Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community

by Vanessa M. Holden

Overview

The local community around the Nat Turner rebellion

The 1831 Southampton Rebellion led by Nat Turner involved an entire community. Vanessa M. Holden rediscovers the women and children, free and enslaved, who lived in Southampton County before, during, and after the revolt. Mapping the region's multilayered human geography, Holden draws a fuller picture of the inhabitants, revealing not only their interactions with physical locations but also their social relationships in space and time. Her analysis recasts the Southampton Rebellion as one event that reveals the continuum of practices that sustained resistance and survival among local Black people. Holden follows how African Americans continued those practices through the rebellion’s immediate aftermath and into the future, showing how Black women and communities raised children who remembered and heeded the lessons absorbed during the calamitous events of 1831.

A bold challenge to traditional accounts, Surviving Southampton sheds new light on the places and people surrounding Americas most famous rebellion against slavery.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252085857
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	07/13/2021
Series:	Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History , #1
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	184
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Vanessa M. Holden is an assistant professor of history at the University of Kentucky.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Author's Note on Language and Sources xiii

Prologue 1

Introduction: An Intimate Rebellion 3

1 Geographies of Surveillance and Control 11

2 Enslaved Women and Strategies of Evasion and Resistance 26

3 Free Issues: Free People of Color in Antebellum Southampton County 39

4 Generation, Resistance, and Survival: African American Children and the Southampton Rebellion 56

5 Surviving Southampton: Geographies of Survival 81

Conclusion 121

Notes 127

Index 153

Editorial Reviews

"Surviving Southampton insists that women’s voices be heard, heeded, and remembered in understanding and commemorating the Southampton Rebellion and provides a model for revisiting slave revolts and other moments of rupture." —Black Perspectives

"Vanessa Holden successfully moves our attention from Nat Turner to his community at a time when the appeal for uncovering societies of resistance has never been more apparent." —Civil War Monitor

"With intricate research and deft analysis, Vanessa M. Holden presents a bold new exploration into Nat Turner’s Southampton Rebellion of 1831 and the imperative roles women and children played in the ongoing fight for Black survival. " —Ms.

"An important new perspective on the Turner rebellion for readers of Black U.S. history." —Library Journal

"Surviving Southampton is a searing history of the community that made Nat Turner and his community rebellion possible. Holden's study is a bold and nuanced account of how Black women helped sustain the rebellion and map new ways to survive the aftermath." —Southern Journal of History

"Holden's well-told account of Nat Turner's rebellion is a welcome addition to the literary canon of the most significant and enduring Black uprising in antebellum America. . . . Highly recommended." —Choice

"Vivid, engaging, and illuminating. The author’s focus on the role of women, children, and community involvement offers a richer understanding of the events surrounding the Southampton Rebellion."—Cheryl LaRoche, author of Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance

"Very few scholarly texts force readers to completely reimagine iconic events. In Surviving Southampton, Vanessa Holden introduces her readers to an understudied cast of characters involved in the most infamous slave rebellion of the nineteenth century—refashioning a well-known segment of history. Through court records and oral histories, Holden centers women and children as participants, combatants, and survivors who resisted slavery’s yoke in the years before, during, and following the Southampton Rebellion. This book is required reading for anyone interested in the study of enslaved resistance."—Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Rutgers University

"Surviving Southampton is itself a work of resistance. . . Holden's book has rightfully pushed the field to revisit existing archives and known records in search of Black women's relationships to rebellion and revolt, and to the agentive and resistive geographies that make overt resistance attainable realities within enslaved communities." —Black Scholar

From the Publisher

06/01/2021

While awaiting trial on charges of insurrection and murder, Nat Turner gave testimony to his lawyer that later became The Confessions of Nat Turner, a sensationalized pamphlet that cemented his place, and that of his male co-conspirators, in one of the most consequential uprisings by enslaved people in the American South. In this, her first book, Holden challenges us to reconsider Turner's 1831 rebellion by focusing on the women and children involved in and affected by it. Only a handful of enslaved and free Black women were officially accused in court documentation, but many others aided rebels by communicating across farms or cooking for meals for them; Holden documents how these women navigated "geographies of surveillance and control" their entire lives. The book explains the significant role that enslaved boys played in the rebellion, and how their youth complicated the possibility of convicting them. It also examines how the insurrection and its aftermath upended the lives of enslaved and free Black Americans for decades to come; many lost loved ones and were left to navigate the resulting reign of white backlash and terror. VERDICT An important new perspective on the Turner rebellion for readers of Black U.S.history.—Kate Stewart, Arizona State Museum

Library Journal