The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt

by Patrick H. Breen

On the evening of August 21, 1831, Nat Turner and six men launched their infamous rebellion against slaveholders. The rebels swept through Southampton County, Virginia, recruiting slaves to their ranks and killing nearly five dozen whites-more than had ever been killed in any slave revolt in American history. Although a hastily assembled group of whites soon suppressed the violence, its repercussions had far-reaching consequences.

In The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood , Patrick H. Breen uses the dramatic events in Southampton to explore the terrible choices faced by members of the local black community as they considered joining the rebels, a choice that would likely cost them their lives, supporting their masters, or somehow avoiding taking sides. Combining fast-paced narrative with rigorous analysis, Breen shows how, as whites regained control, slaveholders created an account of the revolt that saved their slaves from white retribution, the most dangerous threat facing the slaveholders' human property. By probing the stories slaveholders told that allowed them to get non-slaveholders to protect slave property, The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood reveals something surprising about both the fragility and power of slavery.

Genres: History, American History, Nonfiction, African American

320 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2015

Reviews

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disclaimer: ARC via Netgalley.

Before reading this book, I had known of Nat Turner’s rebellion, but only in the most general sense. In my American history classes, we spent time on it, a little more than we spent on John Brown, but the nitty-gritty and the areas of debate were largely left untouched. Therefore, when I saw Breen’s book up on Netgalley, I decided to read it.

Breen gives a detailed history of the rebellion but also of why those in the surrounding area did not join the rebellion. As much as he can, Breen gives biographic details of the slaves involved in the rebellion. He covers not only the rebellion but the trials as well as the after effects. Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is the comparison to Haiti. Breen considers the confessions of Turner, the statements he made prior to his hanging.

In all, it is a gripping read that shreds light on an event that every American should know more about.

[Chris Jaffe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a very interesting book on the history of the Nat Turner revolt, an event often noted but one that hasn’t received too many scholarly studies. Much of the first half or so of this book is a recounting of the uprising. It started small – which was oddly enough a secret to its success. Only a handful of blacks apparently knew about it on the eve of the rebellion, and they’d made no effort to obtain weapons. Those are the things that normally sabotage a rebellion. Instead, it could begin spontaneously, and they used weapons from the houses they entered, building as they went. By daybreak, they’d already hit 3-4 farms, and then moved to the nearby town of Jerusalem, raiding farms as they went. Then they ran into an organized band opposing them a few miles before Jerusalem, and things quickly disintegrated

One of the themes of this book is the internal divisions of the black community. There wasn’t one single response to Nat Turner. Many had written him off years ago when he ran away, only to come back saying God wanted him to return. He only had four followers until the day before the rebellion. He gained a few more on the meeting they set out – and one of them was going along despite Nat Turner, not because. He wanted to rebel, but didn’t seem too interested in Turner. Even during the rebellion, there are clear questions of who was/not a rebel. There was a core group of followers, but even from the first farm, there were some going along whose commitment was less than full. Some reports (from captured rebels after it was over) said the core guys would keep watch on the others. Maybe 60 took part, but at varying degrees of engagement, and never all at once. This also helped explain why it collapsed as swiftly as it did. Pretty much all the killing was done before the first engagement with a white militia.

Another key part of Breen’s book is the white response. In this, he takes issue with the conventional approach that the uprising led to a backlash of 100-200 blacks killed in the region. He has one part where he quotes the most prominent historians on the subject and they all give the same numbers – but Breen notes that the place they get their numbers from is questionable. (And also: the historians tend to keep topping each other. The original source said 120. First that was used. Then it became 100-200. Then some said at least 200). Breen notes that there clearly were slaves killed after the uprising, but that leading whites tried to minimize it quickly. In part, it’s about preserving their property. But it was also about preserving their narrative. They argued that the uprising was a small band led by a fanatic and that most slaves were loyal. This was a narrative far more receptive for themselves. Breen looks at property tax records and other annual records and finds no evidence for 200 or 100 killed. There were dozens, but he’d guess it was closer to 50.

He also looks at the popular level response. The elites controlled the courts, but the people still had their churches – and several churches had a tradition of inter-faith services. Those temporarily ended, and after several months they came back. But some churches had many whites stop attending in protest. Others had much more rigorously segregated services.

Breen makes credible cases for his points. Some parts are fairly dry (like when he goes over tax records) and can get lost in the academic muck of minitua. But it is very well done. The main problem I’d have is that he should’ve spent some time linking it to the Virginia state debate on abolishing slavery that took part right after (and in large part due to) the Nat Turner Rebellion. In that regard, Breen keeps his focus too much on the local community. Still, overall it’s an excellent book.

[Reagan Kuennen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was actually very interesting!! I appreciated this narrative style history because I did not learn about the nat turner rebellion in depth growing up so it gave me a greater picture of the event as well as the repercussions.

[Stan Prager · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review of: The Land Shall be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt,
by Patrick H. Breen
by Stan Prager (9-7-19)

In August 1831, in Virginia’s Southampton County, a literate, highly intelligent if eccentric enslaved man—consumed with such an outsize religious fervor that he was nicknamed “The Prophet” by those in his orbit—led what was to become the largest slave uprising in American history. Nat Turner’s Rebellion turned out to be a brief but bloody affair that resulted in the largely indiscriminate slaughter of dozens of whites—men, women, children, even infants—before it was put down. The failed revolt itself was and remains far less important than its repercussions and the dramatic echoes that still resounded many years hence during the secession crisis. Rarely would any historian of the American Civil War cite Nat Turner as a direct cause of the conflict—after all, the rebellion took place three decades prior to Fort Sumpter—but it is almost always part of the conversation. Turner’s uprising not only reinforced but validated a deep-simmering paranoia of southern whites—who like ancient Spartans vastly outnumbered by Helots were often in the minority to their larger chattel population—and spawned a host of reactionary legislation in Virginia and throughout much of the south that outlawed teaching blacks to read and white, and prohibited religious gatherings without a white minister present. And while for those below the Mason-Dixon it was an underscore to the perils of their peculiar institution, at a time when abolitionism was in its infancy it also served to remind at least some of their northern brethren that the morally questionable practice of owning other human beings was part of the fabric of southern life. Indeed, one could argue that the true dawn of what we conceive of as the antebellum era began with Nat Turner.
For such a pivotal event in the nation’s past, the historiography has been somewhat scant. There is the controversial “confession” that Turner dictated to lawyer Thomas Ruffin Gray in the days between his capture, trial and hanging, which some take at face value and others dispute. But in the intervening years, surprisingly few scholars have carefully scrutinized the rebellion and its legacy, which remains far better known to a wider audience from William Styron’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Confessions of Nat Turner than from the analytical authority of credentialed historians.
A welcome remedy can be found in The Land Shall be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt, a brilliant if uneven treatment of the uprising and its aftermath by Patrick H. Breen, first published in 2016, that likely will serve as the academic gold standard for some time to come. While giving a respectful nod to the existing historiography—which has tended to breed competing narratives that pronounce Turner hero or villain or madman—Breen, an Associate Professor of History at Providence College, instead went all in by conducting an impressive amount of highly original research that locates the revolt within the greater sphere of the changing nature of the institution of slavery in southeastern Virginia in the early 1830s, which as a labor mechanism was in fact in a slow but pronounced decline. Nat Turner and his uprising certainly did not occur in a vacuum, but prior to Breen’s keen analysis, the rebellion was generally interpreted out of its critical context, which thus distorted conclusions that often pronounced it an anomaly nurtured by a passionate if deranged figure. For the modern historian, of course, this is not all that shocking, since the uncomfortable dynamics found in the relationships of the enslaved with wider communities of whites and other blacks (both free and enslaved) has until recent times been typically afforded only superficial attention or entirely overlooked. It is nevertheless surprising—given the notoriety of the Turner revolt—that until Breen there was such a lack of scholarly focus in this arena.
The book has eight chapters but there are three clear divisions that follow a distinct if sometimes awkward chronology. The first part traces the start and course of the rebellion and presents the full cast of characters of conspirators and victims. The second is devoted to subsequent events, including both the extrajudicial murder by whites of blacks swept up in the initial hysteria spawned by the revolt, as well as the carefully orchestrated trials and executions of many of the participants. The final and shortest section concerns the fate of Nat Turner himself, who evaded capture for two months—long after many of his accomplices had been tried and hanged.
The general reader may find the first part slow-going. The story of the revolt should be an exciting read, especially given the passion of prophecy that consumed Turner and the violence that it begat with its slaughter of innocents by an unlikely band of recruits whose motives were ambiguous. Instead, the prose at times is so dispassionate that the drama slips away. In my opinion, this is less Breen’s fault—he is, after all, a talented writer—than the stultifying structure of academic writing that burdens the field, the unfortunate reason why most best-selling works of history are not written by historians. But I would encourage the discouraged to press on, because the effort is intellectually rewarding; the author has deftly stripped away myth and legend to separate fact from the surmise and invention pregnant in other accounts. If there can be such a thing as a definitive study of the Nat Turner rebellion, Breen has delivered it.
It is clear from the character of the narrative that follows that Breen’s true passion lies in the aftermath of the revolt, where he serves as revisionist to what has long been taken for granted as settled history. This is as it should be, because it was the repercussions of the rebellion and the way it was remembered (north and south) in the thirty years leading up to secession that was always of far greater importance to history than the uprising itself. And it is unfortunately this echo—much of which has been unsubstantiated—which has tainted later scholarship. The central notion that prevailed, which Breen challenges, is that the reaction to Nat Turner was a widespread bloodbath of African Americans by unruly mobs whose suspicion was that all blacks were complicit or were simply driven by revenge. The other, also disputed by Breen, is that whatever trust might have once existed between white masters and the enslaved had forever evaporated, the former ever in fear that the latter were secretly plotting a repeat of the Turner episode. Finally, Breen takes issue with the view of many historians that the authorial voice in Turner’s “confession” is unreliable because it was dictated to a white man who was guided by his own agenda when he published it.
Breen refutes the first by lending scrutiny to the empirical evidence in the extant records of the enslaved population. A little general background for the uninitiated here: the enslaved were treated as taxable chattel property in the antebellum era, so meticulous records were kept and a good deal of that survives. Many slave-owners insured their human “property,” often through insurance companies based in the north. If an enslaved person was convicted of a capital crime, the state compensated the slave-owner for the executed offender. Breen, as a good historian, simply reviewed the records to determine if prevailing views of the rebellion’s aftermath were accurate or exaggerated. What he learned was that there was indeed much hyperbole in reports of widespread massacres of African Americans. Yes, certain individuals and militias did commit atrocities by murdering blacks, and sometimes torturing them first. But the numbers were vastly overstated. And local officials quickly put a stop to this, motivated perhaps far less by ethical concerns than in an effort to protect valuable “property” from the extrajudicial depredations of the mob, whose owners would not then be duly compensated. Breen should be commended for his careful research—which demonstrates that long-accepted reports of mass murder are simply unsupported by the records—yet it seems astonishing that those who came before him failed to follow the same road of due diligence that he traveled. This should underscore to all budding historians out there that there remains lots of solid history work ahead, even and especially in otherwise familiar areas like this one where what turns out to be a flawed analysis has long been taken for granted as the scholarly consensus.
This business of assigning value to chattel human property is uncomfortable stuff for modern students of this era, but as those who have read The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, Daina Ramey Berry’s outstanding treatment of the topic, it is absolutely essential to understanding how slavery operated in the antebellum south. The Land Shall be Deluged in Blood steps beyond the specifics of Nat Turner to offer a wider perspective in this vein, as well. The enslaved were often subject to the arbitrary sanctions of their masters, but those accused of capital crimes were technically granted a kind of due process of law. Breen points out that special courts of “Oyer and Terminer” that lacked juries—the same kind that convicted and hanged those accused of witchcraft in Salem—were ordained in Virginia to judge such cases. Initially enacted to expedite the trial process of the enslaved, the courts—captained by five magistrates who were typically wealthy slave-owners, and which duly supplied defense attorneys to the accused—came to have the opposite effect, convicting only about a third of those brought before them. [p108] Much of the reason for these results seems to be connected to an effort to limit the cost of the state for compensation for those sent to the gallows for their crimes.
It turns out that these same courts also had a tempering effect on the trials of those accused of taking part in the rebellion. But this time, it wasn’t only about the money. Breen argues convincingly that the elite magistrates who controlled the trial process also created and marketed to the wider community a reassuring narrative that the uprising was a small affair involving only a small number of the misguided. In the end, eighteen were executed, more than a dozen were transported and there were even some acquittals. Thus, state liability was limited, and the peculiar institution was protected.
That reassurance seems to have been effective: freedom of movement for the enslaved subsequent to the revolt was not as constrained as some have maintained, as evidenced by the fact that Nat Turner was discovered in hiding and betrayed by other enslaved individuals who were hardly prohibited from wandering alone after dark. By the time Nat Turner was captured and executed, the rebellion was almost already history. As to the veracity of Turner’s “confessions” to Grey, Breen makes a compelling argument in support of Turner’s words as recorded, but that will likely remain both controversial and open to interpretation. So too will the person of Nat Turner. The horror of human chattel slavery might urge us to cheer Nat and his accomplices in their revolt, while the murder of babies in the course of events can’t help but give us pause. Likewise, we might harshly judge those white slave-owners who dared to judge them. But, of course, that is not the strict business of historians, who must sift through the nuance and complexity of people and events to get to the bottom of what really happened, warts and all.
I first learned of The Land Shall be Deluged in Blood when I sat enthralled by Breen’s presentation of his research at the Civil War Institute (CWI) 2019 Summer Conference at Gettysburg College, and I purchased a copy at the college bookstore. While I have some quibbles with the style and arrangement of the book, especially to the strict adherence to chronology that in part weakens the narrative flow, the author has made an invaluable contribution to the historiography with what is surely the authoritative account of the Nat Turner Rebellion. This is and should be required reading for all students of the antebellum era.

Review of: The Land Shall be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt, by Patrick H. Breen https://regarp.com/2019/09/07/review-...

[Johanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book included a lot of narrative which I would have loved if I had been reading this for leisure, but since I was reading it for class I become very frustrated by it. Regardless, the information is excellent and if given in a non-academic setting I would have enjoyed it more. Like I mentioned in my first post about the post, Turner’s Rebellion is such an overall event in American history and in the story of the rise of racial discrimination in the United States.

[Hank Pharis · Rating 3 out of 5]

(NOTE: I'm stingy with stars. For me 2 stars means a good book or a B. 3 stars means a very good book or a B+. 4 stars means an outstanding book or an A {only about 5% of the books I read merit 4 stars}. 5 stars means an all time favorite or an A+ {Only one of 400 or 500 books rates this!).


On August 21, 1831 Nat Turner launched the bloodiest slave revolt in American history. We can easily imagine slaves wanting to revolt against their enslavement. This is a very good account of what we know.

But what specifically motivated Nat Turner to do the things he did? One of the things I most enjoyed about Patrick Breen’s book is his overview of some of the interpretations of Nat Turner. He shows how different historians have portrayed him very differently.

The debate begins with the authenticity of Nat Turner’s original confession. Did he ever give this? Does it faithfully record what Turner said or did he say these things at all?

A few quotes from the book: “Information about Nat Turner’s revolt is sketchy and often suspect. Much that the historian would like to know about the conspiracy cannot be known. The biases of surviving sources also present a problem. Everyone who described the event had biases, but most of the surviving records from the county came from a small group of men who supported the efforts of the county’s leaders to limit the bloodshed. Few accounts of those white voices that demanded a more vigorous response survive. Also, almost no contemporary black voices survive that did not pass through a pen held by a white intermediary.” (13)

“The most important and intensely debated source on the revolt has been The Confessions of Nat Turner, published by Thomas R. Gray. Although Gray’s account was initially accepted as a faithful account of Turner’s own confession, over the last fifty years scholars have questioned its reliability.” (14)

“The Afterword to this book adds several new arguments in support of the reliability of the Confessions. Among other arguments, I have examined Gray’s authorial interruptions of the text as evidence supporting the usefulness of the Confessions. The most likely explanation for the irregular presentation of interruptions is that Gray was—as he claimed to be—in a dialogue with Turner. Furthermore, I have made a close textual analysis demonstrating that Gray preserved Turner’s voice, even to the extent that Gray transcribed what he knew were erroneous comments from the revolt’s leader.” (15)

“In this work, I do my best to document as sympathetically as possible the variety of responses in the black community: from those who thought the revolt was exactly the right thing to do, to those who hated slavery but thought Turner was making a terrible mistake, to those who supported the slaveholders outright.” (166)
“The most powerful attacks on the Confessions based upon contemporary sources have contrasted an account of Turner’s trial that Gray included in his pamphlet to the official records from the trials after the rebellion. According to this argument, one would be foolish to put one’s faith in Gray’s account unless Gray properly represented Turner’s trial. But several historians do not believe Gray’s account of what happened during Turner’s trial. In particular, historians cast a jaundiced eye on the prominent place that Gray assigned to the Confessions during his account of the trial.” (170)
“The official records of the trials, in contrast, included no mention of either Gray or the Confessions. This has led Kenneth S. Greenberg to conclude that “the entire document that Gray presents as a trial record was very likely his own creation.” Although it is possible that Gray embellished his account, nothing significant in the court records contradicts Gray’s version of Turner’s trial. Moreover, the similarities between the two accounts of the trial suggest that Gray attended the trial. Both the account of the trial in the Confessions and the official trial records agreed on all of the important things that happened during the trial. Both said that Nat Turner pleaded not guilty. … Although Gray was likely at the trial, his account differed from the official one recorded by James Rochelle, Southampton’s clerk.” (171)
But ultimately Breen concludes: “The most reasonable reading of this document is that Gray faithfully transmitted the confessions of America’s most famous slave rebel.” (179)

[Jeff Jellets · Rating 4 out of 5]

And evil begets evil.

The Nat Turner revolt of 1831 was the bloodiest slave rebellion in American history. My high school history books probably had a highly sanitized sentence or two on it. But the reality of rebellion is far more horrific, leading to the deaths of between 55 and 65 people, many of whom were women and children, many beheaded with axes in their homes. And while the revolt itself is ghastly, the practice that birthed Nat Turner and his fellow rebels is just as … or maybe even more … hideous: slavery (whose abuses against African-Americans continued for generations and whose blight is an unremitting stain on American history).

In The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood, historian Patrick Breen weaves a riveting account of Turner’s revolt that starkly portrays the facts of what happened on those grim days in August. He also stubbornly eschews the simple explanations (and motivations) of its participants, digging deep into the complex roots of how people – black and white – reacted during the revolt, in its suppression, and in its aftermath. Perhaps the most revealing of these observations is Breen’s examination of the post-insurrection trails where elite, slaveholding white judges showed restraint in carrying-out the executions of those captured – not because they suddenly grew hearts – but for largely economic reasons.

As I said before … evil begets evil.

But as great as the first hundred pages of this book are … it kind of slips into the doldrums by Chapter 6. Breen makes it clear that the genesis of the book is his doctoral dissertation and I hope he earned high marks because the book does get rather scholarly after the mid-point (drearily so … I’d say). By Chapter 8, we are looking at church segregation – and from the scholarly perspective it's incredibility important topic – but I struggled through what felt like padding. The last half of the book took me about four times as many days to read as the first (which I read voraciously in a single afternoon).

Verdict: I’m of two minds when it comes to this one. The first one hundred pages of The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood is five-star amazing, chronicling an event that should have shaken this country to its core – a mass murder eight times bloodier than Manson Family murders – but that was instead quickly obscured by elite slaveholders who feared the revolt might be a trigger to further the cause of the complete abolition of slavery. The first half of this book ‘must-reading’ for any fan of history. The book’s second half … is a bit pedantic … so go past Chapter 5 at your own risk.

[Craig · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a detailed history of the Nat Turner slave uprising. The author does a great job of pointing out that people do not behave monolithicly to events. Something that even today people forget. He delves into the details on why some slaves supported and some rejected the uprising. Many in fact went on to help the slave owners. He also points out that while many whites would later want to do reprisal killings the leaders of the county stopped them (for financial reasons).

I knew about the uprising before but not in this detail. I picked this up after watching the recent movie "Birth of a Nation." In a shocking turn of events a movie was historically inaccurate (to be fair to the movie it was trying to make specific points about slavery and racism and showing Nat Turner killing babies probably would have detracted from that).

While this discussed the impact of the revolt in the county it did not discuss the long term ramifications in the country as a whole. That would have been an interesting discussion as well but it was not required for this work.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good account of the revolt, but I wish Breen had discussed the long-term impact of the revolt as well as its place in the cultural canon of the South, African-Americans, or even considering Styron's crap novel.

He cites Gramsci's hegemony and Du Bois's double consciousness, but does not actually draw out his application of them. He provides the examples that act as their applications in the context of the Southern slaveholding elite and division within the Black community over the revolt, but does not supplement this with actual analysis from Gramsci or Du Bois. As someone familiar with their works and concepts, this is not necessarily a problem for me, but I think the general reader needs an explanation of these deeper than what Breen supplies.

[Robert Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best account of the Nat Turner Rebellion I have seen. Don't look for an exciting read. This is a detailed attempt to look at the rebellion with as little bias as possible and evalutate the various sources, such as "The Confessions of Nat Turner". The result is a somewhat academic, but very interesting book.

[Marky · Rating 1 out of 5]

Historical hogwash. Wait for Vanessa Holden's book.

[Killian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not certain that I had ever heard of this particular revolt, but I wanted to know more about it since this isn't a topic I come across very often.

As can be imagined, it was an unsuccessful revolt in that it did not bring about any kind of change, and many of the organizers were hung, although if their goal was to kill whites then I supposed to were quite successful. The author keeps the writing quite unbaised and stays away from arguing the immorality of slavery, instead focusing on the events and people's actions in the context of the times they were in. I greatly appreciated this since I think we can all agree that slavery = bad. He also includes some very satisfying research at the end regarding the lasting impact of the revolts in Southampton County (where they occured) through looking into the minutes of churches. Great stuff.

Being a law nerd, the most interesting section to me were the trials and how they were conducted. I had never heard of the term "oyer and terminer" before, and reading how this system works was fascinating. Apparently this was the same style that the Salem Witch Trials took which makes me want to read about that now too. It was especially fascinating how they were used in this instance since the whites wanted to downplay the revolt and how many slaves and free-blacks were actually involved which meant pardoning or simply not prosecuting many involved. They could have made the whole thing into a blood bath, but for reasons of their own choose not too. /golf clap

I'll honestly say that the writing is the reason I took a star away. This subject was apparently the authors thesis project, and it definitely feels like reading one. I would have appreciated the narrative being tightened up, and the heavier research being left for later. In some instances this happened, but at other times during the telling of the revolt itself the author meanders into research notes that would have felt more natural reading after knowing the entire story. There are also multiple places where things that have been covered previously (and sometimes quite in depth) are repeated again as if they are new information. This is just a personal pet peeve, but it annoyed me to no end.

Overall, a well researched book on the events of this revolt. Great reading if the topic is interesting to you, although the writing does suffer a bit for being uneven and repetitive.

Copy courtesy of Oxford University Press, via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

[Patty · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nonfiction account of Nat Turner's rebellion (a slave rebellion in 1831 Virginia). Breen focuses as much on the trials and aftermath as the rebellion itself, which is a fair choice, since despite its large repercussions, the rebellion only actually lasted about two days and probably involved no more than forty or fifty people at its height. Breen does a good job of exploring how other black people, both free and enslaved, reacted to the rebellion – a few chose to join, a few threw in with their masters, and many avoided making any choices at all. He also lays out the white reaction, since many of the richest and most powerful men in the area in fact minimized the retribution, since after all executing a rebel meant losing a valuable piece of property, if you were a slave owner. This in turn led to disagreements between the rich and poor whites of the area over how to understand and respond to what had happened.

Breen also does a good job in discussing the image of the rebellion in the time since it happened, and getting back to the original sources. He lays out what has become 'common knowledge' that in fact never happened, and what did happen that has been forgotten. Overall a good book if you're interested in the topic, but probably too academic to be worth it if you're not already engaged.

I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.

[Catherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was the first reading for a course I'm currently taking focusing on Nat Turner's Revolt. I found it to be an interesting take on a horrendous and morally complex point in U.S. history. Breen asks two questions in his exploration of the revolt: 1. How did slaves react to their enslavement? and 2. How did the region's slave-owning whites maintain their dominion over white non-slaveowners, and quell the violent backlash in the aftermath of the revolt?
In addition to showing that the events surrounding the revolt are in no way black-and-white (pun semi-intended), Breen uses his evidence to paint a picture of Turner's character that significantly changed my view of him.

[Sean · Rating 3 out of 5]

a rebellion of slaves. This book is a fantastic portrayal of the slaves attacking there masters.

It was written almost like a thesis where they talk about what happen from a historic point of view. I did find that some of the items were skewed in favor of the white people. that is because of the time frame this happened in. I find that some of the accounts were too one sided and that some of the information given about slavery was inaccurate.

[Natalie L. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book sheds light onto a topic that shaped our history. We may have all learned about Nat Turner's revolt in high school, minimally, but didn't really know a lot about it. This account is well researched and readable. It puts you in Southampton, Virginia during the revolt and afterwards and provides insight into the divides among whites and black slaves at the time. Of particular interest I think, are the trials of the accused members of the revolt and the churches reaction afterwards.

[Mike Shoop · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good use of sources and added to my general knowledge of the events, but I wish it had been presented in a more readable narrative. It felt too academic and dry, and I actually skimmed the last 50 or so pages, which I seldom do. Will have to see if David Allmendinger's account is any better.

[Alec Gray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before you go see "Birth of a Nation", give this book a try- a brutal story of America' bloodiest slave revolt.

[Diana · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a compelling read after watching Nate Parker's Birth of a Nation.