Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy - Brossura

Jordan, Winthrop D.

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0807120391 ISBN 13: 9780807120392

Casa editrice: Louisiana State Univ Pr, 1996

Riassunto

An inquiry into the suppressed Adams County slave rebellion plot of 1861 reveals how slaves conspired to overthrow and murder their white masters and what happened when the conspiracy was discovered. By the author of White over Black.

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L'autore:

Winthrop D. Jordan, the William F. Winter Professor of History at the University of Mississippi, is the author of several books, including White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550--1812, for which he received the Bancroft Prize, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, the National Book Award, and the Francis Parkman Prize.

Product Description:

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

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Louisiana State Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0807120391
• ISBN 13: 9780807120392
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 250