9/16/2023 0 Comments Did nat tuner turn himself in![]() Two generations of revisionist work have trained us to think of slave society as a single, unitary community. Rebels had to unite slaves across neighborhood lines, yet slaves typically cultivated solidarity within those lines, and slave society was everywhere divided along them. Neighborhoods posed the problem of rebellion sharply. Turner's neighborhood in Southampton was by no means identical to neighborhoods in those states, but he was all too familiar with their dynamics as an arena of both solidarity and conflict. Slave narratives vividly describe slave neighborhoods in Maryland, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, along with Mississippi and Virginia. Slaves often captured fugitive strangers who ventured into their neighborhood, and runaways lay out in their own neighborhood because here they could expect to find allies. Neighborhoods drew these distinctions most sharply with runaways. Neighborhood had little meaning apart from distinctions between people inside and outside the place. Indeed, conflict between slaves was intrinsic to making neighborhoods the locus of solidarity in the first place. This was a terrain of conflict as well as solidarity. In the Natchez District of Mississippi, for example, neighborhoods were the place where slaves worked together, cultivated family ties, practiced Christianity, socialized, and struggled. Neighborhoods like Turner's shaped the contours of slave society across the South. When the rebels left the neighborhood, divisions opened up in the ranks, and the revolt began to collapse. ![]() ![]() And the rebellion proceeded apace as long as it remained there. All his initial recruits were other slaves from his neighborhood. But when his family handed him a book to stop his crying, he spelled the objects pictured, "a source of wonder to all in the neighborhood." Turner never felt compelled to steal, but those who did relied on him to plan their exploits, for such was the store that "the negroes in the neighborhood" placed on his judgment. When he was a boy, no one had taught Nat his letters. Neighborhood was the place where he found confirmation of his childhood sense that he was intelligent beyond his years. When Nat Turner looked back on the origins and progress of his revolt, he told the story from beginning to end as a neighborhood enterprise. ![]()
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