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WORK TITLE: The land shall be deluged in blood: a new history of the Nat Turner revolt
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY:
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NATIONALITY:
http://www.providence.edu/history/faculty/Pages/pbreen.aspx * http://mybookthemovie.blogspot.com/2016/02/patrick-h-breens-land-shall-be-deluged.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:University of Georgia, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Providence College, RI, associate professor.
WRITINGS
Contributor to Deadline and to the Smithsonian Magazine Web site.
SIDELIGHTS
Patrick H. Breen is an associate professor of history at Providence College. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia. Breen has written articles that have appeared in publications, including Deadline and on the Smithsonian Magazine Web site.
In 2015, Breen released his first book, The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt. In this volume, he focuses on the infamous 1831 slave revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, led by Nat Turner. Turner and the other enslaved persons who took part in the rebellion were notably violent, killing over fifty white people before being forcibly subdued by government troops just days after revolting. White leaders reacted strongly to Turner’s revolt. Turner was hanged before the end of 1831. News of the revolt caused whites in other areas of the South to become fearful. Breen analyzes participation in the Turner revolt, noting that most of the slaves in the region chose not to join in. He suspects that those who did not participate either disagreed with Turner’s stance or were too afraid of the consequences to join him. Breen also notes that some whites advocated for brutal retribution against the rebels, while others believed that being too harsh would only give slaves cause to rebel again. Breen examines the 1831 book, The Confessions of Nat Turner, which was written by Thomas Gray, an attorney.
In an interview with John Fea, contributor to the Way of Improvement Leads Home Web site, Breen explained how he came to be interested in the Nat Turner revolt. He stated: “I had been captivated by those southern authors who follow in the wake of William Faulkner, in particular Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy. Interest in southern literature led to an interest in southern history, which soon enough meant that I had to grapple with slavery. Many great historians have spent their careers wrestling with this demon … and my task was to find a subject that was both narrow enough that I could get my hands around it and important enough that my work might illuminate something important about slavery.” Breen continued: “Simply because I had gone to William and Mary for school, much of my archival work had focused on slavery in the Old Dominion. What could I write about in Virginia that would allow me to do what I wanted to do? My mind kept coming back to Nat Turner’s revolt. What did this extraordinary moment reveal about the nature of slavery?”
Critics responded favorably to The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood. “An original study of first-rate scholarship, this title is recommended for scholars and students of the antebellum South [and] African American studies,” asserted John Carver Edwards in Library Journal. A Publishers Weekly writer remarked: “Historian Breen recounts in captivating detail the story of the enslaved mystic Nat Turner.” Writing in the Journal of Southern History, Ben Wright commented: “Breen’s wider claims do not considerably diverge from broader trends in the historiography. Others have similarly complicated the resistance-accommodation framework and illustrated planter hegemony. But Breen’s work does offer valuable insight on the decision making of black Americans in and around the rebellion and convincingly demonstrates how white slave owners resisted a potential popular backlash.” Choice reviewer, M.A. Byron, categorized the volume as “highly recommended.” Robert Paquette, critic on the H-Net Reviews Web site, suggested: “Patrick H. Breen has researched Turner’s rebellion for more than a decade. He has unearthed important new information on the content and course of the insurrection. Inspired by the work of the late historian Eugene Genovese, Breen asks important questions about Turner’s thinking, his goals and those of his followers, and the responses of both blacks and whites in Southampton County to the event.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, June, 2016, M.A. Byron, review of The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt, p. 1529.
Journal of Southern History, February, 2017, Ben Wright, review of The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood, p. 167.
Library Journal, October 15, 2015, John Carver Edwards, review of The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood, p. 99.
Publishers Weekly, August 3, 2015, review of The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood, p. 46.
ONLINE
H-Net Reviews, https://networks.h-net.org/ (April 1, 2017), Robert Paquette, review of ‘The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood.
Providence College Web site, http://www.providence.edu/ (May 23, 2017), author faculty profile.
Way of Improvement Leads Home, https://thewayofimprovement.com/ (December 31, 2015), John Fea, author interview.*
Patrick H. Breen
Photo of faculty memberAssociate Professor
Contact Information:
pbreen@providence.edu
401-865-1715
Ruane Center for the Humanities 132
Education:
Ph.D. - University of Georgia
Area(s) of Expertise:
I hope that my new work on Nat Turner will be considered the authoritative account of America's most famous revolt. I have penned a recent essay on Turner's religion for The Smithsonian Magazine's web site. I have written on The Birth of a Nation (2016) for Deadline. I have been interviewed by Rhode Island's National Public Radio. Slate and The L.A. Times have turned to me as the authority on the revolt. I have also been interviewed on blogs including "The Way of Improvement Leads Home" and "The Page 99 Test."
Selected Publications:
Recent Presentations:
Breen, Patrick H.., Virginia Forum, Lexington, VA, "A Historical Reappraisal of William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner". March, 2011.
Breen, Patrick H.., The Economic & Business History Society, Providence, RI, "Chair: Session 1, Panel B (Presiding and Commenting on Papers Connected to the Economics of Slavery)". April, 2007.
Breen, Patrick H.., Southwest Texas Popular Culture/American Culture Association annual meeting, Albuquerque, NM, "The Confession of Nat Turner". February, 2007.
QUOTED: "I had been captivated by those southern authors who follow in the wake of William Faulkner, in particular Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy. Interest in southern literature led to an interest in southern history, which soon enough meant that I had to grapple with slavery. Many great historians have spent their careers wrestling with this demon ... and my task was to find a subject that was both narrow enough that I could get my hands around it and important enough that my work might illuminate something important about slavery. Simply because I had gone to William and Mary for school, much of my archival work had focused on slavery in the Old Dominion. What could I write about in Virginia that would allow me to do what I wanted to do? My mind kept coming back to Nat Turner’s revolt. What did this extraordinary moment reveal about the nature of slavery?"
The Author’s Corner with Patrick Breen
December 31, 2015 / johnfea
LandPatrick Breen is Associate Professor of History at Providence College. This interview is based on his new book, The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt (Oxford, 2016).
JF: What led you to write The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood?
PB: Thanks for inviting me to this blog interview. Even before I decided to pursue a career in history, I had been captivated by those southern authors who follow in the wake of William Faulkner, in particular Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy. Interest in southern literature led to an interest in southern history, which soon enough meant that I had to grapple with slavery. Many great historians have spent their careers wrestling with this demon—it is hard to think of a subject in American history that has led to more fabulous books—and my task was to find a subject that was both narrow enough that I could get my hands around it and important enough that my work might illuminate something important about slavery. Simply because I had gone to William and Mary for school, much of my archival work had focused on slavery in the Old Dominion. What could I write about in Virginia that would allow me to do what I wanted to do? My mind kept coming back to Nat Turner’s revolt. What did this extraordinary moment reveal about the nature of slavery?
JF: In 2 sentences, what is the argument of The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood?
PB: Nat Turner’s revolt was a moment when the consensus that undergird the slaveholders’ power—that slavery needed to be accepted—was transformed from a premise into a question. The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood traces the remarkably varied responses among both blacks and whites to Turner’s revolt and argues that in the aftermath of the revolt the county’s landed gentry were able to get others to accept an account of what happened in ways that successfully restored their hegemony.
JF: Why do we need to read The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood?
PB: Even before we read our first history book, Americans are taught a certain story about slavery—that it was an awful, inhumane system, in Edmund Morgan’s delightful phrase, “America’s original sin.” This meta-narrative is incredibly powerful and has been even more useful, but there are many good reasons to adopt a new approach to slavery.
First, unlike those works that present unlimited oppression as a—or perhaps the—characteristic of slavery, power in Southampton is more fluid and interesting than that. Influenced both by my teacher Eugene D. Genovese and postmodernists, I put hegemony at the center of my story about Nat Turner’s revolt. Unlike many histories that lean on hegemony, the story here is dynamic. Turner challenges the slaveholders’ hegemony, but Turner’s challenge fails and not just militarily. The Land shows how the slaveholders used their power as judges, writers, and even church elders to create an account of the revolt that was compatible with a stable slave society. This reminds readers how important the stories are that we tell ourselves about the past.
Second, my sense is that the standard history of slavery is becoming less powerful politically. The vast majority of historians who have written on slavery have done what they have done with at least one eye on the present. It is no coincidence that so much of the great work on slavery has been a part of the attack on the obnoxious system of legal racial segregation. For someone whose number one goal is to fight against an anomalous and odd system of formal legal segregation that persisted in the South, writing a history of Southern slavery as a dark and exceptional system makes a good deal of sense. I admit that I too wrote The Land with an eye to the present, but the problems I see in society—things like inequality, racism, violence, alienation, and failures in education and democracy—seem less susceptible to an easy analogy with an unusual system. That does not mean that there is nothing to learn from the history of slavery, just that we need a richer history of slavery from which to draw our lessons.
Third, rethinking slavery not as “America’s original sin” but perhaps as one of many terrible, but very human, institutions in American history has important ramifications for our conceptualizations of American history. If the Civil War is the event that redeems America’s original sin, then it is justified, and America’s story fits a weirdly secular salvation narrative, something that appeals to the whiggish sensibility of so many Americans. But if slavery was just one awful system, the success of the Civil War at ending this awful system was counterbalanced by the failure of Reconstruction to create a system that was much better and was, in some ways, worse. (This is nothing but Woodward’s thesis, rewritten in a negative light.) But the problem in getting people to accept this negative Woodwordian thesis is not that historians have failed to document the horrors of the Reconstruction and the age of Jim Crow, but that historians’ sense of slavery as completely different means that we have made it hard for people to see the ways that oppression continues, albeit in a different form, after the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment. By presenting a human view of slavery, the entire arc of American history changes and not in a way that bends towards justice.
Finally, the old view of slavery makes it almost impossible to access the world of so many slaves. While some slaves led lives of quiet desperation in an awful Manichean world, so many (I want to say most) slaves did not live in such a moral universe. They had to navigate a world filled with good and bad humans—many of whom used their almost unchecked power in obscene ways. As a result, the idea of resistance, which has become so central to our understanding of how people should respond to slavery, was not obvious to the people who lived in slavery. Maybe we know what Django should do (even before we shell out our $10), but there was much less certainty in Southampton, Virginia, even among the slaves, about what Nat Turner should do. The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood recaptures this uncertainty and ambiguity in ways that few works on slavery do.
But I think that this last point might just be another way of saying that we should try to recapture all the craziness, complexity, and contingency of the past. And these stories abound. The Land tells the story of Hubbard, who saved his mistresses’ life, and then could not find her where he had hidden her because she feared that he would change his mind and betray her to the rebels. Her decision—while understandable—almost cost Hubbard his life as he was unable to prove his loyalty to whites who were looking for retribution. It tells the story of the fight between a slave Burwell—who was delivering messages for the whites who were too afraid to travel—and the free black Exum Artist, who tried to cut the white lines of communication. It tells the story of Boson, a convicted slave who escaped from prison and then got a white accomplice who unsuccessfully tried to sell Boson out of Virginia so that he could escape his death sentence. It tells the story of a nearby biracial church that decided to excommunicate whites who wanted to exclude blacks from the church after the revolt, even as it adopted blatantly unchristian forms of segregation as a reform of the communion practice. Most important of all, it tells a new story of Nat Turner, the most prominent, best documented and most compelling slave rebel in the history of the United States. Their stories and many more deserve to be read.
JF: When and why did you decide to become an American historian?
PB: A bit more than twenty years ago, I was sitting in a dorm room at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, NY. During the day, I was working in Kelvin Lynn’s lab where he was doing some really great stuff with positrons, which are a weird form of matter. (They are pretty much just like electrons, but have a positive charge.) The work was interesting, and I could easily see a career trajectory where I did similar studies for another forty years. The only problem with this plan was that every night after finishing at the lab, I would go home and read literature and history. I could not stop thinking about the questions that Eugene Genovese had raised in his history classes. Even though I knew that the job market for physicists was much better than the job market for historians, I thought I would give history a try. I’ve pretty much been trying to do history ever since.
JF: What is your next project?
PB: I have loads of things that have been piling up on my desk. Perhaps the one that is dearest to my heart is a project on Lunsford Lane, whose narrative describing his efforts to buy himself and his family from slavery is an underappreciated work of genius. (I take the epigraph for The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood from his 1842 autobiography.) Frederick Douglass’s polemical views of slavery were and still are incredibly powerful stories, but I do not think that people appreciate how Doulgass’s contemporary Lane anticipates the great insights of W. E. B. DuBois.
QUOTED: "An original study of first-rate scholarship, this title is recommended for scholars and students of the antebellum South [and] African American studies."
Breen, Patrick H.: The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt
John Carver Edwards
140.17 (Oct. 15, 2015): p99.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
* Breen, Patrick H. The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt. Oxford Univ. Nov. 2015. 304p. maps, notes, bibliog. index. ISBN 9780199828005. $29.95. HIST
On August 21, 1831, African American bondsman Nat Turner (1800-31) led a rebellion of slaves and free blacks in Southhampton County, VA, commandeering horses and guns from plantations and farms while attempting to recruit followers. The uprising lasted little more than a day before being quashed by local militia. Nearly 60 people were murdered during the raid. Before his execution on November 11, Turner provided a confession to his captors, which was subsequently published by lawyer Thomas R. Gray. Breen's (history, Providence Coll.) full-length narrative clearly reveals that the insurrection challenged the authority of the planter class but also that the ensuing crisis uncovered divisions within Southhampton's black and white communities. Turner's cohorts garnered little sympathy from local slaves, implying that abiding psychological and emotional schisms existed among them as to their station in life. In contrast, bands of vengeful and disaffected whites were lawfully prevented from wholesale retribution against all slaves and free blacks. Breen convincingly shows that the county's landed gentry and courts succeeded by both suppressing the rebels and protecting the investment in human chattel held by Southhampton's slaveholding elite. VERDICT An original study of first-rate scholarship, this title is recommended for scholars and students of the antebellum South, African American studies, and all libraries.--John Carver Edwards, formerly with Univ. of Georgia Libs.
Edwards, John Carver
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Edwards, John Carver. "Breen, Patrick H.: The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt." Library Journal, 15 Oct. 2015, p. 99. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA431617194&it=r&asid=1b0e9aafa2db36f36e3d5b3b21bb2a1b. Accessed 4 May 2017.
QUOTED: "Historian Breen recounts in captivating detail the story of the enslaved mystic Nat Turner."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A431617194
The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt
262.31 (Aug. 3, 2015): p46.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt
Patrick H. Breen. Oxford Univ., $29.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-19-982800-5
Historian Breen recounts in captivating detail the story of the enslaved mystic Nat Turner, who in the late summer of 1831 led his fellow bondspeople in Virginia's Southampton County into a rebellion aimed to overthrow white authority. The revolt was quickly subdued by state and federal troops, though the rebels killed more than 50 whites in just a couple days. Turner's name became a byword for terror throughout the South and he was hanged by year's end. Numerous scholars have studied Turner's revolt, but Breen's exhaustively researched study achieves something new by highlighting the divisions within both the black and white communities of eastern Virginia. Several dozen slaves joined Turner's endeavor, though most did not, either out of fear or because they disagreed with him. No whites appear to have supported Turner, yet white opinion was also divided, with some demanding horrific retribution and others, particularly judicial and military leaders, fearing that such vengeance could threaten the social order more than Turner's actions had. By emphasizing the diversity of opinion among both slaveholders and slaves, Breen reminds readers that race is "a historical product and that racial categories do not determine actions," a claim that resonates throughout the history of American race relations. (Nov.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt." Publishers Weekly, 3 Aug. 2015, p. 46. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA424620034&it=r&asid=1bd5242e3366792368590d705d380d62. Accessed 4 May 2017.
QUOTED: "Breen's wider claims do not considerably diverge from broader trends in the historiography. Others have similarly complicated the resistance-accommodation framework and illustrated planter hegemony. But Breen's work does offer valuable insight on the decision making of black Americans in and around the rebellion and convincingly demonstrates how white slave owners resisted a potential popular backlash."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A424620034
The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt
Ben Wright
83.1 (Feb. 2017): p167.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt. By Patrick H. Breen. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xxii, 294. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-19-982800-5.)
Scholars and students of southern history need little introduction to the events surrounding Nat Turner's rebellion. Those familiar with previous scholarship on the revolt, particularly David F. Allmendinger Jr.'s Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County (Baltimore, 2014), will find little new in the events of The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt. Instead, Patrick H. Breen attempts to do more than retell or even reframe the rebellion and its causes and consequences. Breen uses the rebellion as a laboratory to dissect two of the most difficult questions in southern history: how should we understand slave resistance, and how did slave owners maintain control over the nonslave-holding white majority?
Both questions are answered with help from imported theoretical frameworks. Breen relies on W. E. B. Du Bois's theory of double consciousness to explain black action and on Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony to explain how the slaveholding minority protected their wealth and power from white nonslaveholders. Less theoretically inclined readers need not shudder, however, as the book successfully mixes narrative verve and argumentative clarity with theoretically informed analysis.
Breen presents Du Bois's double consciousness as a means of escaping the accommodation-resistance framework of slavery studies. Historians have often described myriad forms of slave resistance, and Eugene D. Genovese long ago explored how enslaved peoples could work within the social discourse of paternalism to better their lives. Breen believes that both perspectives obscure a more complex truth. He demonstrates how the sometimes contradictory decisions of black Americans, even those associated with the most dramatic slave rebellion in the nation's history, belied the resistance-accommodation dialectic. One might argue that Breen offers escape from a trap already losing its snare. Trends from the last two decades, including, for example, the work of Stephanie M. H. Camp and Anthony E. Kaye, have shifted historians away from the resistance-accommodation paradigm. But for those still vexed by the issue, Breen has much to offer.
Gramsci enables Breen to answer how slaveholders preserved their wealth and power in the aftermath of the revolt. Historians have successfully used the Italian theorist to demonstrate how elites use culture to maintain power. Planter hegemony in the Old South has been treated at least as well by Stephanie McCurry's Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York, 1995) and other works. Breen, however, compellingly tracks the particular contingencies of postrebellion Southampton County. The non-slaveholding majority represented a danger to the slaveholding class, Breen argues, and a backlash threatened to exterminate the enslaved and destroy slaveholders' wealth. In fact, the title, The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood, refers not to the actual revolt but rather comes from slaveholding petitioners who warned that angry white Americans would eradicate the black race. The revolt turned southern Virginia into a tinderbox of paranoia. As a result, the slaveholding class wielded the militia and the courts to protect its investment in human capital.
Breen concludes the book with an eleven-page argument for the veracity of The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831). When taken in tandem with Allmendinger's work, these reflections powerfully assert that historians can, in fact, separate Turner's voice from that of editor Thomas R. Gray, and that Turner's composes the overwhelming majority of the source.
Breen's wider claims do not considerably diverge from broader trends in the historiography. Others have similarly complicated the resistance-accommodation framework and illustrated planter hegemony. But Breen's work does offer valuable insight on the decision making of black Americans in and around the rebellion and convincingly demonstrates how white slave owners resisted a potential popular backlash.
Ben Wright
University of Texas at Dallas
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wright, Ben. "The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt." Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 1, 2017, p. 167+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481354151&it=r&asid=aacd0eabfa9311b6a300ccc49ff7c382. Accessed 4 May 2017.
QUOTED: "highly recommended."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A481354151
Breen, Patrick H.: The land shall be deluged in blood: a new history of the Nat Turner revolt
M.A. Byron
53.10 (June 2016): p1529.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Breen, Patrick H. The land shall be deluged in blood: a new history of the Nat Turner revolt. Oxford, 2016. 294p bibl Index afp ISBN 9780199828005 cloth, $29.95; ISBN 9780199828012 ebook, contact publisher for price
(cc) 53-4520
F232
2015-42315 CIP
Historian Breen (Providence College) reexamines the most infamous slave revolt in US history. The story of Nat Turner's rebellion in Southampton County, VA, according to Breen, "has inspired relatively little scholarly attention," and those limited scholarly sources have depicted Turner as either exceptional in comparison to the average slave or representative of all slaves. Breen, however, argues that the story is far more complex. In analyzing the black community's response to the initial outbreak of Turner's rebellion, the author demonstrates that the majority of slaves did not get involved, and many of those who did defended their white masters. Thus, Breen offers a new look into the diversity of a Southern slave community and the "fragility and power of slavery." Arguably, the biggest contribution Breen makes to the study of Nat Turner and his rebellion is the thorough defense of attorney Thomas Gray's The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831). Historians have often dismissed the book as a reliable source because of the inherent bias of the author. Breen makes a compelling argument that the book was arguably the most accurate account of the events. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. All academic levels/libraries.--M. A. Byron, Young Harris College
Byron, M.A.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Byron, M.A. "Breen, Patrick H.: The land shall be deluged in blood: a new history of the Nat Turner revolt." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, June 2016, p. 1529+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA454942931&it=r&asid=41c1804022c98a1f72147bfdc10e2504. Accessed 4 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A454942931
QUOTED: "Patrick H. Breen has researched Turner’s rebellion for more than a decade. He has unearthed important new information on the content and course of the insurrection. Inspired by the work of the late historian Eugene Genovese, Breen asks important questions about Turner’s thinking, his goals and those of his followers, and the responses of both blacks and whites in Southampton County to the event."
Paquette on Breen, 'The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt'
Author:
Patrick H. Breen
Reviewer:
Robert Paquette
Patrick H. Breen. The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 320 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-982800-5.
Reviewed by Robert Paquette (Alexander Hamilton Institute)
Published on H-Slavery (April, 2017)
Commissioned by David M. Prior
On Sunday, August 21, 1831, in Southampton County, Virginia, a thirty-something enslaved religious enthusiast named Nat Turner unleashed an insurrection that would pile up more white corpses (fifty-five) than any other slave insurrection in US history. The rebels, which at peak probably numbered fewer than sixty slaves, killed mostly women and children. Although crushed within forty-eight hours, Turner’s smallish band succeeded in striking more than a dozen households and terrorizing a large swath of whites in more than one state, well beyond the revolt’s restricted ambit. Indeed, no domestic slave insurrection had a more profound impact on the southern United States. From Virginia to Louisiana, slaveholding elites reacted to the uprising by taking a variety of measures to tighten up security, targeting not only slaves but free persons of color as well. Some proslavery southerners on the road to secession would look back at Turner’s bloodletting as a kind of crossing of the threshold in their thinking about slavery and on the principles needed to defend it.
Precisely because slaves rank as one of the most disadvantaged groups in history in organizing resistance to oppression, slave plots that did get off the ground prove most illuminating targets of analysis. Patrick H. Breen has researched Turner’s rebellion for more than a decade. He has unearthed important new information on the content and course of the insurrection. Inspired by the work of the late historian Eugene Genovese, Breen asks important questions about Turner’s thinking, his goals and those of his followers, and the responses of both blacks and whites in Southampton County to the event.
Whenever authorities anywhere use the word “spontaneously” to describe the eruption of any act of collective violence, listeners should immediately be cautioned to suspect that either the authorities do not know what happened or are engaged in purposive deception about what happened. Although Breen raises questions about Turner’s capacity as a strategist, fighter, and leader, design and planning went into the uprising. In touch with the Holy Spirit and with visions of race war dancing in his head, Turner had originally planned to strike on July 4, but sickness caused him to postpone action. He wisely kept his plan confined initially to a small group of four others. The rebels started by attacking households with which they were quite familiar, to get recruits and to seize money, weapons, and munitions. Some of the rebels clearly knew how to handle guns. Newspaper reports claimed that many white men in Southampton County, for generations a hotbed of religious revivalism, had departed shortly before the outbreak of violence to camp meetings across the border in Gates County, North Carolina. If true, perhaps Turner’s calculations were affected by the perceived weakening of the balance of forces against him. “In some cases,” Breen concludes, “the torture after Nat Turner’s revolt produced useful intelligence” (p. 80). The flogging of Turner’s wife yielded an incriminating list, which also revealed design in Turner’s mind.
The bloodletting began with Joseph Travis, a decent fellow, according to Turner’s own testimony, owner of the farm on which Turner worked, and stepfather of the adolescent (Putnam Moore) who actually owned Turner. In seeking to terrorize whites with indiscriminate slaughter of the nits as well as the lice, Turner hoped to recruit on the march by forcing the hand of slaves reluctant to enlist. On that score, as Breen demonstrates, Turner had miserable success. Numerous slaves helped whites survive the rebellion, and on the plantation of Dr. Samuel Blunt, armed slaves helped fend off Turner’s band. If his endgame after plundering the county seat of Jerusalem was the securing of some sort of “foothold” in the region within which to negotiate a settlement with whites to end bondage (p. 33), then it is difficult to credit Turner’s conscious terrorism as part of any kind of coherent, credible strategy. At any rate, the goals of leaders and soldiers do not always mesh. Turner clearly had trouble keeping his followers in line, several being captured after getting dead drunk on the apple brandy for which the county was famous. After the decisive confrontation with two fortuitously converging white forces at the estate of James Parker, Turner had little success on the run trying to rebuild his scattered force.
Breen’s substantial study should be read in conjunction with David Allmendinger’s Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County (2014)—a book that Breen did not have a chance to consult before his went to press. Both authors could have done more in exploring the religious context and dimensions of the revolt led by the premillennialist, antinomian Turner. Allmendinger proves superior in clarifying the intricate networks of kith and kin involved in the revolt. Breen proves superior in thinking of the revolt in the context of the historiography on slave resistance. Both reach similar conclusions about the authenticity of Turner’s voice in the Confessions, the pamphlet that contains the result of Turner’s transcribed jailhouse interrogation as to what motivated him to do what he did. Both corroborate important findings originally made by historian William Drewry in a book published in 1900 and too often written off by postmodern scholars because of its Jim-Crow-era racialist coloring. Both credit attorney William C. Parker with providing a very accurate description of Turner, down to the balding spot on the top of his head. Both agree that the Thomas Wentworth Higginson/Herbert Aptheker estimate of more than one hundred slaves summarily killed in the frenzy of repression that immediately followed Turner’s defeat should probably be cut by more than half. Breen has a particularly good chapter on how elites in Southampton and beyond stepped forward to clamp down on white mob activity, proceed to orderly trials, and control the narrative of what happened.
Four years after the revolt, the citizens of Southampton County gathered at the courthouse to address growing concerns about the threat posed to their security and property by nefarious agents of organized abolitionism in the North. The committee formed to devise a plan of action included Jeremiah Cobb, the presiding magistrate in Turner’s trial; Colonel Parker, the local attorney and militia leader who provided Governor John Floyd with Turner’s description; and Thomas R. Gray, the down-in-the-pocket lawyer responsible for seizing the opportunity to interrogate Turner while in jail and producing the singular document known as Turner’s Confessions. Nowhere in the resolutions composed to rally slaveholders in resisting a fanatical enemy did the authors once mention Turner. Curiously, unlike other southern observers who were quick in jumping to the application of post hoc logic in placing the blame for Turner’s rebellion on outsiders, the principals of the Southampton committee, at least on this occasion, drew no explicit causal connection between creeping abolitionist agitation and the insurrection of 1831. Trusting the evidence of their own senses, Cobb, Parker, and Gray would have had difficulty in locating Nat Turner’s revolt outside the mind of Nat Turner.
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=48022
Citation: Robert Paquette. Review of Breen, Patrick H., The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt. H-Slavery, H-Net Reviews. April, 2017.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=48022