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4. "We Will One Day Have Our Throats Cut in this County'': Stephen Duncan and the Challenges of Slavery
- Louisiana State University Press
- Chapter
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In the 1820s, Stephen Duncan slowly and meticulously built his family’s wealth and anchored its position of power within the inner circle of the region ’s most important social and economic networks. As the1830s opened, heheldavarietyof valuableassets:expansivetractsof land,hundredsof slaves, and valuable family and business connections. Yet maintaining the value of those assets required constant vigilance, since frequently Duncan had to contend with larger forces that he could not personally control. Among these forces was the value of land and crops, which declined signi- ficantly in the summer of 1831. Having suffered through a drought in June, Duncan’s crops fell two-thirds short of what he expected, and his fields produced half of the previous year’s yield. Meanwhile, at the close of the crop year that August, the average price of cotton dipped to 9.92 cents per pound in New Orleans—its lowest price in that city since 1812. Markets elsewhere, especially in New York and Liverpool, mirrored this drop.1 For Duncan, the year’s serious crop difficulties gave way to potentially even graver dangers in the fields. As the summer sun of late August seared the Mississippi landscape, events in faraway Virginia unfolded that would, in the coming months, burn indelible images in the minds of black and white Mississippians. In the Virginia Tidewater county of Southampton, August 21, 1831, began as ordinarily as the thousands of days that came before it. By the time sunset fell over the Old Dominion, cataclysmic events had ripped through Virginia’s master class. Nat Turner and several fellow bondsmen received what they believed to be signs from God indicating that it was the propitious moment to 52 4 “WE WILL ONE DAY HAVE OUR THROATS CUT IN THIS COUNTY” Stephen Duncan and the Challenges of Slavery forge ahead with their plot to bring freedom to the enslaved, and they rose up in rebellion.2 After killing Turner’s enslavers, the self-emancipated group enlisted nearly seventy followers, who methodically proceeded to execute white slaveowning families as they moved through the county. By the morning of August 24, the rebels had cut a swath of freedom encompassing more than twenty square miles. Trying to get control of the rebellion, armed white vigilante groups gathered by the hundreds and enlisted the help of military troops. The ensuing bloody clashes resulted in the slaughter of hundreds of slaves, including slaves who were not participants in the uprising. Turner initially eluded authorities but was eventually captured at the end of October. Within a few days, a Virginia court sentenced Turner to hang.3 For Stephen Duncan and other white southerners, the Turner revolt struck at the heart of their strength—and their vulnerability. Though open acts of slave resistance occurred from the time that slave ships first brought Africans to colonial America, the Turner revolt and its outcome brought forth white fears of black rebellion that were unmatched.4 Whites rushed to enact tighter and more rigid methods of control over slaves. Symbolic of this reaction was the intersection of two roads in Southampton County, where whites impaled on a stake the severed head of a black man. Blackhead Signpost, as the crossroads came to be known, stood as a grim reminder that slaves who sought freedom would be met by certain and brutal death.5 Asnewsof therebellionspreadacrosstheSouth,panicspreadthroughwhite society, profoundly affecting slaveholders’ consciousness. A captured runaway slave from Mississippi claimed that the scars that marked his body were from a “severe whipping with a cow-skin, at the time of the South-Hampton insurrection .”6 The distress created by the Virginia revolt eventually found its way to Auburn. Duncan initially dismissed the event, proclaiming in a letter to Thomas Butler, “I don’t credit the story of the extension of the Virginia insurrection .” Yet his very next sentence revealed his deep alarm: “I have great apprehension that we will one day have our throats cut in this county.” The existence of a majority black population fueled Duncan’s fears. “We now have 5 blacks to one white; and within 4 hours march of Natches there are 2200 able bodied male slaves. . . . It behooves us to be vigilant—but silent.”7 As the days and weeks passed, Duncan was increasingly anxious as he focused on the reality of a black majority in Natchez. In Adams County, slaves and free blacks numbered over 11,000, while the white population totaled challenges of slavery 53 [3.215.183.194...