Tower Hill: A Plantation on the Edge of Rebellion

From a Pullitzer-Prize-winning historian, an absorbing family saga of Virginia slavery and the earthshaking rebellion led by Nat Turner in August 1831 Tower Hill draws on an untapped family archive to reveal the history of a struggling slave plantation, mired by debt, volatile climate, disease and social isolation, whose local merchant family, the Blows, were driven to family turmoil and madness. The enslaved Blacks at Tower Hill endured by embracing evangelical Christianity and its promise of community and support. Nearby, the Great Dismal Swamp provided a haven for runaways. In 1831, Nat Turner’s rebellion killed more than fifty from Tower Hill’s slaveholding families in a single day. George Blow’s suppression took twice as many Black lives, and shaped the uprising’s memory as an event mounted by a lone fanatic. Alan Taylor shows how the revolt emerged from a broader network of localised spiritual agitation and how a larger uprising might have erupted but for a mistake in timing. The shockwaves of the Turner rebellion, running through secession and civil war, still reach us today. Alan Taylor’s American Civil Wars (9781324110491) was praised as: "Those doubting that there is anything fresh to say about the [American Civil War] should read Pulitzer Prize winner Alan Taylor’s brilliant, panoramic account of the conflict." – Richard Carwardine, Literary Review "[O]ffers compelling new insights...” – Amanda Brickell, The Wall Street Journal "Taylor is a formidable historian and masterly writer..." – Thomas Ricks, The New York Times