Tower Hill

Tower Hill draws on a previously untapped family archive to reveal the routines of daily life and the fraught family dynamics on a slave plantation in southeastern Virginia in the early- to mid-nineteenth century. Owned by generations of a local merchant family, the Blows, Tower Hill was a struggling enterprise mired in debt, degrading soil, volatile climate, endemic diseases, and social isolation. All this exacted an emotional toll that drove the Blows-husbands and wives, fathers and sons-to family turmoil and madness. The enslaved Blacks at Tower Hill endured in part by claiming an evangelical Christianity as their own, embracing its promise of ultimate deliverance from suffering and, in the here and now, its broad communities of support. Nearby, the Great Dismal Swamp provided a haven for runaways who built lasting enclaves there.

Nat Turner's rebels struck slaveholding families near Tower Hill suddenly, killing more than fifty men, women, and children in a single day. George Blow helped lead the suppression that took twice that many Black lives. He also helped mold the memory of the uprising as an exceptional event mounted by a lone fanatic leading a few deluded followers. But Alan Taylor shows that the revolt emerged from a broader network of spiritual agitation reaching throughout Tidewater Virginia and North Carolina. A much larger uprising might have erupted but for a mistake in timing by Turner and his followers. The shockwaves of the Turner rebellion, running through secession and civil war, still reach us today.