The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory.

Paquette, Robert L.

The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory. By Scot French (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. ix plus 379 pp. $26.00).

In January 1860, less than a month after John Brown hanged for attempting to incite a servile insurrection at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, an anonymous correspondent to the Charleston Mercury rose to answer Victor Hugo's inflammatory charge, published in a London newspaper, that Brown's execution in the United States by officials in a democratic republic was analogous to the execution of Spartacus by George Washington. Like many other foreigner observers, the writer maintained, Hugo had failed to register a seismic shift during the last thirty years or so in southern thinking on the question of human freedom. Southrons had retreated from the "liberal" position of Washington and Jefferson, rejecting the siren-like seduction of "universal liberty" and "universal equality" to embrace the "true doctrine" of "regulated liberty, or privilege, the same thing." "We"--the white South--had concluded that "some nations, tribes, and people are, by nature, formed to obey others," and "had Washington and Jefferson lived till the outbreak of Jerusalem, in Southampton county, it is highly possible they may have recanted their errors." (1)

The outbreak that had so afflicted the southern mind occurred in 1831 on a late summer night in rural Virginia. A literate, messianic slave named Nat Turner led a small band of followers on a killing spree that resulted in deaths of more than fifty whites, the majority of them women and children. Although not the largest slave insurrection in United States history nor the bloodiest, should the body count include blacks as well as whites, Nat Turner's revolt generated a ferocious wave of repression with lasting consequences throughout the slave-holding South. Responding to wild rumors of similar or related unrest, panicked whites in other southern states killed dozens of innocent blacks. State legislatures passed laws that prohibited anyone from teaching slaves how to read and write. Black preachers and their congregants found their movements increasingly constrained and challenged. At the same time, white theologians mobilized for a much more systematic effort at missionary outreach on the plantations to ensure that the slaves would receive the Christian precepts appropriate to an orderly slave society. Free people of color also came under closer surveillance, forcing hundreds to leave the region and even the country. The Virginia state legislature began a momentous debate on the future of slavery in the state. Indeed, more than a few members of the South's clerisy openly admitted that the revolt had forced them into a more self-conscious inquiry into the institution of slavery itself. Nat Turner's revolt drove the country across a threshold. The defense of slavery stiffened; hostility toward abolitionists intensified; the sectional rift widened.

In The Rebellious Slave, Scot French offers little that is new about Turner's revolt, for that is not his intent. He explores instead the collective memory of Nat Turner, how individuals and groups of individuals have striven to find "transcendent meaning" in the nation's "troubled past" by thinking and writing about the most conspicuous insurrectionary slave in United States history. Building a tradition in any society requires persistent rediscovery and conscious seizure of elements of the past. For divergent constituencies Turner's image became contested ground. Over the decades he has appeared in print and other media as everything from a deranged brigand to a cerebral and divinely-inspired revolutionary. The various versions of Turner that have come to public attention chart in revealing ways momentous struggles in American politics and culture.

In a book of five chapters and more than thirty subchapters, French begins before the revolt with the antislavery writings of Thomas Jefferson, David Walker, and William Lloyd Garrison, which prepared the American mind for the rise of a rebellious slave like Nat Turner. Jefferson's well-documented trembling about slave rebellion had a long history and flowed logically from his embrace of a conception of mankind that, whatever his musings about racial difference, accepted the notion that all human beings possessed equally an innate, God-given moral sense. French relies on Peter Hink's prizewinning study in discussing Walker, a southern-born, free black firebrand. His incendiary Appeal (1829), a pamphlet with black nationalist and Pan-Africanist overtones, called on slaves throughout the South to rise and break the galling yoke of slavery. On the one hand, Turner's revolt, coming less than eight months after the publication of the Liberator, appeared to confirm Garrison's prediction about the inevitable consequences of maintaining the great evil of human bondage. On the other hand, the timing of his abolitionist publication afforded southern whites the luxury of applying post hoc reasoning to assign blame for the revolt away from Turner and the institution of slavery itself to malevolent outsiders.

In chapter two, French explores the construction of narratives about Turner and the revolt by four of his Virginian contemporaries: John Hampden Pleasants, editor of Richmond's Constitutional Whig; a teenaged slave woman named Beck; Thomas R. Gray, the Southampton County lawyer who compiled Nat's Confessions; and Governor John Floyd. Pleasants' reporting on the revolt stands as a model of investigatory journalism compared to that of most of his fellow newspapermen. Beck's disjointed and inconsistent narrative, extracted by agitated local officials, stretched the ambit of the revolt beyond Southampton County and led to the conviction of innocent slaves. Although French does not dissect Turner's Confessions to distinguish between Turner's voice and Gray's editorial interventions, he does suggest how Gray's shaping of Turner's voice was meant to address the needs of certain groups. For Southerners with nagging doubts about the paternalistic side of slavery, Governor Floyd imaginatively ramified the plot northward, blaming external agents, including Yankee peddlers and traders, of fomenting a generalized spirit of slave insubordination.

Chapter three focuses on the "apotheosis" of Turner by northern abolitionists as the country moved toward civil war. For a time, the revolt chilled the atmosphere in which they had to operate and stimulated a vigorous debate within their fracturing movement about the appropriate means to effect the desired end of emancipation. French gives due attention to the invocation of Turner and other black rebels by Henry Highland Garnet in his fiery address to the National Convention of Colored Citizens in 1843. Frederick Douglass, who confronted Garnet and his militant position at the Buffalo convention, becomes more sympathetic to the use of violence against slavery in the 1850s and during the Civil War dropped frequent references to Turner and other rebellious slaves to underscore points about black manhood and racial pride. French also documents the elevating references to Turner in the narratives produced under the direction of Lydia Maria Child by the former slaves Charity Bowery and Harriet Jacobs. Whether Turner's revolt truly generated a mythological hero and tradition of rebelliousness in the antebellum slave quarters, however, remains unanswered by French.

Turner may not have inspired John Brown to attack the federal armory at Harper's Ferry, but the affair sparked a burst of national interest in the history of slave rebellion before Lincoln's election. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, one of the Secret Six who supported Brown, searching for a tradition of black rebelliousness, conducted groundbreaking research on the subject that culminated in a series of published essays on Turner and other rebellious slaves. French neglects to mention that the presence of Yankee troops in Southampton County in 1862 so jogged the collective memory of Turner there that a Union officer had to address publicly the county's blacks to calm the insurrectionary anxieties of the county's whites. French does note that Turner weighed on Abraham Lincoln's mind before the promulgation of the Emancipation Proclamation, and the shadow of Turner certainly hovered over the attendant debate about the Proclamation's likely impact. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who had incorporated one reconstruction of Turner in writing about slave rebellion in her novel Dred (1856), envisioned him again near the end of the war. The Confederacy's impending destruction, she thought, fulfilled Turner's prophecies. In a stroke, "Stowe transformed the bloody race war prophesied by Turner into a divinely sanctioned civil war that would purge the nation of slavery's sin and hasten the dawn of a new millennium in America" (p. 134).

Emancipation, of course, failed to usher in Stowe's Kingdom of Heaven, and in "Signposts," the longest chapter of the book, French tracks references to Turner by blacks and whites, mostly scholars and political figures, from the end of the Civil War through the Great Depression. With Redemption, the rise of Jim Crow, and racial reconciliation between northern and southern whites, a public consensus about Turner emerged by the end of the nineteenth century, as evidenced in William Drewry's Southampton Insurrection (1900). Among generally loyal and faithful slaves, Turner stood out in Drewry's history as an antebellum aberrant whose animalistic butchery bespoke the compelling need after slavery for continued white supremacy. By contrast, black writers, reeling under a discriminatory onslaught, divided on their representations of Turner in ways that reflected differences in strategy about how to survive an ever more virulent white racism. Some blacks in their writings accented Turner the warrior; others stressed his education and Christian piety; still others preferred not to speak of Turner at all. As French points out, when the Indianapolis Freeman, a black newspaper, polled its readers in 1890 to identify "the ten greatest Negroes--living or dead," Turner picked up a few votes but failed to make the list.

W. E. B. Du Bois considered writing his dissertation at Harvard on Turner, whom he regarded as one of the great figures in American history. His interest in Turner as a freedom fighter and American patriot presaged that of the Harlem Renaissance and of a number of newly formed and politically assertive black organizations of the early twentieth century. A revolutionary, workingclass Turner also appeared in publications by communist writers, most notably Herbert Aptheker, whose scholarship on slave rebellion challenged the moon-light-and-magnolia nostalgia that had been flourishing for generations in academe. By the end of the 1930s, French observes, Americans had multiple versions of Turner from which to choose.

French's final chapter probes the representation of Turner in the politically-charged decades after World War II and is highlighted by a fascinating discussion of William Styron's blockbuster novel on Nat Turner and its subsequent death in Hollywood as a movie script. Radical elements within the black intelligentsia lambasted Styron for racism and other crimes in his presentation of Turner. French captures the unfairness of much of the criticism, although Eugene Genovese's brilliant public defense of Styron, which raised a number of transcendent questions in its own right, deserves more than the two lines French gives it. Styron's Turner never reached the cinema, French argues, not because of his Black Power critics, but because Doctor Doolittle and Hello Dolly flopped for Twentieth Century Fox at the box office. At any rate, "For all of his [alleged] elitism, Styron did more to popularize the history and memory of Nat Turner's Rebellion than any other writer of the twentieth century" (p. 274).

French's stimulating book should be read in conjunction with the essays in Kenneth Greenberg's anthology, Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory (2003). One might hope that the contributions of both of these books will prepare the way for a major scholarly analysis of the revolt that will advance the discussion beyond Stephen Oates's Fires of Jubilee (1975).

ENDNOTE

1. Charleston Mercury, 5 January 1860.

Robert L. Paquette

Hamilton College