Communities in Revolt: An Introduction

Southampton County, Virginia, was the locale for the 9/11 of the Old South's slave system. Randolph Scully, Patrick Breen, and Anthony Kaye show that any effort to understand Nat Turner's extraordinary rampage must build on our understanding of the ordinary and familiar. Churches and evangelical communities stood at the center of the Old South's social order, as did attachments to neighborhoods.

Scully and Breen provide fresh readings of Baptist church records. Although the "shocking, exceptional nature of the Turner rebellion" (16) defies easy analysis, Scully notes that Turner was "a frustrated black spiritual virtuosi" (16). Breen studies the months after the Turner rebellion, when evangelical congregations attempted to rebuild communities of trust. Kaye sees the Turner rebellion as a neighborhood undertaking.

Too much that is polemical or speculative has been written about Nat Turner. These essays, by contrast, exercise admirable restraint. None claim to find some kind of silver bullet that explains the Turner insurrection. None credit after-the-fact reports of vast conspiracies known to many slaves within a fifty or hundred mile radius. None wish away the obstacles that were sure to crush any slave insurrection in antebellum America.

Breen notes that Turner, a young black man who realized that he had far more God-given ability than his white enslavers, grew up in a locale where some local whites didn't approve of slavery, and where some shared with blacks a belief that it was contrary to Christian teaching.