Almost Free: A Story about Family and Race in Antebellum Virginia

4. Visions of Rebellion

78 chapter four visions of rebellion perhaps nat turner was responding partly to the greater restrictions on liberty in Virginia when he plotted what became the most famous and most deadly slave rebellion in American history. In late August 1831 Turner, a literate and deeply religious slave also known as Preacher Nat, led a group of rebels from farm to farm in Virginia’s Southampton County, near the North Carolina border. They killed all the white people—men, women, and children—they could find. Turner and his followers hoped their actions would generate a great uprising of slaves that would end white dominance and fulfill Turner’s vision that “the first should be last and the last should be first.” Nat Turner’s stated goal of racial inversion—black over white—was precisely what white Virginians most feared. In calling forth a picture of an alternate reality in which all black people might be truly free, Turner’s Rebellion destroyed white complacency about slavery and gave black people cause to reexamine their place in the world. For the Johnson-Malvin family, the rebellion, its aftermath, and its consequences would rock their lives and rattle the family they had determined to keep together. For worse and not for better, Turner’s Rebellion altered the landscape in which they lived, as it altered the political landscape in all of Virginia and the nation beyond it. Visions of Rebellion 79 The earthquake of Turner’s Rebellion struck all the harder because changes of the previous decade had already begun to shake things up. The Missouri Crisis and Compromise of 181–21 had introduced a more intense version of the national political battle over slavery. Antislavery activists, both black and white, had begun organizing and publishing in the northern states. And the nation as a whole was undergoing massive economic and social change. Population statistics tell part of the story: the 5.3 million people who lived in the United States in 1800, when Samuel Johnson began planning his freedom, had grown nearly two and a half times to 12. million in 1830, the year before Turner’s Rebellion. Along with population growth came geographic expansion and the growth and elaboration of commercial markets. People at the time fretted over the rapid changes. As early as 1817, South Carolina politician John C. Calhoun expressed his concern that “we are . . . rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing.” For Calhoun, national growth had centrifugal force—something to be fought against. The nation’s swift development brought with it “the most imperious obligation to counteract every tendency to disunion.” Samuel Johnson observed up close one of the ways in which Americans tried to counteract any tendency to disunion when Warrenton’s residents hosted a grand, fiftieth-anniversary celebration of the nation’s birth. In 1824–25, General Lafayette, the French aide to General Washington and a beloved hero of the American Revolution, made a triumphal and nostalgic visit to the United States. His tour launched a period of nationalistic festivities, building up to the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1826. Lafayette traveled to all twenty-four states, visiting Virginia twice. In late August 1825 he arrived in Fauquier County, where he was greeted with great ceremony—boys in uniform, men on horses, esteemed guests in carriages. In Warrenton he listened as Thomas L. Moore, who had witnessed Samuel Johnson’s deed of emancipation, made a 80 chapter four celebratory speech before a crowd of five or six thousand people. Afterward, Lafayette graciously responded, speaking of his love of Virginia and of republican principles. Surely Samuel Johnson worked among the servants who made the occasion possible, for the reception following Moore’s speech took place in “Mrs. Norris’s Tavern.” (Ann Norris was now in charge.) A bit later, “under a handsome arbour in the beautiful green in front of the Tavern,” “a large company sat down to a sumptuous and elegant dinner prepared by Mrs. Norris.” Ann Norris’s former charge Lucy Johnson Malvin probably helped to prepare and serve this feast to the guests, who included expresident James Monroe and Chief Justice John Marshall. A couple of years earlier Monroe, as president of the United States, had issued the invitation for Lafayette to visit America. Now dining with the honored general, Monroe led the guests in raising their glasses to Lafayette. He toasted: “Neither time, nor titles, nor dungeons...