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Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County by David F. Allmendinger Jr. (review)

Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County. By David F. Allmendinger Jr. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pp. [xiv], 416. $49.95, ISBN 978-1-4214-1479-9.) Over the years, scholars have expressed much uncertainty about Nat Turner and his 1831 rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, because of the thin evidentiary base that was largely generated by slaveholders. Anonymous newspaper reports by journalists and judges, brief trial transcripts, and a pamphlet, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831), published by Thomas R. Gray, have been the principal sources. Scholars have disagreed over the scope of the uprising, Turner's motives and plans, and the reliability of Gray's Confessions. William Styron's interpretation in his 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner also generated both attention and controversy. Modern historical book-length treatments date to the 1960s and 1970s. Besides several collections of primary sources, there are three histories by Herbert Aptheker, Stephen B. Oates, and Thomas C. Parramore. Just over a decade ago, a collection of essays on Nat Turner edited by Kenneth S. Greenberg appeared. Turner's rebellion is thus currently experiencing a renaissance with the publication of the volume under review and another recent book by Patrick H. Breen. Dissatisfied with our lack of knowledge about both blacks and whites who were involved in the uprising, David F. Allmendinger Jr. set out to reconstruct their lives. In the absence of significant collections of ego-documents, he spent many years mining local records, including "wills, deeds, inventories, court minutes, chancery records, marriage registers, free black registers, processioners' returns, tax lists, [and] poll books," linking what he found to the manuscript returns of the U.S. census (p. 302). This exhaustive research has allowed Allmendinger to admirably map the lives of white, middling Southampton County residents in extraordinary and at times dizzying detail. Convoluted family histories and connections, economic ups and downs, and even the layouts and contents of cabins and houses are all here. His research exposes in fine detail the workings of a local, kin-based economy in which slaves often made up the bulk of a white family's wealth. Both white success and misfortune had devastating consequences for the enslaved, who were freely bartered, bequeathed, gifted, mortgaged, hired, and sold, paying with forced mobility and family separations for their owners' striving. …