Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community by Vanessa M. Holden (review)

Although Nat Turner confessed to leading the bloody rebellion that came to be known by his name, he never identified other participants, except for those already known to authorities. Nor did he divulge details about how he stayed hidden for months after militia brought the 1831 revolt in southeastern Virginia to conclusion. Scholars of numerous biographies and historical inquiries surrounding events that summer and fall have mostly allowed Turner to take responsibility. The community of color that gave rise to and survived the rebellion has received less attention. University of Kentucky professor Vanessa M. Holden helps to rectify this oversight in this tightly focused volume.

Surviving Southampton follows a current trend of looking at slave rebellion as "far bigger than one man's inspired bid for freedom," as Holden puts it (7). The book, which began as the author's senior thesis and was fifteen years in the making, argues that the surrounding community of color was widely involved. As rebels traveled from farm to farm slaughtering slaveholders, they encountered women, youth, and men of color, enslaved and free, who knew each other through work and social relationships. Some joined in. Those not directly involved in combat relayed news, provided food, and encouraged or discouraged participation among those they knew. Eventually, noncombatants also testified before legal authorities and picked up the pieces of life in an area that was forever changed by the trauma.

Holden organizes her findings in five chapters. The first focuses on the way a system of surveillance and control regulated the mobility of African Americans in the region before the rebellion. The second, a study of mostly one farm, considers enslaved women's strategies of evading and resisting surveillance and control. Women like Charlotte and Ester performed a variety of domestic and agricultural tasks, which gave them access to all parts of an owner's property and made it easy for them to relay information, act as lookouts, and provide food, as needed, before, during, and after the rebellion.

A third chapter addresses free people of color who made up about 20 percent of Southampton County's Black population. In many ways, they had the most to lose. Before the rebellion, most free Blacks lived a precarious existence, dependent on white people for work and a place to live and tied to the region's enslaved population through kinship and friendship. Although slaveholders feared that free Blacks increased discontent among the bonded population, they provided a cheap form of supplementary labor for Southampton's mostly small to mid-sized slaveholding farmers. After the rebellion, some free people of color, facing increased scrutiny and extralegal threats, left the region. Others sought protection from white patrons, registering with authorities as required by law and apprenticing their children in increasing numbers to white masters.

Children, who made up more than a third of Southampton's Black population, not only witnessed but also participated in events. A fourth chapter looks at how they experienced the rebellion, with particular emphasis on five boys, four enslaved and one free. All were charged as adults and held for trial. All were convicted. The free boy was executed; the other four were sold south.

A fifth chapter, based largely on trial records, considers the immediate aftermath of the rebellion. Of the fifty youths and adults held for trial, only one, Lucy, was a woman. She had physically prevented Mary Barrow's escape when rebels showed up on the Barrows' farm to kill the slaveholding family. Lucy was executed along with seventeen of the men.

Other African American women appear in the court records because they testified, through depositions, about what they had seen and heard. These included six enslaved women, one enslaved girl, and one free woman of color. None offered...