On the night of 21 August 1831, Nat Turner launched the bloodiest slave revolt in US history. Turner and his band of rebels swept through Southampton County, Virginia, killing nearly five dozen white men, women and children, before the rebellion was quashed by the Virginia militia the following day. In the aftermath of the rebellion, dozens of African American slaves and free blacks were killed, either murdered by vigilantes or executed by the courts, as the white community sought to restore order and reassert the power of the slaveholding regime. In The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood, Patrick Breen offers a retelling of this familiar story, in what is probably the fullest and most sophisticated account of the rebellion to date. Breen takes his readers on a narrative journey through Turner's plans, the revolt itself, the resulting trials and, eventually, Turner's capture, confession and execution.

In his telling of the Nat Turner revolt, Breen makes three key arguments. The first, and perhaps most controversial, is that Thomas R. Gray's The Confessions of Nat Turner is an authentic account of Turner's voice. Historians have long debated (and largely doubted) the veracity of Gray's claim that the document was a “faithful record” of Turner's own words (169), and many (including myself) have tended to dismiss the Confessions as the projection of white fears and stereotypes about black male violence rather than the authentic voice of a slave rebel. Breen disagrees, and through a close textual analysis of the document, explained in an afterword to the book, he concludes that the Confessions was most likely written in a hurried fashion, as Gray copied down Turner's own words as he spoke. For example, Breen points out that the narrative is consistent with Turner's limited experience of the revolt; it does not include events at which Turner was not present, even though the details of those events were discussed at length at the trials (and therefore Gray would have been familiar with them). Breen's case is convincing, and those who continue to work on Turner will certainly need to reckon with his conclusions before dismissing the Confessions out of hand.

Breen uses two theoretical frameworks to underpin his conclusions about both the revolt itself and its significance: W. E. B. Du Bois's notion of “double consciousness” and Antonio Gramsci's concept of “hegemony.” In his second key argument, Breen contends that using double consciousness as a model for enslaved people's understanding of their world helps us to complicate the resistance-versus-accommodation debate that has defined slavery studies. As most enslaved people in Southampton County did not get involved in Nat Turner's rebellion (neither joining the rebels nor protecting their masters and mistresses from the violence), Breen argues, neither resistance nor accommodation is adequate to explain enslaved perspectives on slavery. Rather, an emphasis on the divisions and ambiguities, both within enslaved communities and in the minds of enslaved individuals, enables us to gain a fuller, more nuanced understanding of enslaved people's experiences. Breen perhaps oversimplifies the debate between resistance and accommodation in slavery scholarship, especially in relation to recent literature, but the point is well made, especially with regard to a rebellion that has stood as the epitome of slave resistance in the United States.

Breen's third argument is that white slaveholders exerted hegemony over southern society, and that this explains why non-slaveholding whites (who made up the vast majority of white southerners in the antebellum period) supported an institution that was not in their interests. Historians have been debating the role of hegemony in southern life since Genovese's Roll Jordan Roll (1974), and as such, Breen's argument is not new. However, by its nature hegemony has remained elusive: how does one prove the existence of an invisible power in society? For Breen, it is in the exceptional moments, like the Nat Turner revolt, that hegemony comes into focus. As he puts it, “the extraordinary heat of the slave revolt created the conditions that elucidated otherwise invisible hegemonic forces” (8). Breen contends that actually far fewer African Americans were put to death in the wake of the revolt than has previously been imagined, and that this was the result of slaveholders’ ability to use the courtroom to shape a hegemonic narrative about the revolt that downplayed its size and significance and soothed white fears about black violence. Again, the argument is convincing, but it is not clear how historians who work on less extraordinary aspects of antebellum slavery could utilize Breen's methodology to uncover hegemony working in other times and places. Is slaveholder hegemony in Southampton County typical, or unusual?

In The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood, Breen combines an accessible historical narrative with a rigorous analysis that intervenes in long-standing historiographical debates about the nature of enslaved experience and slaveholder power. As such, it will be crucial reading for scholars and students of slavery and slave resistance in the American South.