Tower Hill: A Plantation on the Edge of Rebellion

Summary

The Nat Turner rebellion of August 1831, the iconic uprising of enslaved people in the United States, was much more extensive than we have understood. This powerful exploration of a Tidewater Virginia plantation reveals how the daily resistance of the enslaved was heightened by spiritual beliefs to seek the divine overthrow of a wicked world.

Tower Hill draws on a previously untapped family archive to reveal the routines of daily life and the fraught family dynamics on a slave plantation in southeastern Virginia in the early- to mid-nineteenth century. Owned by generations of a local merchant family, the Blows, Tower Hill was a struggling enterprise mired in debt, degrading soil, volatile climate, endemic diseases, and social isolation. All this exacted an emotional toll that drove the Blows—husbands and wives, fathers and sons—to family turmoil and madness. The enslaved Blacks at Tower Hill endured in part by claiming an evangelical Christianity as their own, embracing its promise of ultimate deliverance from suffering and, in the here and now, its broad communities of support. Nearby, the Great Dismal Swamp provided a haven for runaways who built lasting enclaves there.

Nat Turner’s rebels struck slaveholding families near Tower Hill suddenly, killing more than fifty men, women, and children in a single day. George Blow helped lead the suppression that took twice that number of Black lives. He also helped mold the memory of the uprising as an exceptional event mounted by a lone fanatic leading a few deluded followers. But Alan Taylor shows that the revolt emerged from a broader network of spiritual agitation reaching throughout Tidewater Virginia and North Carolina. A much larger uprising might have erupted but for a mistake in timing by Turner and his followers. The shockwaves of the Turner rebellion, running through secession and civil war, still reach us today.

“Against ongoing efforts to sanitize the record of slavery, Alan Taylor sweeps away nostalgia for an orderly Old South that never was. From a remarkable collection of family papers, he distills the truth that planters persistently disavowed: They were beset by the implacable resistance of the enslaved and by other forces beyond their control. The story of Tower Hill stands as a warning against the will to dominance.”—Vincent Brown, author of Tacky’s Revolt