Communities in Revolt: A Comment

This essay comments on three articles appearing in the same issue of the Journal of the Early Republic: Randolph Ferguson Scully, "'I come here before you did and I shall not go away': Race, Gender, and Evangelical Community on the Eve of the Nat Turner Insurrection"; Patrick H. Breen, "Contested Communion: The Limits of White Solidarity in Nat Turner's Virginia"; and Anthony E. Kaye, "Neighborhoods and Nat Turner: The Making of a Slave Rebel and the Unmaking of a Slave Rebellion." Both the comment and the papers originated in a panel session at the 2005 annual convention of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. The comment suggests that the three articles fit together exceptionally well and demonstrate how local history can provide an ideal setting for raising questions of far more than local interest. Scully and Breen provide book-ends to the Nat Turner insurrection, examining religious tensions in southeastern Virginia on the eve of and immediately following the rebellion. Together, their articles reveal a basic continuity in the dominant pattern of black-white interaction within the Baptist churches of Southampton County, Virginia, a pattern in which segregation and subordination coexisted with a significant degree of black religious autonomy. Kaye focuses on Nat Turner and the revolt that he led, arguing that its most salient characteristic was its local orientation; the revolt "arose from the solidarity of neighborhoods, and it broke apart on the shoals between them." Although these articles have a local focus, they raise big questions, touching on black-white religious interaction, disagreements among whites over the place of blacks in Protestant churches, the sources and limitations of slave rebellion, and the overall impact of the Turner insurrection. Together, they give readers a lot to think about.