Recently I followed a twitter-back-and-forth between some historians and religious studies scholars asking the question, “Do historians ask themselves what history is?” The historians said, yes, of course (I am, after all, teaching a course on historiography right now); the religious studies scholars responded, no, you are not reading the theorists that challenge the process of creating historical narratives because you think they are “too hard.” The historians replied, yes, we are, they are just not the theorists that you have anointed as the chosen ones to read. And so on and on, back and forth. Just then I picked up this work to review—written by a law professor but incorporating the best of historical research and theoretical studies (not to mention literary and legal analysis, and much else). And it was on an ideal subject, largely because you cannot just tell the history “as it actually was” but must invest your own meaning into the story: Nat Turner, leader of a group of enslaved men in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831, who joined Turner in murdering around fifty-five whites in the county before being captured and tried, some then executed. In Turner's case, the capture took about two months, but the legacy lives on to this day.
Before his predictably rapid execution, a lawyer named Thomas Gray took Turner's testimony. Or embellished, or just flat made up his testimony. Or both. No one really knows for sure. Turner's motive was to explain his motives; Gray's was to produce a sensationalist tale that would sell a hell of a lot of copies (as indeed it did) and get him out of debt. Beside that possibly specious document and a scattering of legal records and a few newspaper stories and entries in private diaries and letters, that is about all we have to go on in interpreting this epochal event. Which means that every history of Turner is, by definition, a speculative one. But this remarkably interesting book is more self-consciously so than most others.
And that makes one grateful for the formidable arsenal of intellectual weapons Tomlins brings to the analysis here (reading the endnotes, a book more of less by themselves, is endlessly fascinating). The book begins with an extended takedown of William Styron's famous work Confessions of Nat Turner. While expertly done, for my money, this is the least interesting part of the text, as it verges on the proverbial beating of the dead horse. The reader then moves on to an extended, at times difficult, but nearly always absorbing exploration of Turner's motives. Tomlins ultimately finds that Turner was a religious prophet who recreated in his own mind the life of Jesus as told particularly in the Gospel of Luke, ending with Turner's famous question when asked if he felt remorseful for his killings: “Was not Christ crucified?” Tomlins portrays “Turner's rebellion as an instance of countersovereignty, violence deployed in the hope of changing a regime” (xv). “When the time came for him to explain what had happened, and why, [Turner] had resort not to a language of revenge, or revolution, or self-expiation, or guilt, but to an eschatological cosmology of revelation and judgment. . . . [I]t was judgment in furtherance of redemption, a sacred and tempestuous instant of justice.” Turner's “biblical cadences . . . situate the profane and tawdry worldliness of St. Luke's Parish slaveholders next to the Last Judgment” (82). The author also explains it this way: “Turner's ‘work of death’ was deathwork that he and his comrades performed in the service of their self-transformation, through a cancellation and destruction of the other, from bondsmen subordinated by fear . . . in to willful actors possessed, however fleetingly, of ‘real and true independence’” (108).
In short, Turner's work was that of the prophet countering the profane death-work of slavery. And indeed, that is pretty much how Turner describes himself in the first half of Gray's narrative.
Equally important for this book, Tomlin considers (in rich detail) the counter-response of white Virginians. A lengthy, well-executed final chapter details the struggle between various geographical sections of Virginia (keeping in mind that “West Virginia” did not yet exist)—basically a struggle between poorer, mostly non-slaveholding whites and richer planter whites—and the rise of the “positive good” (as opposed to “necessary evil”) theory of slavery. Positive good or not, the enslavers soon discovered that the best way to make money from their human property was to sell human beings to the newly opening Deep South states, a slaveholders’ “right” they exercised to astonishing effect during the “Second Middle Passage” of the antebellum era. “From that rupture,” Tomlin says, “there emerged a new political and economic equilibitization, centered not on propertied hierarchy but on property's commoditization, notably . . . commodified labor” (136).
Tomlins is dead-on in this analysis of the profane economics of the enslavers. As for his speculations about Turner, who knows? The author claims only to offer the results of his own years of thinking on, about, and through the subject of this momentous event in American history, obscured now by layers of interpretation invested on it literally from the months after its occurrence until today. And that is why the book is called a “speculative history.” As the author advises us in the last sentence, “we must always be ready to read what was never written” (218).
But for me, the reward of the work lies not in the “thesis,” per se, the main argument, but rather in the myriad sub-arguments and rabbit trails followed along the way. In these parts, drawing from theorists such as Walter Benjamin, contemporary documents from the nineteenth century, and poets and lyricists such as Vic Chesnutt (the genius of the glory years of the Athens, Georgia, music scene), the author takes us on an illuminating mystery tour of this most mysterious of events and much else besides. Along the way, he almost effortlessly puts on and takes off the hats of historian, literary critic, legal analyst, poet, theologian, economic forecaster, geographer, postmodern deconstructor, and biblical textual exegete. And so, it is the subpoints (a) and (b) on the outline, the subtexts, paratexts, and unexpected meanderings of this text, that make the experience of reading it so enriching.
