Description:
In the most famous, and bloody, slave rebellion in American history, Nat Turner, a black preacher and self-styled prophet from Southampton County, Virginia, led a ragtag army of men on a twenty-four-hour rampage that left fifty-seven white people dead and a body politic convulsed in panic. It was the South's worst nightmare, long foretold, but when Turner was finally captured and his confessions were offered to the public by a local lawyer, people felt assured that the event had been the result not of a broadscale conspiracy but of the machinations of a single deranged man. Such was the conclusion that could be drawn from the "Confessions of Nat Turner."<BR> Revisiting sources that are at odds with the official verdict of history, Scot French presents a compelling case for a wider conspiracy involving hundreds of slaves throughout the region. It is a singularly important thesis in African-American history, one that Princeton's Nell Painter says "opens up a whole range of possibilities" that there was widespread organized resistance to slavery. French rounds out his work with an analysis of what Nat Turner, the symbol and icon, has meant to different constituencies of Americans at different periods of our history, making this groundbreaking study analogous to Merrill D. Peterson's Lincoln in American Memory.