| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Scot French. The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 2004. Pp. x, 379. $26.00.
Scot French did not set out to write a definitive account of America's most famous slave insurrection. Instead, with his interest in the dynamics of social and collective memory, French uses the insurrection to meditate on "America's search for transcendent meaning in its troubled past" (p. 3). Not surprisingly, no single transcendent meaning emerges from this search, and French's study moves deftly among these competing interpretations to show how Nat Turner, "a maker of history in his own day," has been made "to serve the most pressing needs of every generation since" (p. 6). Writing in the long shadow of Turner and the "Turner industry" of the past three decades, French is both a valuable synthesizer of previous scholarship and an important contributor of new insights and connections.	1
Opening with a chapter on how Thomas Jefferson, David Walker, and William Lloyd Garrison each warned of "an upcoming race war should America fail to eradicate its slave past" (p. 4), French turns from these jeremiads to the real thing. According to French, the official investigation into Turner's rebellion "entailed the drafting of a historical narrative that would satisfy public curiosity, restore public confidence, and make possible the reconciliation of blacks and whites, slaves and masters, throughout the region" (p. 33). French is careful to show, however, that other accounts (those offered by Constitution Whig editor John Hampden Pleasants and a slave girl named Beck) worked both to support and to undermine the official narratives of Thomas Gray and Governor John Floyd.	. . .

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