences from lowly unskilled labors to upper-class entrepreneurs. A few of the author's claims, however, are doubtful. For instance, it is hard to fathom how it was somehow elevating or liberating for free people to do “the most difficult jobs as servants and common laborers” (p. 127). Also, many free people of color left the South for greater freedoms in the North or other places like Liberia. Nonetheless, the book will be a staple for scholars studying this subject matter, and it possesses valuable anecdotes on little-known individuals such as Joseph Jenkins Roberts, Marietta T. Hill, and Daniel A. Payne, which humanize their struggle, success, and survival in the South.

Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community by Vanessa M. Holden

Reviewed by: Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community by Vanessa M. Holden Kelly Kennington (bio) Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community. By Vanessa M. Holden. ( Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2021. Pp. 184. Cloth, $110.00; paper, $22.95.) In Surviving Southampton, Vanessa M. Holden expands the usual scope of the 1831 Southampton Rebellion to include the larger community of free and enslaved women and children who produced and participated in the uprising. Her reframing of the conflict from Nat Turner's Rebellion to the Southampton Rebellion reinforces her argument that such individuals as Nat Turner did not act alone in their resistance to slavery. Violent uprisings always necessitated the participation of the Black community through a variety of resistance strategies. Enslaved and free women's resistance ranged from violence to sharing information or providing support for the rebellion. Holden's work also considers the Southampton County community as a significant context for what she calls an "intimate" rebellion. She notes how the class concerns of small and midsized farms affected the rebellion by bringing enslavers; enslaved men, women, and children; and free people of African descent into close contact in their work and social lives. Holden is to be commended for the painstaking work involved in extracting this story from a limited archive of legal testimony taken under extreme duress. Holden has organized her book into five thematic chapters that, first, lay the foundation for the rebellion and, then, closely examine the source materials available to study and understand it. She builds on scholarship that emphasizes the significance of space and geography, including such classics as Stephanie Camp's Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004) and Anthony Kaye's Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (2007), as well as more recent works, such as Ryan Quintana's Making a Slave State: Political Development in Early South Carolina (2018) and Rashauna Johnson's Slavery's Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions (2016). In the first chapter, Holden provides the backdrop for the rebellion by detailing slavery and resistance in Southampton County, which she describes as "geographies of surveillance and control." She argues that we must look both at the enslavers' geographies of control and at geographies of "evasion and resistance" used by enslaved community members to survive their circumstances (11). The next three chapters examine the roles of [End Page 105] women, free people of African descent, and children in resistance before, during, and after the Southampton Rebellion. Historians have minimized these groups in literature on the Southampton Rebellion, and rebellions more generally, but each group practiced resistance strategies that allowed them to contribute to the Southampton Rebellion. Finally, chapter 5 dives into a close reading of witness testimonies in the immediate wake of the rebellion, including the famous record of Nat Turner's Confessions, paying unique attention to the silences. Holden thus heeds the call of Marisa J. Fuentes, in Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (2016), and others to examine silences in the archives, though Holden adds an interesting twist to how the silences are interpreted. When witnesses take responsibility for the rebellion without implicating other community members, Holden astutely reads these omissions as intentional "silences" that "should be trusted and celebrated" (120). In other words, silences can also reveal "intent, agency, and strategy" (84). Holden's main contribution to the historiography is explaining in detail how a whole new cast of characters participated in rebellions of enslaved and free people of African descent. In Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (2020), Vincent Brown briefly alludes to the role of women in rebellions, and he calls for additional work on women's roles in them. Holden, however, offers a more meticulous analysis of the parts played by enslaved women, free people of African descent, and children in Southampton. She does so by using the rich trial record of the accused rebels, which includes testimony from several enslaved and free women about the men, women, and children involved in the Southampton Rebellion. Holden argues that witnesses sought...

Beyond Slavery's Shadow: Free People of Color in the South by Warren Eugene Milteer Jr.

Reviewed by: Beyond Slavery's Shadow: Free People of Color in the South by Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. Felicia Jamison (bio) Beyond Slavery's Shadow: Free People of Color in the South. By Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 376. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $35.95.) Beyond Slavery's Shadow explores the varied experiences of free people of color in the southern colonies and the United States from the colonial period to the Civil War. From the outset, Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. makes several arguments that he expertly supports throughout the book. First, he asserts that the struggles of free people of color to maintain their rights and independence were consistently waged against colonial powers and state legislators who "gradually adopted attacks on free people of color as [End Page 116] an indirect defense of an economy propelled by slave labor and as a way to attract support from disaffected whites who saw persons of color as commercial competitors" (3). Free people of color—aided by their allies, which included white neighbors, indentured servants, and enslaved people—constantly fought to preserve their freedom and dignity. Milteer's study incorporates a wide range of persons who were included under the constantly changing umbrella category of "free people of color." The grouping varies depending on the time and place being discussed and includes "individuals labeled 'negroes,' 'mulattoes,' 'mustees,' 'Indians,' 'blacks,' 'pardos,' 'morenos,' 'mestizos,' 'quadroons,' and 'octoroons,' who possessed various ancestral connections to the Americas, Africa, Europe, and South Asia" (8). Free people of color obtained this status in a variety of ways, including being born free, suing for their freedom in the courts, purchasing their freedom from enslavers, being manumitted, or self-emancipating by fleeing from enslavers. The author shows that there was no universal experience for this group. Their lives differed depending on "gender, wealth, reputation, occupation, and family connection" (5). For example, Jo and Ann Sip, a married couple who lived in colonial-era Delaware, were bound out and forced to provide free labor for up to seven years to pay jail fees. In contrast, Rachel Bales was fortunate to have a Scottish grandmother who testified on her behalf as evidence of her free status as a British subject. The titles of the chapters reflect the constant battle to maintain one's rights. The book is structured chronologically, which Milteer uses to good effect. Chapter 1, "Liberty in the Colonial South," builds on the stripping away of rights from free people of color, which often occurred by discouraging interracial relationships. Milteer examines legislation from various southern colonies, such as Virginia's 1662 law that increased the fine for marriage and sex between whites and people of African descent; North Carolina and Maryland legislation that fined white women and bound out their "mulatto" children for several years; and Louisiana's 1724 Code Noir, which forbade marriage between white and Black people under threat of fine or punishment. Chapter 2, "The Revolution of Freedom," emphasizes how free people of color used the opportunity and rhetoric of the American Revolution to obtain more rights, often via an enslaver's manumission or by suing for their freedom in court. Chapter 3, "The Backlash," and chapter 4, "Making Freedom Work," are in conversation with one another. The former shows the backlash of the Revolutionary era in which states passed restrictive legislation that made it difficult to gain one's freedom, and the latter discusses how free people of color sought to maintain their rights [End Page 117] while providing important services to their neighbors as "laborers, farmers, artisans, and business owners" (104–5). Chapter 5, "Rebellion and Radicalism," focuses on the antebellum period after the 1831 Nat Turner Rebellion, in which southern states created laws that stripped away rights from free people of color and often forced them to leave the state after gaining freedom. Chapter 6, "Resisting Radicalism," further highlights the varied experiences of free people of color. Though the free population in the South had increased from 182,070 to 262,322 between 1830 and 1860, the vast majority "remained landless and possessed limited personal property" (193). Nonetheless, during the antebellum period, free people of color...

Beyond Slavery's Shadow: Free People of Color in the South by Warren Eugene Milteer Jr.

Reviewed by: Beyond Slavery's Shadow: Free People of Color in the South by Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. Scarlet Jernigan Beyond Slavery's Shadow: Free People of Color in the South. By Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. [xii], 363. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6439-2; cloth, $95.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-6438-5.) In Beyond Slavery's Shadow: Free People of Color in the South, Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. expands on his book North Carolina's Free People of [End Page 772] Color, 1715–1885 (Baton Rouge, 2020) to provide a needed overview of the "collective lives of free people of color" in the South (p. 11). He rejects older scholarship by Ira Berlin and others who asserted that free persons of color were "'slaves without masters'" who existed between "'abject slavery'" and "'full freedom'" (p. 11). Instead, Milteer contends that free people of color "experienced a freedom that was contested yet worth defending" (p. 12). "Intersecting social hierarchies" of "wealth, gender, occupation, reputation, and religion" resulted in diverse behaviors among free persons of color and a "complex assortment of relations" with white southerners (pp. 2, 4). Seven chapters and a conclusion span from the colonial era to Reconstruction. In chapters 1 and 2, the author compares the lives of free people of color in the colonial South with their counterparts in other empires, noting discrimination along with diversity, complexity, and flexibility. During the American Revolution, "unsettled social landscapes" led to either opportunity or oppression (p. 52). In chapters 3 and 4, Milteer examines the next forty-some years, as white people "struggled to determine the proper place for free people of color" (p. 69). Despite "unprecedented attacks," free persons of color and their allies tempered the success of those who sought to make race the sole criterion to determine status (p. 71). Cross-racial bonds of kinship, community, worship, and business held, and free people of color "found ways to convey their societal importance" (p. 116). They founded separate organizations when "working with whites as equals was not possible or desirable" (p. 122). Chapters 5 and 6 begin with the Nat Turner rebellion, which allowed progressively more radical proslavery whites to push free people of color into an "increasingly inferior legal status" (p. 184). Yet the rebellion did not result in a "revolutionary change in the ways average white southerners thought about" free persons of color (p. 138). In the decades leading up to the Civil War, free people of color could still "find justice in a system not designed for their benefit" as they actively defended their rights (p. 180). In chapter 7's examination of the Civil War, Milteer shows that free persons of color pursued divergent paths based on their complex and layered identities. Utilizing county court minutes, apprenticeship bonds, state legislative records, wills, newspapers, and pension files, Milteer focuses on the realities of day-to-day life instead of the contents of legal codes or extremist rhetoric. He cites Melvin Patrick Ely's Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War (New York, 2005) as an important precursor to his work. Milteer characterizes white southern behavior toward free people of color as "fluid," contradictory, and far from monolithic (p. 5). Free persons of color were vital to society and the economy, and radicals sought—unsuccessfully—to push them to the margins. Milteer concludes that many "find understanding the South before 1865 much easier if we can simplify the social hierarchy," but he argues that doing so offers a skewed picture of reality (p. 254). The author skillfully reveals the sometimes-intersecting values of whites and free people of color, as well as "inconsistencies between the law and everyday behavior," and then provides a framework for understanding them (p. 255). [End Page 773] Scarlet Jernigan Piedmont University Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America

The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America

On the Skin: Mary Prince and the Narration of Black Feeling in the Early Nineteenth Century

Mary Prince's The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, transcribed and edited by white abolitionists in England in 1831, was an early entry into the slave narrative genre, the first for an enslaved Black woman in the Americas. This article argues that Prince unsettles dominant critical practices in nineteenth-century literary studies and Black studies in her unsentimental description of laboring and subjected Black skin. Her History, written the same year that Nat Turner's Rebellion took place in the United States and just two years before a decree of emancipation across the British Caribbean and the entire British empire, speaks of Black skin as vulnerable and permeable, but also as emotionally and morally intelligent. In doing so, her narrative makes a claim to a racial characteristic of Black feeling as different from, and superior to, white feeling. For Prince the form of the slave narrative becomes, rather than constraining and disciplining, a platform for articulating embodied Black knowledge and epistemological expertise.

Wither the South on Screen: Revisiting Some Recent Releases

My article deals with the construction of a different South on screen in the posthuman context. It focuses on the way previous idealized embodiments of the South on film are being displaced to give way to an alternative South on screen informed by our contemporary aesthetics characterized by violence and human reification. The filmic South increasingly coheres with the historical South through the rewriting of formulaic tropes such as the plantation, the Southern belle and gentleman, and the staging of significant historical moments such as the Nat Turner rebellion and the Civil War. Recent releases perform national cultural work at a time when the demons of Southern history have come back to haunt the national imagination, as recent events such as the shooting at Immanuel church (June 2015) and Charlottesville (October 2017) have tragically shown.

A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World by Kay Wright Lewis

Reviewed by: A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World by Kay Wright Lewis Stephen E. Maizlish A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World. Kay Wright Lewis. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0-8203-5127-8, 292 pp., cloth, $64.95. Kay Wright Lewis's goal is to correct past accounts of slavery and its aftermath that have inadequately acknowledged the fear and trauma created by the racialized violence African Americans experienced. In A Curse upon the Nation: Race, Freedom, and Extermination in America and the Atlantic World, Lewis claims that "extermination was part of a racialized ideology used to sustain" slavery (2). For African Americans, the memories of that violence in the antebellum South and in the Jim Crow society that followed "remained significant into the Civil Rights era" (2). Whites in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Lewis argues, believed that emancipation and black equality would lead to a race war and the extinction of both races. It was to avoid this outcome that whites employed exterminating racial violence against blacks. Racial violence in America began with the first European settlements. It was initially directed against native peoples. As the colonies expanded, this culture of exterminating brutality came to dominate race relations generally, eventually extending to the imported African population. Lewis traces this growing determination to eliminate or enslave those whom European settlers considered barbarians through the entire colonial period. White people's fear of what they believed to be the warrior past of the Africans they enslaved drove them with particular force to treat their slaves with harsh and gruesome cruelty. Nevertheless, African slaves resisted their enslavement. That in turn, argues Lewis, led to retaliation and even more widespread exterminating white violence. This bloodletting persisted into the antebellum period and intensified in the aftermath of Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831. The result of this new explosion of terror was a series of lasting traumatic memories that haunted the black community for many years. Fear of a race war continued to consume the antebellum white South following Turner's insurrection and its bloody aftermath. Dread of a race war dominated the Virginia debates over slavery and formed the basis for Southern opposition to the reopening of the Atlantic slave trade. Lewis argues that this dread also explains the panicky Southern white people's reaction to John Brown's raid. The memory of the exterminating horror that came after Turner's upraising led African American slaves to be wary of and ultimately reject participation in Brown's plan for a slave insurrection. They feared a bloodbath, but even though they had not responded positively to Brown, one followed the raid anyway. Lewis follows her analysis of racial violence in antebellum America with the claim that South Carolina left the Union not only in reaction to its perception of Northern hostility to slavery but also from a belief that the Federal government [End Page 299] would no longer protect the South from a slave insurrection, that is, from the very race war Southerners had long dreaded. Slaves saw the war for the Union, unlike John Brown's raid, as an opportunity to at last achieve their dream of freedom, so they willingly participated in the Northern war effort. The white Southern response was predictable. As they had been for centuries, African American civilians, along with captured black soldiers, were slaughtered by white Southerners in another exterminating reign of terror that continued after the war and traumatized the black populations for decades to come. That trauma, Lewis explains, was only reinforced during the years of Jim Crow and by the violence visited upon returning black soldiers following the First and Second World Wars. Civil Rights leaders of the 1950s and 60s had different views of how to counter white violence, but, Lewis reminds us, they all recognized that this violence needed to be confronted. Lewis is correct to focus on the ever-present Southern concern over a mutually destructive war of the races. It is impossible to examine the Southern white past without continuously encountering this obsessive anxiety over racial conflict. Lewis's...

Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Rebellion by Patrick H. Breen

Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Rebellion by Patrick H. Breen

“The Guilt of Fragile Sovereigns”: Tyranny, Intrigue, and Martyrdom in an Unchanging Regime (Virginia, 1829-32)

This essay canvasses how far meanings of “regime change” can be stretched beyond their current invocation as anodyne neologistic cover for the illegality of a “coup d’état.” Some years ago the anthropologist John Borneman made one attempt to extend the compass of regime change beyond simple realist “topplings” of governments one disfavors to responsibility for legal reconstruction of the target regime because he wished to argue that idealistic interventions against tyrannical rule should always be legitimate. This essay asks whether the term can be stretched in a different direction, to encompass instances of intervention against tyrannical rule beyond the sphere of interstate relations where it is currently lodged. To test the proposition I turn here to a particular event—the Turner Rebellion, a slave rebellion that took place in Virginia in 1831—and to recent work in political theory that dwells on the politics of counter-sovereignty. Here regime change encompasses a rebellion of slaves against a tyrannical slaveholding regime, a failed attempt to deploy a revolutionary politics of counter-sovereignty against the regime’s pretensions to legality. Here tyranny remains the target of regime change. But rather than the solvent of tyrannical rule, law in this case is the instrument of its expression.

'The Guilt of Fragile Sovereigns': Tyranny, Intrigue, and Martyrdom in an Unchanging Regime (Virginia, 1829-32)

This essay canvasses how far meanings of “regime change” can be stretched beyond their current invocation as anodyne neologistic cover for the illegality of a “coup d’etat.” Some years ago the anthropologist John Borneman made one attempt to extend the compass of regime change beyond simple realist “topplings” of governments one disfavors to responsibility for legal reconstruction of the target regime because he wished to argue that idealistic interventions against tyrannical rule should always be legitimate. This essay asks whether the term can be stretched in a different direction, to encompass instances of intervention against tyrannical rule beyond the sphere of interstate relations where it is currently lodged. To test the proposition I turn here to a particular event—the Turner Rebellion, a slave rebellion that took place in Virginia in 1831—and to recent work in political theory that dwells on the politics of counter-sovereignty. Here regime change encompasses a rebellion of slaves against a tyrannical slaveholding regime, a failed attempt to deploy a revolutionary politics of counter-sovereignty against the regime’s pretensions to legality. Here tyranny remains the target of regime change. But rather than the solvent of tyrannical rule, law in this case is the instrument of its expression.

Yourcenar, et al.: Styron’s Sources for The Confessions of Nat Turner

Page 1 of the manuscript of The Confessions of Nat Turner, box 9, folder 1, William Styron Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Used by permission of the William Styron Estate. Image supplied by the author. JAMES L. W. WEST III Pennsylvania State University Yourcenar, et al.: Styron’s Sources for The Confessions of Nat Turner MOST OF THE ATTENTION GIVEN TO THE SOURCES FOR WILLIAM STYRON’S The Confessions of Nat Turner has been focused on historical and quasi-historical documents. Among the most important of these are Thomas R. Gray’s original Confessions (1831), Frederick Law Olmsted’s A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), and William S. Drewry’s The Southampton Insurrection (1900). Styron read all three before he began composing The Confessions of Nat Turner and incorporated text from all three into his narrative. He relied upon these writings for information, language, atmosphere, and detail; they were useful to him in establishing the chronology of the Nat Turner rebellion and in creating historical verisimilitude.1 In this essay I want to investigate a different group of “sources.” I will consider four books that Styron read and drew upon, not for information about the Nat Turner rebellion but for ideas about how to recapture the past and how to recreate Nat Turner’s voice. I believe that these four books had at least as much influence on the shape and intent of Styron’s narrative as did the historical documents mentioned above. The books are Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, and Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian (1951, 1963); Erik H. Erikson’s Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (1958); Stanley M. Elkins’s Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959); and Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). The Confessions of Nat Turner, published in 1967, belongs in company with these books. All four were innovative and controversial when published. All four were anchored in the distant or recent past but had broad contemporary resonances. Styron wanted to write this kind of book—not a conventional historical novel but, to use his term, a 1 Gray’s prefatory statement “To the Public” is reproduced on pp. xv-xviii of the first edition of The Confessions of Nat Turner.; Richard Whitehead’s sermon to the slaves on pp. 96-101 is taken from Olmsted; the account of the treatment of Nat Turner’s body on p. 428 is from Drewry. Styron’s reading about the history of slavery is detailed in West, William Styron 331-43. 32 James L. W. West III “meditation on history” that would speak to the present moment. As he observed in his “Author’s Note” to the first edition, “The relativity of time allows us elastic definitions: the year 1831 was, simultaneously, a long time ago and only yesterday” (ix). By attempting to recreate his protagonist’s voice Styron was seeking not factual or verifiable truths but a broader set of truths about race, society, and humanity. The four books discussed in this essay, all of which Styron read while composing The Confessions of Nat Turner, were useful to him as models. The authors of these books were in pursuit of the same goals and ends that he sought. Memoirs of Hadrian Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-1987), born in Belgium to a French father and a Belgian mother, wrote in French but lived for more than half of her life in the United States. She was an author, a student of ancient history, and a teacher of comparative literature. Something of a recluse, perhaps because of her bisexuality, she lived for almost forty years withhercompanion and translator, Grace Frick, on a remote island off the coast of Maine. In 1951 she published Mémoires d’Hadrien with Librairie Plon in Paris. The book, which can best be described as a biographical novel, is an attempt to recreate the life and voice of a subject from the distant past, in this case the Roman emperor Hadrian (76–138A.D.).Mémoiresd’Hadrien. wasanimmediatesuccessinFrance, earning Yourcenar awards, honors, and praise—including, eventually, membership in the Académie fran...

Nat Turner and the Work of Enthusiasm

The discourse of enthusiasm in the antebellum United States played a pivotal role in cultural debates surrounding the right of black people to participate in the “age of Revolution,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson called the era in 1837. This argument is explored through the textual archive of Nat Turner's Rebellion (1831). During this period, enthusiasm could refer to either a democratic-sublime or a fanatical-delusional passion for freedom. The term was applied to Turner pejoratively, not so much because his rebellion represented an instance of wild fanaticism to white audiences but because it represented an instance of familiar democratic revolt inadmissibly claimed by black people. Turner makes his own rhetorical claims for the meaning of enthusiasm: the word signifies an ardent zeal that inspires both direct dissent against slavery and acts of communication that transmit to readers a fervor for occluded black freedoms.

The Work of Death: Massacre and Retribution in Southampton County, Virginia, August 1831

What does it mean, particularly to a slave, to describe dealing death as “work?” This essay employs G.W.F. Hegel’s famous lordship/bondage dialectic (from The Phenomenology of Mind) to explore the massacre of 55 members of white slaveholding families that took place on Monday August 22nd 1831 in St. Luke’s Parish, Southampton County, Virginia, now known as “The Turner Rebellion.” I argue that certain specificities of the Hegelian dialectic, notably the centrality of work to the bondsman’s “direct apprehension” of its self as independent, are key components of the massacre. Likewise, I argue that the dialectic helps us understand the specifically juridical form of retributive killing that followed the massacre, in which 18 slaves, variously accused of “feloniously counselling, advising and conspiring with each other and divers other slaves to rebel and make insurrection and making insurrection and taking the lives of divers free white persons of the Commonwealth” were executed. The essay also explores the sociology and social anthropology of the killing that was the focal point of the rebellion. It considers whether this killing was incidental to some other purpose, such as revenge, or revolution, or central and essential to what Nat Turner desired to achieve.

Black Seminoles: the maroons of Florida

Maroon communities and slave revolutions in the Black Atlantic world are well known and well documented. Surinam, Jamaica, Cuba, Guyana, Venezuela, Columbia, Haiti, and Brazil had large numbers of enslaved fugitives who fled the plantations, armed themselves, and defended their human right to be free against national and local military forces. Much less is known about the maroon tradition in the United States where there has been a concerted effort to suppress information on slave revolts and maroon activity. The publicized rebellion of Nat Turner and the planned rebellions of Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vesey that never got off the ground are highlighted, it seems, in order to obfuscate the more successful maroon activities. Tagged as the largest slave rebellion in the United States, the Nat Turner rebellion did not even come close to achieving what some of the revolts waged during the colonial period achieved. There were three epicenters of maroon communities in the United States: the Dismal Swamp of southern Virginia and northern North Carolina, southern Louisiana, and north-central Florida and the Everglades, home of the Seminoles. This paper will examine the Black Seminoles, fugitive slaves who formed a maroon community and became part of the Seminole Confederation that fought three wars against the United States. The Seminole maroons’ century-long defense of their freedom far excelled the courageous revolt of Nat Turner and was by far the largest and longest standing military defense against the United States waged by an African or Indian group.

Revulsions of Capital: The Political Law of Slavery in the Epoch of the Turner Rebellion, Virginia 1829-1832

This paper continues the pattern of work I have been pursuing on the Turner Rebellion, a slave rebellion that took place in Virginia in August 1831. During the past two years I have been engaged in preliminary explorations of different aspects of the rebellion that have resulted in a series of working papers, written to teach myself what I don’t know, and what I should. This paper was written for the same purpose; it differs from prior papers in stepping back from the rebellion itself in order to situate it in Virginia’s constitutional history, and in regard to the debate over gradual emancipation that broke out in its aftermath. Essentially, Virginia in the epoch of the Turner Rebellion is a state divided largely on east-west lines. Slavery dominates east of the Blue Ridge in the long-settled Tidewater and Piedmont; the west (particularly the Trans-Allegheny region that would eventually become the state of West Virginia) is much more recently settled and largely slave-free. This division, together with less marked local slaveholder/non-slaveholder and freeholder/non-freeholder distinctions in the east of the state, largely determines the substance and structure of Virginia’s politics. I consider two “phases” of Virginia’s politics: (1) the Constitutional Convention of 1829-1830, in which Eastern and Western delegates fought over the replacement of county-based apportionment and suffrage that privileged freehold in land by white basis apportionment and white manhood suffrage, and (2) the emancipation debate that took place in 1831-32 during the first session of the state legislature to meet following the Turner Rebellion. I also consider the analysis of the emancipation debate written in 1832 by the William & Mary professor of “political law” Thomas Roderick Dew, Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832. I argue that out of the deep divisions exposed by the constitutional and legislative debates there emerged a new political and economic equilibrium, confirmed in Dew’s analysis, and centered not, as before, upon propertied hierarchy but upon property’s commodification, notably commodified labor. In the case of self-possessed white labor, commodification meant increased circulation. The same was true of enslaved labor, with the important qualification that slaves had no control over how far they were circulated. Slavery became transactional – the price of subsistence. Their commodification meant slaves were no longer harnessed to custom (in the shape of common law property claims), or to positive municipal law, or to paternal stewardship, but instead represented a capital investment on which the master-creditor might realize returns either through work, or, just as rationally, sale into the interstate slave trade. The paper concludes with a short analysis of Virginia’s contribution to that trade before and after the Turner Rebellion.

Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America (review)

Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America. By Hilary J. Moss. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Pp. 296. Cloth, $37.50).Reviewed by Peter HinksHilary Moss has produced a compelling study of African American access education - both public and private - in antebellum America. She focuses on urban Northeast, although she also investigates these matters on middle ground of Baltimore. She intends to make sense of widespread, often violent, white opposition African American education that erupted in northern and southern communities in early 1 830s, a period that coincides with birth of public education ... in America (3). Moss examines three cities where pursuit of education by black parents and activists white and black elicited keen reactions from surrounding white communities - New Haven in late 1820s-30s, Baltimore in 1840s, and Boston in mid 1830s and late 1840s-50s. She concludes that emerging public school system of antebellum North worked hand-in-hand with an increasingly pervasive culture of white domination deny African Americans equal access schools and education - key vehicles for creating citizens - and thereby reinforced popular understanding that they were noncitizens.New Haven's Negro College crisis of September 1831 embodied one of first of many pitched white reactions against African American educational aspirations. Black and white proponents of college, including wealthy New York City merchant Arthur Tappan, determined that New Haven afforded it a particularly favorable site, in part because of city's interracial association, African Improvement Society. Yet a mass meeting of more than 700 local whites denounced it, and homes of blacks and Tappan were attacked. Moss pinpoints dormant white anxieties over black aspiration [colliding] with news of Nat Turner's rebellion (54) as reaction's furnace. The white working class focused its anxiety on the confluence of industrialization, immigration, and gradual emancipation [jeopardizing] their own financial independence and social status (56) and pushing them closer cheap and degraded black labor, while white elite feared that a Negro College derogated their own college education.Events in Baltimore differed but equally served marginalize African Americans. Baltimore interests Moss because whites there accepted city's relatively high incidence of free black literacy when efforts expand it in northern towns often sparked controversy. She finds that a parallel system of private schools for blacks - they were banned from public schools - existed because some Baltimore employers sought literate free blacks and their education neither threatened system of slavery nor challenged strict boundaries separating races. When black leaders petitioned City Council for relief from public school taxes or for financial support for expansion, they emphasized black orderliness and deference. Thus where black education complied with white domination, its existence was tolerated, maybe even encouraged.Boston's Horace Mann proclaimed that public schools would prepare children for rights and responsibilities of citizenship (157), yet, Moss argues, city consistently denied black children inclusion in this project. From inception of black schools in 1 790s through 1840s, Boston School Committee sustained them as separate and inferior institutions. By mid 1840s, however, black parents began petitioning integrate school system, convinced that it alone would alleviate their schools' deficiencies. Over ensuing decade, campaign embroiled blacks and whites in a complicated - sometimes violent - contest of alliances and divisions that occurred as much within as between each racial group. By 1855, black parents and their white allies celebrated integration of schools. …

Strategies for Survival: Recollections of Bondage in Antebellum Virginia (review)

Reviewed by: Strategies for Survival: Recollections of Bondage in Antebellum Virginia Katy Simpson Smith (bio) Strategies for Survival: Recollections of Bondage in Antebellum Virginia. By William Dusinberre. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009. Pp. 264. Cloth, $40.00.) Historians of slavery since Kenneth Stampp have been involved in a tug-of-war over the nature of the institution, with one side pulling for the [End Page 505] individual agency of enslaved peoples and the other side emphasizing the overwhelming oppression of slavery. In the middle, watching over this very physical struggle, stand those historians who remind us that agency and oppression are two sides of the same coin. William Dusinberre joins these centrists with Strategies for Survival, a compelling reexamination of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Virginia interviews that clears the path for a détente. Through sections on "Alleviations," "Offenses," and "Responses," Dusinberre narrates the experiences of the enslaved with the reasoned voice of a practiced pacifist. Acknowledging both the horrors and the mitigations of slavery, recognizing degrees of suffering and degrees of resistance, Dusinberre avoids the pitfalls of his more dogmatic colleagues and presents a nuanced portrait of slavery in antebellum Virginia. At the center of Dusinberre's argument are his sources; by concentrating on those WPA interviews that were conducted by African American interviewers in the 1930s, a situation that was unique to Virginia, Dusinberre hopes to move beyond the biases, silences, and elisions that undoubtedly colored the interactions between former slaves and white interviewers in the rest of the South. Dusinberre begins on a provocative note, describing those conditions that might have eased the burden of slavery for some Africans and African Americans. Here we find slaves who valued their "good" masters and mistresses: white men and women who, despite being slaveowners, upheld some system of justice by teaching their slaves to read, refusing to use the whip, or simply using the whip only when it seemed "deserved." The concept of a "good" slaveowner may initially be hard for readers to swallow, but Dusinberre is right to remind us that slaves experienced bondage in innumerable ways, and that to have a master who was "'good,' or 'purty good,' or 'not mean'" could substantively affect one's quality of life (27). Dusinberre argues that mixed-race slaves who comprised Virginia's "third caste" could also enjoy certain benefits, though by using Harriet Jacobs as his chief example of a "privileged" light-skinned slave he glosses over the link between her physical appearance and her persecution. While mixed-race slaves may have found ways to use their parentage to their advantage, the psychological cost of the sexual abuse to which many fell prey cannot be underestimated. Finally, Dusinberre places urban slaves in the ranks of the slightly-better-off, citing their relative freedom of movement and greater likelihood of earning their own liberty. Despite certain small alleviations, the majority of slaves lived in worlds [End Page 506] of violence; for the remainder of the book, Dusinberre outlines the key abuses to slaves' bodies and souls—from familial separation and physical abuse to the psychological effects of "regimentation" and "contempt"—along with the many attempts slaves made to resist. Resistance, for Dusinberre, encompasses acts of verbal protest, deception, and theft as well as the development of families, communities, and even individual talents. Dusinberre's richest chapter delves into religion as a mode of resistance, especially the ways in which Christianity offered enslaved peoples a route to freedom, education, justice, dissidence, and hope. While his examination of Afro–Christianity incorporates a wide range of practices and responses, he believes that this religion's "greatest gift … to the slaves" was that it "fostered in some of them … a spirit of forgiveness," which seems to undermine some of Christianity's more radical promises (136). One of his most intriguing hypotheses here is that nonviolent forms of resistance had a greater long-term rate of success, and that violence generally failed to bring about substantial improvements to slaves' lives. Though he cites Nat Turner's rebellion as an example of violent dissidence that further restricted slaves' few freedoms, Dusinberre does not provide comparable evidence to support his theory that nonviolent resistance was one...

Texas Terror: The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860 and the Secession of the Lower South (review)

Reviewed by: Texas Terror: The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860 and the Secession of the Lower South Christopher Cameron (bio) Texas Terror: The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860 and the Secession of the Lower South. By Donald E. Reynolds. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Pp. 264. Cloth, $45.00.) Over the past four decades historians have produced a number of excellent studies on secessionism within individual states. In Crisis of Fear [End Page 558] (New York, 1970), Stephen A. Channing argues that the hysteria and fear that swept South Carolina in the wake of John Brown's raid were pivotal in pushing that state toward secession. James M. Woods's Rebellion and Realignment (Fayetteville, AR, 1987) takes a different approach, examining political parties, leaders, and the effect of interest groups and geography on the politics of secession, while Christopher J. Olsen's Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi (New York, 2000) argues that secession stemmed from the culture of honor that developed on the Mississippi frontier in the thirty years before the Civil War. Donald Reynolds's Texas Terror: The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860 and the Secession of the Lower South differs from these works in the singular impact Reynolds attributes to threats of insurrection within Texas on the secession movement throughout the entire Lower South. While Channing's work does not place the secession movement in South Carolina into the larger context of secessionism, Reynolds begins his work with a broader focus on the South and the increasing fear of servile revolt, and he ends the book with an analysis of how the Texas Troubles influenced the debate over secession in states such as Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Arkansas. When people in these states heard reports of the fires and alleged conspiracies in Texas, and then experienced similar plots closer to home, they were much more likely to distrust all northerners and discredit Unionists as traitors to southern principles. In Texas Terror, Reynolds tells us that from the time of Nat Turner's 1831 rebellion, scarcely a year passed without a slave panic somewhere in the South. The "periodic scares over possible uprisings were about as familiar to most white southerners as grits and redeye gravy," he writes (1). Turner's rebellion, periodic slave panics, the memory of the Haitian Revolution, and finally John Brown's raid of 1859 pushed many white southerners into a siege mentality, whereby they believed northerners were constantly working to undermine cherished southern values and institutions. Add to this equation reports of twelve fires that broke out in the Dallas area on July 8–9, 1860, and you get a much strengthened movement for a separate southern confederacy, according to Reynolds. Reynolds shows that this movement began locally, with newspapers around Texas stirring up fears of rebellion and invasion from northern "abolitionists." Papers such as the Austin Texas State Gazette, the Houston Weekly Telegraph, and the Marshall Texas Republican argued that so many fires within such a short period of time were no coincidence, but a northern-inspired abolitionist plot to destroy the South. In addition to [End Page 559] fire, according to the papers, abolitionists meant to destroy slavery by poisoning wells and inciting slaves to kill their masters and other whites. Texans responded to these fears by creating vigilance committees across the state to guard against possible uprisings. Entrusted with broad powers, the vigilantes dispensed "justice" to would-be conspirators through whippings, banishment, and executions. Reynolds argues that fire-eating editors and politicians in the state, those people pushing for secession, used the fear of servile revolt to strengthen their arguments against the Union, often to great effect. Elsewhere in the South, fire-eaters such as William Lowndes Yancey and Robert Barnwell Rhett similarly used what Reynolds calls the "Texas Troubles" to argue for the creation of a southern nation. They claimed that if Lincoln was elected, a situation that began to appear more likely as election day approached, then the entire South awaited a fate similar to that of Texas. Reynolds does an excellent job of demonstrating the importance of the Texas Troubles to political debates over secession within Texas and elsewhere in the South. He draws...

Enemies of humanity: the nineteenth-century war on terrorism

PART 1: FEARING THE CROWD: REVOLUTION AND ATROCITY * Feel the Terror: Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France / Peter C. Messer * Unworthy of Liberty?: Slavery, Terror, and Revolution in Haiti / Laurent Dubois * Vindictive Ferocity: Virginia's Response to the Nat Turner Rebellion / Bryan Rommel-Ruiz * PART 2: KEEPING THE PEACE: A WAR WITHOUT AN ENDING * 1867 All Over Again?: Insurgency and Terrorism in a Liberal State / Brian Jenkins * Making of Russian Revolutionary Terrorism / Claudia Verhoeven * Men with the Faces of Brutes: Physiognomy, Urban Anxieties, and Police States / Isaac Land * PART 3: WAGING TOTAL WAR: THE LOGIC OF RETRIBUTION * Vast and Cool and Unsympathetic: From Descent of Man to The Empire of the Ants / Matthew Candelaria * Savage Wars of Peace: Wars Against Terrorism in Nineteenth-Century Ireland and India / G.K. Peatling * Half Devil and Half Child: America's War with Terror in the Philippines, 1899-1902 / John Coats * War against Terrorism in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia / Hugh Phillips