In the history of the United States Nat Tuner’s rebellion of 1831 figures prominently as the most impactful slave revolt of the nineteenth century. Not only was the uprising in Southampton County (Virginia) one of the few incidents of slave resistance that actually went beyond the stage of mere conspiracy, but the 55 white people that were killed during the three-day raid served as a writing on the wall. It triggered a violent backlash of white authorities and strongly influenced the political debate about the abolition of slavery in the U.S. for years to come. However, while many historians have attempted to reconstruct the events of August 1831 as correctly as possible, in his book Christopher Tomlins pursues a different agenda. In his monograph the person of Turner himself takes center stage, not as a heroic figure, though, but as a religious, cultural and material man. Tomlins attempts to write a history of the events in August 1831 that does not start with the insurrection’s political ramifications, but that hones in on the cultural context of the rebellion and on the different semantic echo chambers, in which people listened to the voices of the main actors of 1831.

In support of his anti-heroic agenda, in his prologue Tomlins criticizes that Turner would stand for a Black type of character and he deconstructs a White desire “to know the Negro,” (p. 15) a phrase he borrows from Styron’s 1967 fictional account of the Nat Turner revolt. In that it is the author’s goal to use ‘speculative history’ as well as broad historical contextualization of the source materials on the Nat Turner revolt to go beyond type-casting Nat Turner as either a legendary freedom fighter or religious fanatic. In his criticism he does not stop with fictional renderings of Black resistance, but he also engages historical professionals like Herbert Aptheker, Eugene Genovese or Kenneth Stampp who have interpreted resistance of enslaved people (e.g. Gabriel’s rebellion of 1800 or Denmark Vesey’s conspiracy of 1822) mainly against the backdrop of political action. Thus, the questions this book asks are (at least) threefold: 1) What can we learn about the motives of Nat Turner and the historical context in which the revolt took place? 2) How can historians write a history of resistance without solely relying on grand narratives of Marxist or political-history categories of resistance? 3) What does it mean to write speculative history? This agenda already indicates that readers will not encounter one book, but three or four within this volume and Tomlins circles his research object without giving preference to one particular reading. Rather he gives us three very distinct analytical angles.

The first two main chapters focus on one of the key documents we have about the Nat Turner revolt: The Confessions of Nat Turner, a pamphlet that claims to be a record of the rebel’s own words, but that was created and compiled from interviews one Thomas Gray, a White lawyer, conducted while Turner had already been imprisoned. Tomlins is very successful in showing that Turner’s voice in this text is both related to the very person as well as “surrounded, caged, by multiple controlling devices” (p. 40), what the author calls ritualized speech acts and paratext. In his close reading of the short pamphlet, Tomlins identifies two different narrative strands – a confession of faith and a criminal confession – that lead him to the conclusion that “while Gray calls the event an insurrection Turner does not” (p. 48). Turner rather relied on a narrative of religious martyrdom that helped him to fashion himself as a prophet and a spiritual leader in an apocalyptic sense rather than a political freedom fighter.

The next part of Tomlin’s text moves to a different area of analysis. As he takes into consideration the acts of violence that occurred during the revolt, the author offers very distinct readings that are directly connected to different concepts of slavery. He considers killing as an act of labor, as work and as a spectacle. In all of that, Tomlins reads Turner with de Certeau – namely relying on his concept of tactics (laid out in the Practice of Everyday Life) as the interpretive lens that allows us to see the situative behavior of enslaved men who through moving beyond the realm of bonded labor for a moment could transform themselves from enslaved men to willful actors. Therefore, the act of executing Nat Turner became an act of reestablishing White supremacy, a performance of White order that had to expunge the slightest idea of Black agency – as it had loomed in the deadly violence Black insurrectionists had performed during the raid.

Putting the Black body center stage, Tomlins, in the final section of his book, goes on to read a slave’s two bodies that were intertwined in the ways in which White authorities interpreted the revolt and the aftermath: while the implicit danger of Black resistance and resilience elicited modes of policing and punishing Black people, the lens of the economic appreciation of Black bodies (e.g. labor or reproductive value) made it way more complicated to demonize Black men without endangering the enslaved Black body as an ongoing investment.

To conclude, this is a book about the Nat Turner revolt as much as it is about the craft of writing history. By framing his arguments in Benjaminian terms Tomlins succeeds in addressing questions of subaltern voices, archival silences and the limits of historical narrative. Echoing Saidiya Hartman’s claim that recovering Black voices in the archive remains a mission impossible Tomlins follows her advice that the voices of enslaved people can only be viewed as being part of a larger setting of archival and narrative power.1 By offering a variety of interpretations Tomlins makes a compelling case to be critical of mere political interpretations of slave resistance and the conditions of slavery in the 1820s and 1830s. Sometimes it is hard, though, to read the three parts of the book together as one volume – especially the economic thrust of the final section deviates from the foci of the first main sections, which favor cultural or performative readings of the insurrection.

Note:
1 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection. Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-century America, Oxford 1997, p. 12.