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

Nat Turner’s rebellion, a slave revolt that swept across Southampton County, Virginia, in late August 1831, remains America’s most famous slave rebellion. Slave rebels left nearly sixty white men, women, and children dead in their wake as they made their way to the county seat, then called Jerusalem. Though white militia put the rebellion down quickly in forty-eight hours, the county, Virginia, the American South, and the nation reeled. Some whites entertained the abolition of slavery in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Others worked to bolster the South’s long-established power structure. Many more whites, particularly in Southampton County, began the business of picking up the pieces of lives shattered by the violence. Patrick Breen’s The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt, offers a much-needed fresh look at Nat Turner’s rebellion.

As Breen notes in the book’s opening chapter, “What happened in Southampton County has inspired relatively little scholarly attention” (2). Along with David F. Allmendinger Jr.’s Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County (2014), Breen’s study is among the first in the decade since Kenneth S. Greenberg’s edited volume, Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory (2003), to take up the rebellion in a historical monograph. Records concerning the revolt are not obscure. The white officials taxed with making sense of the rebellion and keeping order in its wake left behind a rich primary-source base for historians: court transcripts, militia records, executive communications with the governor of Virginia, newspaper articles, and the transcribed confessions of Nat Turner. Henry Irving Tragle published an edited collection of these documents, The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation of Source Material, in 1971. And yet historians have not written a revised narrative of the revolt in decades. Patrick Breen’s work provides readers with a clear, readable, and accessible account focused on the local history of Southampton County.

Breen’s book opens in the most intimate of settings: an illicit meeting between Nat Turner and his coconspirators in the woods of Southampton County in the winter of 1830–31. Breen dives right into the small community—really just a handful of men connected by geography, at times kinship, and their enslaved status—as they plot the course of 1831. From there, he moves on in chapters 1–3 to recount the rebellion, from the initial leaders’ plot to their plan’s demise at the hands of the local militia. He carefully lays out the rebels’ tactical advantages and weaknesses.

In the next three chapters, Breen takes up the local history of the rebellion’s aftermath. He offers a narrative history of the court proceedings that followed the local militia’s victory over the rebellion. Breen argues that local officials used the court proceedings to assert their control over the county and that the courts were their means of shaping the public narrative of the rebellion to best serve long-established hegemonic power. In a readable explanation of court proceedings, he demonstrates the careful calculations that local officials made as they walked a tightrope of white fear and rage, African American defiance and evasion, and the specter of local grief.

In chapter 7, Breen returns to Nat Turner’s biography and his final days in Southampton County. Turner remained missing from late August through late October. Breen revisits The Confessions of Nat Turner, both the content of the document and the document’s creation by a local lawyer who interviewed Turner in the course of his trial before local justices. The chapter serves as a narrative coda, completing the local history of the rebellion that Breen begins in the first chapter and revisiting the importance of Nat Turner’s own biography in the narrative that whites created to reassert mastery and...