The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt by Patrick H. Breen (review)

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 nonslaveholding majority represented a danger to the slaveholding class, Breen argues, and a backlash threatened to exterminate the enslaved and destroy slave-holders’ 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.