A wolf by the ears

On August 22, 1831, a slave named Nat Turner unleashed a bloody uprising in Southampton County, Virginia that terrified white Southerners, galvanized white abolitionists, and inspired generations of black revolutionaries. After his capture, Turner recounted tales of butchering women and children, and of hacking to death the white owners who had oppressed slaves for decades. Turner’s rebellion ignited an equally vicious backlash among whites who tortured slaves suspected of complicity in the plot. Even slaves who had no prior knowledge of Turner’s plans were regarded with suspicion and often harshly treated as a pre-emptive measure against any future stirrings of revolt – as the Richmond Enquirer noted, “Rumors are sufficient to keep alive the vigilance of the people.”

Yet in the midst of the panic and terror, the one emotion that seemed noticeably absent was surprise. While some newspapers professed puzzlement that a slave who had been taught to read and write, and who had received no “cause or provocation,” would rebel, those accounts highlight the widespread understanding that slavery was an inherently violent system and that slave rebellions were “not isolated and infrequent events.” By underscoring Turner’s gentle treatment prior to the rebellion, the newspapers tacitly acknowledged that there were masters who behaved brutally toward their slaves. As their tone suggests, whites realized on some level that the violence embedded in the state of slavery was only held in check by a kind of mutual compact between blacks and whites. Whites understood that black subjugation had to be enforced with a measure of violence, but not to such an extent that blacks would rebel.