Before reviewing this book, it’ important to get some things out of the way regarding slavery and its importance as an institution and the impact that it has had on American history. Slavery more than any other single thing has shaped the history of the United States, it has created a divided country one where whites are superior to blacks and all of this was done in the name of creating wealth for one group on the backs of the other. There is a reason why stories like Nat Turner’s are so incredible is because they are the very few cases where slaves were able to stand up to their masters and actually create somewhat of a new reason for them to live. Slavery always was a big cauldron of dissatisfaction and simmering rebellion, Nat Turner’s rebellion has been just one of the most famous cases and one of the examples of why charismatic leadership and the belief in something can be more important than a well-defined ideology. The Fires of Jubilee is a book about much more than just Nat Turner’s slave rebellion. It’s a book about Southern society before the Civil War, about master and slave, the church, the state and most importantly about anxiety. Anxiety over the impossible happening, that the slaves would rise up and try to kill their white masters. This was exactly what Nat Turner was able to do and he’s still being talked about to this day as an example of a great leader who did the impossible
In the Fires of Jubilee, the author Stephen Oates draws a picture of society in the Old South and that society’s relationship to slavery and the ways that it was shaped by different forces. The most important ways in which Oates built his argument was by citing two very important parts of society and their relationship to what would ultimately escalate into Nat Turner’s rebellion. These two forces which more than any other created the environment necessary for a slave rebellion like Turner’s to happen were the influence of religion and the anxiety which many white Southerners had concerning the possibility of slave rebellions which could destroy the thin veneer of calm and civility in which Southern society and slave owning was built upon.
Religion was a very powerful force in the United States, especially after the revolution and the founding of the new Republic. One of the most powerful new sects which flourished in the new United States was the Methodist church. The Methodists “inveighed against the evil of slave owning, though they were hardly the first sect to do so.” (Oates) The Quakers were so opposed to slavery that they were accused of sowing “’dangerous’ notions in the slave that might incite them to violence.” The Methodists believed that slave owning was negative not only because it was wrong in a moral sense but was also a great social ill. While there was a growth of religious thought which opposed slavery there was very little movement in Southern whites freeing their slaves because “slave ownership was not only a tremendous status symbol in the Old South, but was the most tried and tested means of racial control in their white supremacist society. (9-10) Religion was meant to be something which could work to deal with the social ills of slavery, but it actually had very little impact n reducing slave ownership in the South.
Another major concern among Southern whites in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was an ever increasing fear, anxiety, and paranoia regarding possible slave rebellions and the nature of the slavery which they thought could lead to more and dissatisfaction among its slaves. One of the first major reactions to a major slave rebellion by southern Whites was the news coming from the Caribbean and the slave rebellion in Santo Domingo, present day Haiti. In the 1790s the fighting in Santo Domingo was “was unspeakably savage, with whites and blacks slaughtering one another in a carnage of racial violence that ultimately cost some sixty thousand lives.” (Oates 15) This event led many southerners to be very worried about their own slaves so much that they called for the ending of the slave trade coming from the Caribbean claiming that there was “Santo Domingo virus” which was infecting blacks with insurrectionist ideas. (Oates 16) All in all, the events in Haiti during the 1790s was enough to shake their confidence in their system. If fears of foreign insurrection were not enough, there we events in Virginia and South Carolina which only made the situation worse.
Oates paints a picture throughout the first half of the book of ever growing tension in the South between slaves and slave owners regarding their anxiety for a possible rebellion. The way in which Oates portrays the development the anxiety with which Southern society faced the ever possible specter of slave rebellion is quite an important point to be made about his thesis. Oates cites the example of Gabriel and his rebellion. The Gabriel rebellion which was squashed was planned by a literate, urban slave Gabriel, who was influenced by the ideology of the American and French revolutions. This included liberalism and the idea which all men were created equal. In short, Gabriel and his comrades, who were slaves used the very values on which the United States was founded to build support for a slave rebellion. (Oates 16-17) This to say the least was a very dangerous prospect which, along with the uprising in Haiti “left a searing legacy – a fear of slave uprisings that would haunt them for decades to come (Oates 18) Later on yet another failed slave rebellion proved to be an even more important step in creating the environment for Nat Turner’s rebellion
In 1822, Denmark Vesey planned in Charleston, South Carolina a rebellion similar to Gabriel’s which was meant to be a combination of urban and rural slaves working together to create as much damage as possible to the whites. This plan was also discovered and suppressed, but what important about this event was the reaction from Southern society. In the wake of the Vesey rebellion, all over the South, there were measures to curb insurrection by passing laws which forbade blacks the right to read and write, the suppression of publication like Walker’s Appeal and the creation of militias to deal with possible future insurrections. (Oates 45-48) Oates, in this section, paints a picture of ever growing tension in Southern society regarding the possibility of slave revolts and that is exactly the environment which was created by these events led almost inevitably to the events of Nat Turner’s rebellion.
Religion was the main method by which Nat Turner was able to build support for his planned insurrection. Nat Turner was a very religious man, who prayed and fasted and seemed to be a very charismatic leader. Turner on his slave pulpit “recounted his visions in dramatic detail, telling his congregations about warring angels in the sky, about the Savior’s arms, stretched across Southampton's horizon. (Oates 36) It was through his preaching that Turner was able to build a small, trusted following which he told an about a possible “mission” of some sort.
Now Oates’ narrative comes to the rebellion itself. While the events of the rebellion are important and they created the necessary backlash in Virginia and around the South it does not seem very worth it to describe the gory details of Turner’s rebellion blow by blow. It suffices to say, that on the very early morning of August 21, 1831, after lots of planning at the moment Turner, the charismatic leader, the prophet Nat Turner had been able to do something which had rarely been done in the Americas. A complete slave rebellion one that left “a zigzag path of unredeemable devastation; some fifteen homesteads sacked and approximately sixty whites slain. Still, the slaves had not waged indiscriminate warfare- Nat had spared several white, including Giles Reese and John Clark Turner.” (Oates 88) What is endlessly more interesting are the effects of Turner’s rebellion and what it did to Southern society. Through his rebellion, Nat Turner had “smashed the prevailing stereotype of master-slave relations in the Old South, forcing whites to confront a grim and deadly reality – that was not all sweetness and sunshine in their slave world, that their own Nats and Harks might be capable of hatred and rebellion.” (105) This created a new fear in Southern society, all of the anxiety which had been building since the events in Haiti during the 1790s finally came to fruition and all of that fear had culminated in a rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia of all places, a place which Oates constantly calls a backwater and mostly irrelevant. It proved that it could, in fact, happen anywhere and that the slaves had the necessary rage and all that they needed was the leadership to make their designs possible. This is the larger point which can be taken from the book is that Nat Turner his character, his charisma and leadership were very necessary ingredients for the rebellion and if it was not for him and the other situations mentioned above there might have never been a rebellion as violent as Nat Turner’s.
The reaction to Turner’s rebellion from Southern politics and society centered on the fears of what abolitionism was playing in sowing discord among slaves. In reality, Abolitionism was never as well organized as many Southerners claimed and their protests actually made William Lloyd Garrison and his Liberator much more powerful than it actually was. Northerners were also not very committed to the abolitionist cause, many of them “discriminated against free Negroes, but were perfectly content to leave slavery alone where it already existed” (133). In practice, the larger problem with slavery was that it had become an unsustainable practice and the violence surrounding Turner’s Rebellion just proved how fragile of an institution that was being attacked on sides. In the wake of Turner’s Rebellion during the so-called Great Reaction, many Southerners “produced a strident vindication of slavery that went beyond Thomas Dew’s celebrated defense.” (Oates 143) In opposition to Northern abolitionism they claimed that slavery was a “positive and unequivocal good, condoned by the Bible and ordained by God from the beginning of time.” (Oates 143) In short, the response to Turner’s Rebellion and Southern society’s opposition to abolitionism created the ideological conditions which ultimately led to the Civil War.
The large argument given by Oates in The Fires of Jubilee boils down to two large facts which conspire to create a third. Religion both among whites and slaves was a powerful force which could be used to deal blows against the institution of slavery which was Nat Turner’s ultimate use of it as a way of organizing resistance. Second, Southern anxiety surrounding threats both real and imagined led to the conditions in which repression became the primary method with which Southerners controlled their slaves and the society responded to possible threats. These two threads led to Turner’s Rebellion and the reaction to it ultimately led to Civil War. Southern opposition to abolitionism meant the strengthening of slavery as an institution and its belief as a moral good which in large part led to Southern justifications for secession in order to protect their “Peculiar Institution.” I also largely appreciate how well sourced and documented this book is and Oates does a great job of creating a very engrossing narrative which explains the large scale processes which made Nat Turner’s rebellion possibly, if not a likely outcome for a slave society which had been so worried about keeping order that it led to great problems which they could not handle
Works Cited
Oates, Stephen B., and John McDonough. The fires of jubilee. Recorded Books, 1997.
