The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory

French vividly traces the""postmortem career"" of Nat Turner as an alternately loved and loathed icon of black America. From the official""master narrative"" of 1831 to William Styron's highly controversial, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, and beyond, Turner's rebellion inspired uncompromising resistance for many Americans, and embodied loathsome anarchy for many more. French first parses the image of the rebellious slave before Turner. The antislavery jeremiads of Thomas Jefferson (who was""for black freedom on his terms, and his terms alone,"" according to French) and starker voices like William Lloyd Garrison and David Walker presaged a bloody uprising among the slaves; others used the perception of simmering black rage to push pro-slavery sanctions. French's book, like the brilliant work on John Brown by fellow University of Virginia professor Merrill Peterson, mainly examines the protagonist's intensely debated legacy. Abolitionists, later Communist propagandists and finally civil rights activists and modern liberals would celebrate Turner as their archetype and hero. Confederate sympathizers and white Southern conservatives labeled him a dangerous fanatic and mass murderer, and would ennoble instead the faceless""faithful slave"" or quiet Negro. French is an adept chronicler of Turner's ghost, although much of the book will be familiar territory to those who have read Kenneth Greenberg's edited volume on the subject. The work expands but leaves unresolved the debate over whether the rebellion resulted from a wider conspiracy or simply, as the official account holds, from the messianic mind of Turner himself. After stating his intent""to reach an audience beyond the academy,"" French succeeds admirably through concrete prose, though his ethereal subject matter may nonetheless limit that reach considerably.