THE NAT TURNER INSURRECTION TRIALS

Lawyer and legal scholar Gordon aims to set forth the bloody history of Nat Turner’s campaign against white slave owners and evaluate it in the context of homeland terrorist attacks, most notably 9/11.

In 1831, Virginian field slave Turner and a band of other slaves and freed blacks launched a bloody battle. Their rebellion was put down within 48 hours, but not before they had managed to slaughter some 55 white men, women and children. Though the book’s title suggests that its emphasis is on the trials of Turner and his followers, Gordon spends even more pages of this slim tome meticulously reconstructing the events leading up to the rebellion and sorting through the hearsay of what actually happened. Carefully footnoted, the compelling story of how a literate, religious field hand came to believe he was the second coming of the Messiah, destined to raise an army to kill his oppressors, makes an interesting read. Yet Gordon’s painstaking, and sometimes repetitive, efforts better describe the insurrection’s roots than its repercussions. The author loses momentum when he reaches what should be the payoff–how the rebels’ trials were handled. After the first few days of vigilante violence to quash the revolt, Gordon argues, due process was restored–more than a third of the accused were found innocent—and tempered with mercy, as then-Virginia Gov. John Floyd commuted many of the death sentences issued by the courts to transportation, or being sold in another state. But although Gordon details the separate, unequal justice process reserved for slaves, the parallels he draws between the Nat Turner rebellion and 9/11 are underdeveloped and belated, as much of the contemporary material is relegated to a series of appendices that feel like afterthoughts.

A reconstruction that may prove valuable in its own right, but as a source of illumination of contemporary treatment of terrorists ultimately it lacks satisfying insights.