Tomlins on the Turner Rebellion as an Attempt at Regime Change in Antebellum Virginia

Christopher Tomlins, University of California, Berkeley, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, has published 'The Guilt of Fragile Sovereigns': Tyranny, Intrigue, and Martyrdom in an Unchanging Regime (Virginia, 1829-32) as UC Berkeley Public Law Research Paper No. 2760643. Here is the abstract.

“Regime change” has been called “a trendy new term for an old and special kind of intervention,” the toppling of those who displease or worry the United States Government. In an attempt to stretch “regime change” beyond simple coercive removal to encompass an ethics of accountability, and hence a measure of justification, the anthropologist John Borneman has proposed a tri-partite analysis of what regime change entails: government overthrow; military occupation and colonization; and caring for the enemy. The question arises whether the term can be stretched even further, or defined differently, to encompass instances of intervention against tyrannical rule beyond the sphere of interstate relations where it is currently lodged. To do so I turn here to a particular event – the Turner Rebellion, a slave rebellion that took place in Virginia in 1831 – and to recent work in political theory that dwells on the politics of counter-sovereignty. Rather than debate the ethics of one state’s decision to seek violent ascendancy over the leadership and population of another, therefore, here I attempt to stretch regime change to encompass a failed rebellion of slaves against a tyrannical slaveholding regime, an attempt to confront and lay low a guilty and fragile sovereignty by deploying a revolutionary politics of countersovereignty realized in conspiracy and self-sacrifice. I attempt also to analyze how this failed effort at regime change affected the regime itself, how it led fragile sovereigns to war with each other over changing their regime themselves, and how they too failed. Finally, we encounter decisive and successful change, although not in the nature of the regime in question but in the prevailing means of explaining it – epistemological rather than ontological change, in short, seeking to secure the regime from change by placing it in a realm beyond sovereignty and guilt, beyond politics and law, altogether. This episode of concatenated regime change is presented here to inform our own understanding of the phenomenon known as a regime, and our own attempts to construct schemata of change.

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Tomlins on Looking for Law in "The Confessions of Nat Turner"

Christopher Tomlins, University of California, Berkeley, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, is publishing Looking for Law in 'The Confessions of Nat Turner' in Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places (Marianne Constable and Leti Volpp, eds., n.p., n.d.). Here is the abstract.

From Harriet Beecher Stowe to William Styron and Sharon Ewell Foster, from Kyle Baker to Nate Parker, and others, American popular culture has found Nat Turner's "Confessions" endlessly fascinating. The fascination of course extends to historians. Particularly in recent years, scholars have dug deeply into the local history of what came to be called The Turner Rebellion. The result is a greatly enriched archive. Still, much of what is known of the event and particularly of its eponymous leader – and hence the manner of their portrayal – remains dependent on Thomas Ruffin Gray's pamphlet "Confessions." Naturally one must ask whether a hastily-written twenty page pamphlet rushed into print by an opportunistic white lawyer, down on his luck and hoping to cash in on Turner's notoriety, actually deserves to be treated as empirically reliable access to the mentalités of those engaged in planning and executing an "insurrectory movement." Should the pamphlet survive that test, a second question immediately surfaces: precisely what is it that the pamphlet evidences? This essay seeks an answer through consideration of a number of recent literary analyses of Gray's pamphlet.

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The Turner Rebellion and the Hegelian Dialectic

Christopher Tomlins, University of California, Berkeley, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, has published The Work of Death: Massacre and Retribution in Southampton County, Virginia, August 1831, as UC Berkeley Public Law Research Paper No. 2639785. Here is the abstract.

What does it mean, particularly to a slave, to describe dealing death as “work?” This essay employs G.W.F. Hegel’s famous lordship/bondage dialectic (from The Phenomenology of Mind) to explore the massacre of 55 members of white slaveholding families that took place on Monday August 22nd 1831 in St. Luke’s Parish, Southampton County, Virginia, now known as “The Turner Rebellion.” I argue that certain specificities of the Hegelian dialectic, notably the centrality of work to the bondsman’s “direct apprehension” of its self as independent, are key components of the massacre. Likewise, I argue that the dialectic helps us understand the specifically juridical form of retributive killing that followed the massacre, in which 18 slaves, variously accused of “feloniously counselling, advising and conspiring with each other and divers other slaves to rebel and make insurrection and making insurrection and taking the lives of divers free white persons of the Commonwealth” were executed. The essay also explores the sociology and social anthropology of the killing that was the focal point of the rebellion. It considers whether this killing was incidental to some other purpose, such as revenge, or revolution, or central and essential to what Nat Turner desired to achieve.

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The Socio-Legal: Locating Other Meanings of Nat Turner's Rebellion

Christopher Tomlins, University of California, Berkeley, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, is publishing Debt, Death, and Redemption: Toward a Soterial-Legal History of the Turner Rebellion in Exploring the Legal in Socio-Legal Studies (David S. Cowan and Dan Wincott, eds., London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Here is the abstract.

The objective in this essay is to question the conjunction “socio-legal,” resorted to routinely by law and society scholars who locate “law” in a determined/determining relationship to social “context.” Concretely, the essay examines the capacity of the socio-legal to assist us in explaining a particular incident in antebellum U.S. history, the Turner Rebellion, a slave revolt or “insurrection” that occurred in Southampton County, southeastern Virginia, in August 1831 by counterposing the agency of the soterial, which stands at about as stark a polar opposite to the social as it is possible to imagine. Soterial means salvific, pertaining to salvation, to the eschatology of redemption. If social connotes the profane, the world of the creature, the world of fallen humanity, where law reigns and justice is an afterthought, soterial connotes the sacral, beyond law, where justice is eternal. The question posed is which – the social or the soterial, empiricism or metaphysics – better helps us understand the Turner Rebellion? Which of them, in particular, unleashes from that incident the energy that might alter the way we understand American history and, not incidentally, the way we understand law?

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Looking at the Law of Slavery and the Nat Turner Rebellion, 1829-1832

Christopher Tomlins, University of California, Berkeley, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, has published Revulsions of Capital: The Political Law of Slavery in the Epoch of the Turner Rebellion, Virginia 1829-1832, as UC Berkeley Public Law Research Paper No. 2477048. Here is the abstract.

This paper continues the pattern of work I have been pursuing on the Turner Rebellion, a slave rebellion that took place in Virginia in August 1831. During the past two years I have been engaged in preliminary explorations of different aspects of the rebellion that have resulted in a series of working papers, written to teach myself what I don’t know, and what I should. This paper was written for the same purpose; it differs from prior papers in stepping back from the rebellion itself in order to situate it in Virginia’s constitutional history, and in regard to the debate over gradual emancipation that broke out in its aftermath. Essentially, Virginia in the epoch of the Turner Rebellion is a state divided largely on east-west lines. Slavery dominates east of the Blue Ridge in the long-settled Tidewater and Piedmont; the west (particularly the Trans-Allegheny region that would eventually become the state of West Virginia) is much more recently settled and largely slave-free. This division, together with less marked local slaveholder/non-slaveholder and freeholder/non-freeholder distinctions in the east of the state, largely determines the substance and structure of Virginia’s politics. I consider two “phases” of Virginia’s politics: (1) the Constitutional Convention of 1829-1830, in which Eastern and Western delegates fought over the replacement of county-based apportionment and suffrage that privileged freehold in land by white basis apportionment and white manhood suffrage, and (2) the emancipation debate that took place in 1831-32 during the first session of the state legislature to meet following the Turner Rebellion. I also consider the analysis of the emancipation debate written in 1832 by the William & Mary professor of “political law” Thomas Roderick Dew, Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832. I argue that out of the deep divisions exposed by the constitutional and legislative debates there emerged a new political and economic equilibrium, confirmed in Dew’s analysis, and centered not, as before, upon propertied hierarchy but upon property’s commodification, notably commodified labor. In the case of self-possessed white labor, commodification meant increased circulation. The same was true of enslaved labor, with the important qualification that slaves had no control over how far they were circulated. Slavery became transactional – the price of subsistence. Their commodification meant slaves were no longer harnessed to custom (in the shape of common law property claims), or to positive municipal law, or to paternal stewardship, but instead represented a capital investment on which the master-creditor might realize returns either through work, or, just as rationally, sale into the interstate slave trade. The paper concludes with a short analysis of Virginia’s contribution to that trade before and after the Turner Rebellion.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Interpreting Nat Turner's "Confessions"

Christopher L. Tomlins, University of California, Irvine School of Law, has published Demonic Ambiguities: Enchantment and Disenchantment in Nathaniel Turner’s Virginia as IC Irvine School of Law Research Paper No. 2012-22. Here is the abstract.

This paper conjoins three texts – the “Confessions of Nat Turner,” Walter Benjamin’s “Capitalism as Religion,” and Max Weber’s “Science as a Vocation.” Benjamin and Weber provide interpretive prisms through which to examine Turner’s confession. Though quite unlike each other, each glances at the demonic – a matter of some significance when one considers the meaning of the “full faith and credit” held due the decision of the Southampton (Virginia) County Court to hang Turner for his attempted 1831 slave rebellion. Like guilt/debt, the dual meanings of Schuld that, for Benjamin, confirmed the existence of a religious – specifically a Christian – structure in capitalism, the conjunction of faith and credit has its own demonic ambiguity, simultaneously sacralizing (faith) and secularizing (credit) the authority of the law. In capitalism as religion and as law, these demonic ambiguities fuse together in an overwhelming simultaneity that is at once economic and juridical, moral and psychological, profane and sacral. This simultaneity – and Turner’s attempt to disrupt it – is the paper’s chief concern.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.