406
MICHAEL THELWELL
seers had no more intimate an understanding of blacks than do their
descendants. As the first real leisure class produced in this country, and
under the pressure of its morally ambivalent position, the slave-holding
south devoted much energy to rationalizing and justifying its situation.
The resulting elaborately articulated regional mythology - a guilt-gen–
erated, intelligence-perverting, self-serving view of race - limited the
perception and evaluation of experience. With a few concessions to
changed social realities, this system still provides the basis for white
racism in the nation.
In the portrait the South created of itself slaveholders were much
maligned, benevolent Christians whose concern for and services to their
chattel far outweighed, they felt, the labor they extracted in return.
Their slaves were simple, childlike subhuman types of limited intelligence
and potential who were basically happy and contented with their lot.
But it is clear from the most cursory look at plantation . records that
only the most obtuse slaveowners ever really believed this. What
emerges from these documents is that the more perceptive whites rec–
ognized that they were almost totally ignorant of what really went on
in the minds of their property.
Kenneth Stampp's
The Peculiar Institution
cites many texts which
indicate the extent to which slaveholders were aware of the blacks'
concealed loyalties, values, social, legal and moral codes. The question
is: how does what we know of the historical Nat Turner fit into a
framework of a slave culture and society which was zealously protected
from white scrutiny. As Stampp reports, one Virginian observed his
slaves to have "sharp faculties" and "extremely fine and acute percep–
tions." Another found his to be "so deceitful" that he could never
"decipher their character" or "get at the truth." According to an over–
seer, any white man who trusted a Negro "was a damned fooL" In 1851
a slave master bemoaned the "notorious fact that on every large planta–
tion of Negroes, there is one among them who holds a kind of magical
sway over the minds and opinions of the rest; to him they look as their
oracle. . . . The influence of such a Negro, often a preacher, on a
quarter, is incalculable." Clearly, these indications of a black community
response to slavery are important, not only to blacks in search of their
true history, but to any understanding of what must really have taken
place in Southhampton County in 1831.
All available historical sources indicate that Nat Turner's roots and
his support came from the organization and the culture of the slave
community. His brief confession, recorded by a white lawyer in 1831,
hardly mentions whites- until the passages where the violence is de–
scribed. (The other source to which Mr. Styron appears to have resorted
is
The Southhampton Insurrection
[1900], a book written by one WiI-
