A compelling reconstruction of a slave-revolt conspiracy in Adams
County, Mississippi, during the spring and summer of 1861 - and of
the grisly events that ensued after the plot was exposed. The
documentary trail of the "Plan," as the abortive insurrection was
called, is reed. thin: No official government report, newspaper
article, pamphlet, or speech referred to it, and other contemporary
records mentioned it only with tantalizing brevity. The longest
extant record, an "examination" (no doubt coerced) of the plotters
by local planters, is more helpful but still fragmentary.
Nonetheless, from this slim evidence, Jordan (History and
Afro-American Studies/Univ. of Mississippi; The White Man's Burden,
1973) presents a coherent narrative about a southern community
perched on the lip of a volcano, astonished at proof of the slave
unrest it had long dismissed but always feared. Jordan has fleshed
out the testimony of the conspirators with the help of census
records, diaries and letters, plantation papers, a WPA oral history
given by an ex-slave, and even gravestones. Moreover, in ferreting
out how the conspiracy formed and then unraveled, he never strains
credulity, and he uses the incident to throw light on such matters
as the role of religion among slaves, fear of abolitionist
agitation, class divisions in white society, the grapevine by which
slaves communicated, and male slaveholders' fears that their women
would be raped. Jordan's tale evokes the furtive nocturnal
whisperings of the conspirators, rumors running wild among
slaveholders, and silence masking awful carnage (at least 40 slaves
were hanged in the Natchez, Mississippi, region during the year of
the plot). A historical jigsaw puzzle assembled with consummate
skill by a thoughtful chronicler of the "peculiar institution."
(Kirkus Reviews)
In the war-fevered spring and summer of 1861, a group of slaves
in Adams County, Mississippi, conspired to gain their freedom by
overthrowing and murdering their white masters. The conspiracy was
discovered, the plotters were arrested and tried, and at least
forty slaves in and around Natchez were hanged. By November the
affair was over, and the planters of the district united to conceal
the event behind a veil of silence. In 1971, Winthrop D. Jordan
came upon the central document, previously unanalyzed by modern
scholars, upon which this extraordinary book is based - a record of
the testimony of some of the accused slaves as they were
interrogated by a committee of planters determined to ferret out
what was going on. This discovery led him on a twenty-year search
for additional information about the aborted rebellion. Because no
official report or even newspaper account of the plot existed, the
search for evidence became a feat of historical detection. Jordan
gathered information from every possible source - the private
letters and diaries of members of the families involved in
suppressing the conspiracy and of people who recorded the rumors
that swept the Natchez area in the unsettled months following the
beginning of the war; letters from Confederate soldiers concerned
about the events back home; the journal of a Union officer who
heard of the plot; records of the postwar Southern Claims
Commission; census documents; plantation papers; even gravestones.
What has emerged from this odyssey of research is a brilliantly
written re-creation of one of the last slave conspiracies in the
United States. It is also a revealing portrait of the Natchez
region at the very beginning of the CivilWar, when Adams County was
one of the wealthiest communities in the nation and a few powerful
families interconnected by marriage and business controlled not
only a large black population but the poorer whites as well. In
piecing together the fragments of extant information about the
conspiracy, Jordan has produced a vivid picture of the plantation
slave community in southwestern Mississippi in 1861 - its
composition and distribution; the degree of mobility permitted
slaves; the ways information was passed around slave quarters and
from plantation to plantation; the possibilities for communication
with town slaves, free blacks, and white abolitionists. Jordan also
explores the treatment of blacks by their owners, the kinds of
resentments the slaves harbored, the sacrifices they were willing
to make to protect or avenge abused family members, and the various
ways in which they viewed freedom. Tumult and Silence at Second
Creek is a major work by one of the most distinguished scholars of
slavery and race relations. Winthrop D. Jordan's study of the slave
society of the Natchez area at the onset of the Civil War is a
landmark contribution to the field. More than that, his exhaustive
and resourceful search for documentation and his careful analysis
of sources make the study an extended and innovative essay on the
nature of historical evidence and inference.
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