Abstract
Nat Turner’s bloody slave revolt in Southampton, Virginia, in 1831 produced a swift and violent reaction. Although Turner evaded capture for several weeks, his rebellion quickly collapsed as local militiamen exacted revenge on the rebels as well as innocent Blacks—including women and children—unlucky enough to be in the way. In one case, the militia decapitated 15 slaves and displayed their heads on pikes to serve as a warning to future conspirators.
The press response to Turner’s revolt was less bloody but no less extreme. A report in the Richmond Enquirer referred to the “horrible ferocity of these monsters” and called the rebels “a parcel of bloodthirsty wolves.” The Norfolk Herald accused the rebels of killing for the thrill of it: “[H]aving steeped their hands in human sacrifice, [the rebels] became infuriated, and, like bloodhounds, pursued the game of murder in mere wanton sport.” Turner himself was described as “artful, impudent and vindictive” and the “most remorseless of the executioners.”
The southern press response to the Turner revolt is hardly surprising. But as Brian Gabrial shows in this detailed examination of the racial politics of slavery in antebellum America, the “discourse of racial panic” was only part of the larger national debate over slavery in the press that, more often than not, marginalized antislavery ideas, exacerbated sectional tensions, and set the stage for a devastating war that could have destroyed the nation itself.
Gabrial, who teaches journalism at Concordia University in Montreal, begins his study with the 1791 slave revolt in Haiti, an event so shocking to Americans that nearly all later news accounts of slave troubles made reference to it. He goes on to investigate five U.S. slave rebellions or conspiracies, from the obscure (the 1811 German Coast revolt in Louisiana) to the celebrated (John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859).
This approach is repetitive, but it yields a number of insights into ways the press constructed slavery and slavery-related controversies. In the discourse concerning slavery’s enemies, for example, Gabrial notes the newspaper emphasis on religious fanaticism, including attacks on the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, which the press linked to slave resistance. Gabrial also finds that slavery’s enemies shifted over time in the southern press, from the slaves themselves to free Blacks to White abolitionists. New York abolitionist Gerrit Smith, for example, was vilified in the southern press for his support of Brown and his uprising. Brown himself was portrayed as reckless, even in the northern papers. As the New York Evening Post put it, “Brown’s ends were in themselves just and generous; but his methods of obtaining them were misguided and foolish.”
Newspapers north and south often responded to racial unrest with alarm. In 1800, for example, the Massachusetts Spy reported on Gabriel Prosser’s “conspiracy of the negroes” in Virginia. “It is hardly possible to say how extensive and terrible might have been its consequences,” the Spy’s writer speculated. Such fears, Gabrial argues, reinforced negative attributes Whites assigned to darker skinned people. “So insistent were these fears of racial violence that they consumed white, especially southern, society throughout the antebellum years and, arguably, up to the present day,” Gabrial concludes.
Beyond stoking racial anxiety, some newspapers constructed slaves as loyal servants unwilling to turn on their masters. This “good Negro discourse” reassured readers that slavery was helpful to Blacks, who were depicted as generally satisfied with their situation. Following Denmark Vesey’s 1822 conspiracy in Charleston, South Carolina, the Richmond Enquirer noted that Vesey’s plan had been reported to authorities by “some faithful blacks.” In this and other cases, southern papers defended slavery as a “positive good,” a theory that “rested on the supposition that slaves needed masters to act as loving but firm parents,” Gabrial writes.
By 1859, the acrimony over slavery was so great that it undermined civil liberties. Southerners were especially outraged over abolitionist publications and worked to keep such documents out of the hands of slaves. Postmaster Amos Kendall aided their cause, allowing local postmasters to control “incendiary” material from the north. State statutes, fines, and imprisonment were also used to suppress antislavery activities in the south, Gabrial notes. “Over time,” he writes, “the slave power oligarchy and its allies were willing to allow civil liberties, including those of freedom of speech, association, and the press, to disintegrate so that slavery would be preserved.”
With its carefully developed analytical framework and fine-grained examination of antebellum news, Gabrial’s book will be useful to graduate students and advanced undergraduates exploring racial issues in U.S. journalism history. It could also serve as a primary text for courses on race and media in America and as a supplemental text for media history classes.
In the end, Gabrial’s book is a pointed reminder that the United States was founded upon a racial paradox. That paradox was the gap between the new nation’s ideals—equality and freedom for all—and a vexed racial reality that accepted and defended Black slavery for decades. “Simply put,” he writes, “America’s post-Revolutionary War leaders claimed America as a white man’s country, leaving their descendants with an unresolved social evil.” As recent police shootings of unarmed Black men in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere have made clear, that social evil remains unresolved.