Scholarship recipients from last year. Correct . She came here and enjoyed herself, im sure. Patrick is the author of the land shall be day loosed in blood, a new history of nat turners revolt published by Oxford University press. It is one of the finest books i have read on southern history in a long time. It is a book i assigned to my undergraduates in this spring, and as we all know, undergraduates are tough customers when it comes to books. They absolutely enjoyed mr. Breens scholarship and especially his writing. It is a bold book, important book, and one thing patrick and i talked about, it is just a shame that one can go to southampton county today where turners revolt took place and you will see some state signage, but you will have no way of taking a driving tour to see the sites related to that important revolt. It truly is shocking. Patrick is trying to do his part and bring more awareness and audiences likeat us who go to battlefields, i suspect if we had the opportunity, we would take a bus to southampton county to look at that historic landscape. It has changed radically. I dont believe, patrick can speak to this later, that there is a single building that still survives from the revolt. Is that true . Are there any homes left . There are some. Good. I was not aware of that. So it is a real pleasure to have patrick at the Civil War Institute, and he will speak about his book about nat turners revolt, patrick breen. [applause] patrick thank you, peter, and thank you all for coming. This is a real honor and a pleasure to be here, coming to talk to you guys at the Civil War Institute is a real honor. I am pleased to do it. I want to make a special welcome to the young people, High School Students who are here. As Peter Carmichael said, my daughter actually applied and got into it last year, and had a great, great experience. I want to encourage you because there is two things. My daughter wants to thank you, peter, for not inviting me last year. [laughter] patrick which is fair. And second, i want to tell you guys what i would tell my daughter, but i wont tell my daughter this because she isnt going to listen to me. You guys are at a great age, you are going to be looking at colleges, doing things, really reach out to people. This is a great opportunity for you guys to learn about the life of the mind, and dont be afraid of people who have Pulitzer Prizes and who have written 30 books. I am allowed to be scared of them, but you guys, not so much. Not so much. And if you are scared of them, talk to me, but get in the habit of talking to these people, find out what you are interested in. This is a really, really great opportunity, peter, and it is a fabulous thing. I want you to get in the habit because when you get to college, you can be the person who is in the front row in college who meets the speaker afterwards. We love that. The people who come to speak love students who are engaged, so i wanted to get you guys in the habit. It is an unbelievable opportunity. Anyway, today im going to talk about nat turner. Nat turner did not happen in gettysburg in 1863. Here i am talking gettysburg. How do i get you back to 1831 . Gettysburg, as you know, is a it is also a place of the gettysburg address. This is a place where history has happened. People come here, unlike southhampton county. We do not have a woodstock for nat turner. Civil war woodstock, this is awesome. We dont have that. I guess we do, it is like when be in can green that she and Ken Greenberg can get together for drink. How do i get you guys back there . It is not like im going to tell you about 1863 more than you already know. Let me start with this. Abraham lincoln. It is not his gettysburg address but his cooper union address. One of the most important speech he makes. Candidate,n he is a that picture of him from Matthew Bradys is taken the same way as the Coopers Union address. In anyone ever aged as much five years . One of the things he does as he is sitting there, and in this address he starts talking about southampton county. He asks his audience of new yorkers, what induced the southampton insurrection . 28 years ago . Three times as many lives were lost as at harpers ferry. What happened . Why is he asking this . I think it is simple to understand. The republicans are getting blamed for john brown. Not johns saying it is brown starting the slave insurrections. In fact john brown was a complete fiasco. If you want to look at a real slave insurrection look at southampton county. Why did they revolt . It was not because of republicans. There were no republicans. So what is it . The slavesthat made revolt in southampton county . It is an important question and one that does bear on people studying the civil war. One that you guys were diving into this should think about. It is when i will talk about for the next 45 minutes or so. Back to 1831 not 1832, the year Gettysburg College was founded. 1831. It is not lincoln who is president , it is jackson. That guy. He is on the 20 for another 10 years i hear. Economics. I want to set this economically. When we look at the civil war, many historians who know a lot one ofcivil war the things we look at the civil war as we say this is one of those wars where railroads matter. Right from the first battered battle. He look at manassas, you have troops being delivered by rail. It is a modern war. Railroad in 1830. There it is. Exactly one year before nat turners revolt. We are not in the world of railroads. World is not that world. Heres a map. Construction in the United States by decade. 1830, there is nothing. There is like three dots there. There is a. By selfcare charleston. Two dots in pennsylvania. No railroads. We want to remember that there is a good deal more isolation. , the nation is going to be crossed by railroads. Not crossed all the way, but 1867 is going to be cross all the way. Railroad construction is going to explode after nat turner. They do not know that is coming. What they do have a sense that is coming is cotton revolution. Has been cotton produced forever. Is going to be a tremendous increase in the availability of cotton. Move from just being able cotton, tolongform produce short Staple Cotton which is going to open a production throughout the of the south. Cotton production is going to boom. Heres a map of cotton production. 1820. Bottom one is cotton production in 1860. Tremendous amount of expansion in cotton production. Keep in mind, the 1790 production is just some oratory read along the coast of South Carolina and georgia. There has been an incredible expansion of cotton. Of course, with cotton production, holland. Hold on. With the cotton production, is going to come slavery. I dont know what happened to my i got to jump ahead. Ok. I dont know where it is. This is what happens when you play with your slides late at night. [laughter] i am just happy it is here. I am saying ok, i have got all these nice slides i hope to show up. Ok. With cotton production, we are going to see an increase in slavery. Very going to see a slideshow later on we are going to see a slideshow later on about how the slave population is going to follow cotton production in america. We have the Industrial Revolution happening. Cotton is going to become the central ingredient. Slavery is going to be the main way that the staple of the Industrial Revolution is produced. What does that mean . It means something really important for slavery. In the 1780s and 1790s, slavery is in retreat. There is no doubt about it. State. Vania is a free why . They abolished slavery. Help me out here . 1780 . What . Whats 1833 . No, that is britain. To see massachusetts, pennsylvania, the first one to abolish the slave trade is vermont. Why is vermont the first to abolish the slave trade . Because there are a bunch of pirates. They are up in vermont and they want to make sure the new yorkers who have slaves do not bring their slaves on to establish their claims to the land. Whatever. The point is, slavery is in retreat. There is no doubt about this. The great accomplishment of the articles of confederation which could not figure out how to tax the country, it did figure out one thing which was how to keep slaves out of the northwest territories. You also have a constitution approved that is going to end the slave trade to america 20 years after its adoption. They did not do it immediate, which was unfortunate, but they did it 20 years later. Remember, 17 80s, slavery is unattractive. In the 1780s youre going to see virginia moving away from slavery. Laws,going to free up making it easier for virginians to have virginian slave owners to free their slaves. There is a movement away from slavery. It makes sense in a way. There is an insatiable demand for slavery. With the expansion that is going to become insatiable demand. What youre going to see is a antislavery. Right . Here we have the one of the great institutions of america i say that with italics or quotes or something. Think about it. We are not talking about ending slavery. Were talking about sending free blacks away. Up a freeing end exercise, but what is it mostly going to do . The main racist goal is to get blacks out of the country. This is not antislavery. Missouri compromise. Slavery appears on the national stage. What do we get . We get slavery in missouri. Right . Thatthere is a prominence slavery wont go but slavery is there. It is balanced. Slavery is part of the country. It is part of the world. It is growing. Say that there are not opponents of slavery. One more thing, the new york emancipation law think about this. New york cant even figure out how to enhance emancipate its own slaves. It passes a law that as does places with more slaves past antislavery loss that are more gradual. Places that are poorer get rid of slavery immediately. Aaces like new york which has small but significant slave population is going to get rid of slavery by abolishing it. Any slave born after 1800 is going to be free when they are 25. In 1799 . T people born theyre going to be slaves forever. For them. After all, that its been the civil war starts, new jersey as a slave state. There are still slaves in new 1860y in 1867 is the census because they never came back and abolished it permanently. Pass . Oes new york they pass an emancipation law that says in 1827, those people who are born before 1800 are going to be free. Think about how small a step that is. That is in new york. This is not in richmond, charleston, this is not the kind of place where slavery, which did look threatened everywhere with the french revolution, the haitian revolution, what was going on elsewhere, it looked threatened in the 1780s and 1790s. By the 1820s, it seems like it there to stay. It is stable. That is going to lead many a ple especially many black people to go out and start would be consider modern abolition. You will see the first black newspaper published in the United States, published in new york. Goings to see david walker appeal, 1829, calling for slaves to fight for their freedom. 1831, you see William Woods theilliam lloyd garrisons liberator. We see this movement to start abolition. To start realized that there has got to be something done to stop this institution, to get rid of it actively. It is not just going to wither away and die. Slavery is something that seems to be reestablished, and more firmly established even though we are in the stage of progress and enlightenment. Is 1831. England, abolitionism is having more success. Keep that in mind. This reflects come a in part, is sugar based, not cotton based. It also reflects the fact that england is freeing slaves in its colonies, primarily jamaica. The thing i want to to keep in mind is as there is movement against slavery, it does not happen everywhere. In america, in southampton county, slavery seems strong. Slavery seems strong in ways that we dont always imagine. Yes, these things are happening. Yes garrison is printing the liberator. This stuff is starting up, but it is slavery seems and feels permanent. You can see this very well in the average price of a slave over the years. What does this show . Booms and panic, busts. I think this works. Maybe i dont use it. Peaks, 1837. These other panics that happen in a world economy. What you see . The panics happen, but slavery is there. He price of slaves is growing the price of slaves in 1860 unit the price of slaves in 1860 is at an alltime high in 1860. Indoor lets. What about southampton county . Where is it physically . It is right there on the map. The bottom. Sort of south of petersburg between petersburg and norfolk on the North Carolina border. Heres a map. I am not sure how well it appears. It is hard to see. Ins is the United States 1830. This shows the slave population. Places in red the red dots the orange dots cover the middle one, are roughly 50 slave. Here is the world. We have lots of slaves. You have to remember, virginia is part of slavery. The cotton expansion is happening, the cotton boom is happening. The biggest plantations which had been in South Carolina are going to move to places like mississippi and alabama. Mississippi more than alabama. And louisiana. These plantations do not change the fact that virginia is the largest slaveholding state in the country in 1860. Virginia has got an in orbis slave population. An enormoushas got slave population. The demographics in virginia . Slaves 32. Mber how often do slave revolt succeed . Never is an ok answer. Credit, it haitis doesnt happen. It is difficult for a slave revolt to succeed. Is it going to succeed in virginia 32 . That is going to be tough. What about southampton county . Set happen county has more slaves than whites. Southhampton county has more slaves than whites. It is not like the High Schoolers here going like hey, we are going to revolt. Although, that would be sort of cool. [laughter] there are a lot of slaves in southampton county. A lot of slaves. I also want to go back to this map of the cotton production. In 1820, you will see cotton production this map shows slight cotton production extends up into southhampton county which is true, it does. See where it is going, we know wesley production is going. It is going to go along the Mississippi River. This is also going to play an important role. Why . We are going to see the shift of the population from the coast, which is where it is in the 1830 map, to the Mississippi River area. That is without taking the slave population away from virginia. Virginia is still the it is just the growth in the population happens in the west. Whathing you cant seek, is the number of slaves in the country in 1830 . 2 million. 1860 . 4 million 4 million. Notice this. Southhampton, the slaves i do not to get my numbers reversed. Southampton county plus population is going down. Why . This is not a center place of economic growth. Cotton production is going to be moving away from southampton county. Away, but are moving the blacks are moving away faster. How is that happening . Slave trade. Think about it. If the slave population of thousand southhampton grew in the same way it grew in the rest of the world, what would happen . It would double. Astonishing. Ne is it is more like a 65 decline. Relative to the growth in the nation. Where is that population growth going . Mississippi, louisiana and georgia. South. Oing important things to keep in mind. Inducedg that may have the slaves to rebel, this may be one. This is not my research. It does not even make it into my book but i guy name david whichd anger wrote a book had a great provocative question. He asked why what happened . Why did they do it . One thing he found out was that weeks before net turner announced the revolt to his his son hadates, been mortgaged. David says a lot of that that turned in it because he knew his son had been mortgaged and this was a response. We do not know that. I think that is reasonable. I think it is the right reading. Things happen for lots of reasons, but mighty revolt if you found out that your son has been mortgaged . And is going to get sold away echo never to be seen again . Seems to me not a bad reason to rebel. Even if it is against impossible odds. Keep that in mind. Nat turner never speaks about that. What i want to talk about today the demographics. Which is just i think the context for it. I want to explore why the slaves are rebelling. What induced the southhampton insurrection . In thet as we see it records. Follow the evidence to what that says. What induced the slaves to rebel . Nat turner. Who is nat turner . Whites thought that nat turner was crazy. He was a fanatic. Who wrote downs nacht turners confessions which are readily available online. I encourage you to read it. One of the things my book does, i am not going to talk about this today as it takes the confessions more seriously than anyone has in the last 50 years. I make arguments about the reliability of these confessions. My argument you can read it if you want is that they actually are what they say they are basically what nat turner said. Sourceakes me remarkable which makes him a remarkable source. You can read it in an hour. If you want to find out why he rebelled, you can read it online. Newspaper reports said he was a fanatic. He is a preacher, and a pretend profit. This is the model that has lasted. It is important part of our way, the slaver vault. Turner sions of nat there he is. He is still a fanatic. He is still a little crazy. That is who it is. Whichk there is a way in this has been one way of understanding nat turners revolt is just by saying its just this crazy thing that happened and nat turner is a jim jones figure. I do not think that is true. I think the evidence that thomas gray wrote does not support that. If thomas gray believes it. How do we understand that turner. The one view is that he is a fanatic, the other is that he is a heroic figure. New nachthas seen the turner movie which can greenberg and i saw together, that may have been the entire audience. It did not do well in theaters, but it is a new understanding of what happened in nat turnerss revolt. He is completely heroic. He is the hero. He is the man who does great things. This is not new in 2016. The ghost here he is being a great preacher and the slaves are enthralled. By his leadership. That is not how it went down. On to tell you a little bit about how it went down and make comments on the way to talk about how we have to rethink about nat turner because it might make us rethink a little bit about how we think about slaves and this. Picture, thist one is more accurate. What happened . On 12 february 1831, here is the clip, there are great websites. You can see the path of the clips of the sun. The eclipse of the sun. Nacht turner says in his signssion, immediately the appearing in the heavens, the seal was removed from my lips and i communicated the great work laid out for me to do. We have got the eclipse. The thing i find interesting is, who did nacht turner tell . Four. Four is not a great number to start a rebellion. I think 40 times four, or 4 million times four is a little better. Why four . It is pretty clear. In the article investigating this found the rebels decided not to tell more people because the word always leaked. Raises an interesting question, how did they study the history of this . I wish i knew. What were they thinking about . I do not know. They did know their history enough to know that slave revolts are hard. What do you have to do . You have to have one person what does ben franklin say . Three can keep a secret as longest as one is dead . As one is that . It is not easy. Our rebellion is dangerous because all you have to do is have one person get a little queasy, and youre the one nice person i like. Just dont hang around x sunday. Why not . Boom. Do fanatics sit there and say i am only got till four people . No. People who think about it. They are the ones. He is being cagey. She is being smart. Abraham lincoln knew as much. At his cooper union address, he said the same thing. Leaks. D is he a fanatic . If by somatic you mean religious, i guess. Im not sure he is fanatic in the sense that i think the sense when people say fanatics they mean more than that. So, here he is with his four, telling them about the plan. How do you set up a slave revolt . Lets start with the two premises i have. One, he is not crazy. Slavesites outnumber threetwo in virginia. How do you revolt . If you can answer this, please come to the microphone at the end. Youre not allowed to use zombies in your answer. [laughter] it is not obvious. I have a phd, i have thought about it. I do not know how you do it. It is not clear. Phd, i probably could not start a slave result even if i wanted to. Slave revolt. One thing is they came up with the idea of starting on july 4. Why july 4 . July 3 is a great day. July 15 gives you nine more days. Isnt it obvious . July 4 is a meaningful date. Just remember, that is not the constitution. That is the declaration of independence. It is political. I found this interesting. How many people are involved in the revolt at this point . Five. What are they doing . They are saying, we are thinking about this revolt in political terms. Is not turner thinking about it in political terms . Is nat turner thinking about it like Frederick Douglass does . No, i do not think so. When they say july 4 comes around, what happens . This is what he says. It was tended by us to have begun the work of death on july 4 last. Plans formed and rejected. The time pass without our coming to any determination. He got worried. Another sign he is not crazy. Ok, we are going to go die. Why . God wants for today . God wants me to die. Want me to join a slave rebellion . I am not going to do it. I have a 401 k . Im not doing it. They do not have the same thing, but they have the same worries at least one of the same worries that they are going to die. Do you want to die . No. Do you want to die in this political war . No. I think this is a meaningful moment because not turner does not see it in a political role political framework, he sees it in a religious framework. But what does that mean . His group has expanded to five people total. They are already looking at the revolt differently. Seeing this like Frederick Douglass. Some people are seeing this as a political move. This is one of the important lessons we need to pass along to scholars and students. People do things for different reasons. Mean you do not want to sit there and say they did it for one reason or another. They like slavery or something stupid like that. You dont want to say that but you do want to be open to the differences in views of people. Now, turner is expanding it. What is what is the other thing this means . If there are differences between five people, are people are these five people following nacht turner blindly . Blindly . Rner what did give nat turner the confidence that it was time to begin . What was the sign . The sun appeared blue. Who is into reading harbingers in the sky, but that would make me twice. Thats a little weird. This is time to begin. The revolt begins paired with or they do . Heres a map of st. Lukes parish. At josephing to start travis house. He is the man who is net turners guardian. Theyre going to set out and followed this past towards jerusalem. Ok. What do they do . They start squabbling about who is going to hit first. Like no, you begin first. Why . They didnt trust him. Make sure heo could not walk away and i dont know what theyre talking about, those guys are crazy. If you take a swing, everyone knows that you are going to die. These people were not following nat turner blindly. What did they do . They go in and they kill the travis family. And then they jump, some of these pictures were from the wpa. Of the farms. This is francis farm, which is really shack. They knocked on the door said come on out, we have a message for you. Grab them and killed them. Takinge begins initially advantage of surprise. In the morning, they start going quickly. They get horses and they start ing. This is on the swing back. They go to catherine whiteheads house. Porter,wards, richard by this point in the morning, there are nine on horseback, six are walking and they are making their way back towards jerusalem. To catherine whiteheads plantation, which is bigger, net turner is going to end up killing only person he killed, are good whitehead. A lot has been made of this. This graphic novel picture he makes. William stier made a tremendous amount of this. The expo nation for this is a little simple. Natner was just turner was riding in the back like a general. He had a little sword. His sword did not kill anyone. With it,to kill her but he took a fence post and bludgeoned her to death. Fast as theyg as can, killing as many people as they can. On monday morning, they realized that they had been discovered. What do they do . Nat turner reassembles the group. He sits there and says i have two divided wings which make sense if youre going as fast as possible. Beenhen, he says we have detected, lets bring them together so that we are going to be able to fight back against whatever response comes in for us. Realized the word has spread. They come to plantations that have been abandoned, they come together. They come together to harass plantation. They are to 40 slaves. Are all excited about what is happening. As they make their way towards jerusalem, theyre going to have a they are going to attack a schoolhouse which is on the firewall or levi wallers farm. While there end the schoolteachers escape. People look and tell the stories about the brutality. Ultimately, they make it to about a mile away from jerusalem. Gate, where they have the battle. Here is a still of the battle from birth of a nation, the 2016 movie. The battle doesnt actually happen anything like this. It is a complete mess. You guys know this stuff better than i do. It is a battle between two sites, none of them know anything about what they are doing. Everything goes wrong. It is a disaster. Doesnt even know what happened when he gets captured. s it turns out, nat turner army ends up beating chasing off the field a small group of about they happened upon them but they ran into another group of whites who heard the sound of the battle. They dispersed. People disperse. There is going to be a tremendous amounts of the county is going to be up in arms. What happens is turner escapes. But the next two months, turner is away. Until midoctober. I want to close with this. I want to draw your attention to what happens when he is discovered and the underappreciated lines that happened in the confessions. Groes starting to go hunting, the document to the place. Turner had hidden in his hiding space. Having gone to walk about, discover to me and sparked, on which thinking myself discovered, on making myself known they fled from me. What happens here . Turner is like, some blacks are out hunting with their dog in the middle of the night. Blacks are out hunting on october 15 . What is going on . It doesnt make sense. After the revolt, the revolt was put down and in fact immediately after the revolt, the whites in charge realize the danger was not from the blacks who were put down in a day or two. The danger to the slaveholders was from the whites. There was nothing they could do if regular whites decided they wanted to kill all the blacks they came across. Martial law was passed in southampton county. The county the fighting was really does the repercussions against the black community was much less than people thought. Why . The slaveholders needed to protect their property. Turner is found. He is discovered. He knows the blacks are not going to hide him and he is eventually going to lead more hiding out but they are chasing him and know where he is. They discover him. When he is finally captured, what is one of the great documents in American History . The confessions of nat turner. That is a quick telling. I wrote a longer book but what i wanted to tell you about is just one thing we have got to do is be careful about thinking about slavery as this simple answer. Slavery is a complex institution. It is going to lead people to respond to it in different ways and the ending of slavery is going to be complex and the civil war. People are going to respond to it in different ways. Some people are going to be like Frederick Douglass. Some people are worried about families. Some are worried about are going to see this in a religious framework. Some are worried about their lives. There is going to be lots of different responses and we need to be aware in the way that the historical moment creates opportunities. At ed gallaghers talk, he was like freedom follows the union army. That is important because think about the relationship of events to moments. One thing you notice in the Slave Community is there are not a lot of slaves who are going out and saying, i am going to do this no matter what. There are some. What you have is a lot of people making decisions based on what they think is the best way going forward, not knowing what the future is going to bring. That is how nat turner worked and that is the story i try to tell in my book. Thank you. [applause] breen we have time for questions. The way it works is if anyone has a question, they can come up to a microphone. Hello, dawson from illinois. My question is, to what degree do you think that the fear of the slaves among white southerners, how that played into their fighting in the civil war and the post breen the idea that slaveholders are immediately afraid. When i see evidence that blacks are out hunting two months after slaveholding in the middle of the night, blacks are out probably not with guns, probably with dogs come out hunting, that is astonishing. I do not want to turn to the fear. There is a powerful motion and it is one that a lot of people are afraid of. After turners revolt, a lot of people were afraid that the leaders who declared martial law and prohibited whites from killing blacks indiscriminately, the slaveholders who did that a lot of whites were upset at that decision. They sent a letter to Andrew Jackson saying we need to support these guys. Dont you realize that every house has one of these potential killers . All of these houses with slaves . There are slaves everywhere. You could just kill us anytime you want. We are defenseless against this. Our people who are afraid to but there are also people whose fear is different. For the slaveholders, and i think in the civil war and reconstruction, one of the fears the slaveholders has is not the fear that they are going to get their heads cut off in the middle of the night. Some people have that. The one fear they have is they are not able to control the black population. They have complete control of the black population under slavery. They are like, hold on. What do we need to do to control the black population . In reconstruction, the fear of blacks plays into social control. They drum up all the lacks raping a white woman and kill a bunch of blacks and makes her blacks stay in their place or do whatever. In nat turners world, the fear does not work that way. The fear of the slaveholders is. If we get so afraid of blacks killing whites, there is nothing that can be done. Think about this. What do you do if you go up and shoot a black person in 1831 . I am scared. They indict you for murder, which you can get indicted for murdering a slave. You do what to a grand jury . I thought it was nat turner. There is no way you are getting convicted. The fear the slaveholders have is they are going to lose control of slave property. Thank you. I think that is something we have to keep in mind. The emotional stuff is easily used, and easy to document, but there is a way we have to think about how there is a fear of losing social control. Thank you. Mechanicsville, pennsylvania. What we have for the confessions is nat turner is interpreted to us through grade. Gray. How to you as a historian filter out grays point of view so that they can get to nat turner. Breen when the project began, basically my start was to say this all historians who have been working for the last 50 years say, gray messes it up somehow and we do not know where you we do not know how. Then you get historians saying why should nat turners voice here . I was going to be more methodical and say this is all great until we hear otherwise. As i pushed on and pushed on, i began to realize there is a lot in the confessions that suggests it is not great. One thing grape within ray puts in is introductory things. He puts in. Medical comments from his point of view so you can see where viewpoints are different. Grays viewpoints of the revolt are different from that turners. Different from nat turners. So one of the things there are many reasons but i have come to see this as a more reliable account. The part in the middle that would would be an exact translation would be pretty close. That is one of the reasons why. There is a great explosion of scholarship on nat turner after a novel came out in 1967. Everyone would grab whatever they wanted from the confessions and use it willynilly to support their position, ignoring the question about the reliability of it. When that burned itself out, no one wanted to search the confessions. When i came back to it, the idea is you can read it as not a production it is clear he had not written it before that turner had been captured. Ultimately, he is going to mess up but it is he might use linguisticly. It is not a video recording. I think it is a fairly accurate account of man nat turners confessions and it is well worth listening to the voice of nat turner. I was wondering the extent to which the killing of women and children influenced the negative feelings of turner because it seems to be one thing to kill people but another thing to attack an innocent school. It is more violent. Breen there is a great story about this. It is a bridge too far. You have a law professor writing about it makes sense. It is a slave and to fight back you kill people and ok. There is this moment where at the first house, they slay an infant sleeping in the cradle. This is something that is fairly clear they talked about, the rebels and there was one point of view which is, we should kill everyone and show the blacks we are not afraid of anything. Another point of view and this is probably nat turners point of view is, we should probably kill the men and we have to kill the women because they can run even if they are not going to fight. But nat turner loses that argument. I am not sure which side he is on but they kill women and children and women in children and children becomes this huge rallying cry. The women and children, these guys are savages. No one is thinking about the way slaveholders treat women and children in slavery. Leaving that to the side, it becomes a rallying cry. After the revolt, people who push against slavery and this is another thing i do not talk about enough in the book but other scholars have. After the revolt, virginia is talking about ending slavery. There are proposals at the Virginia Legislature that get serious consideration that they should adopt gradual emancipation. Remember that wave that stopped around 1804 in new jersey . There is a movement to get that going again. There is a debate and during that debate there are petitions from women and children saying, we do not want to become involved in politics but this is a political question that connects to our safety. We want slavery to end. There is a series of petitions that have been written by women and one was written by a man who signed it as a woman and then had the women of augustine county sign it. It did not succeed. The people moving for gradual emancipation lost but it is a powerful moment and the supporters of gradual emancipation thought they could use it to support their argument against slavery. Does coalesce questions. I am from massachusetts. My question is, because down on restricted slavery and in response to the aggressive slave rebellion, how do you think america would have responded to malcolm x had he been more successful in meeting aggressive revolts and perhaps even killing more white people in the name of civil rights instead of mlks peaceful approach to change . Breen great question. Malcolm x is one of the enduring figures and what would he think . One thing we have to be careful of is saying we have the size these things. Malcolm x is many different people. If you look at the new biography, you see these guys change over time and you to be careful not to say there is one solid thing. I want to contextualize. There are points at which he is looking, at which he is trying to scare people. He is talking a big game in terms of violence and such. There are times when he is moving in Different Directions so you do not want malcolm x had many different positions on race and you do not want to assume there was one position. You want to historic size it. Thank you. Last question. I am from the Washington Area and my question is about the book, the confessions of nat turner. My oldest brother in high school and my mother were having a discussion about whether or not the book should be breen it went out on the pulitzer prize. It got great initial notices. There are a couple problems with it that were brought up. This is 1967 the book is written. One is, is a white southerner writing the story of americas most famous black slave in the first person . He is making him a little crazy and making him flawed and he thinks he is humanizing him but a lot of black power activists, guys not malcolm x. But guys say you cannot do that. The other thing is, the center of the story becomes the story of the killing of Margaret Whitehead. He and William Styron see that as psychologically important. He does not think he killed Margaret Whitehead perchance. He thinks it is meaningful this is the only person he killed. Nat turner actually loved and hated Margaret Whitehead, which is 100 years of racist historiography where we have the black racist. Nat turner, americas black hero, is becoming someone lusting after white women. That becomes something that is too far. These are big issues that set off the debate in the 1960s. Thank you so much for your time. [applause] are watchingu American History tv. All weekend, every weekend on cspan 3. Veterans day on American History tv. Hear from members of the sixth central postal directory battalion. The only allfemale africanamerican unit sent overseas during world war ii. There is a preview. That here is a preview. They had 800 africanamerican women in that battalion, and they deployed to england. When they got there, they had surprise waiting for them. 17 million pieces of mail that were backlogged. With that, with all of the deployment and i remember that the only way that africanamerican women could serve overseas was the commander specifically requested them. Came over to serve in the european theater. With that, what was one aspect yourur deployment, successes over there that you would like to relate to the audience . Knowwould like for them to with the mail pile the size it was for us to get it done and the length of time that they wanted us to do it, it took us a year. We did it in eight months. Barry good. Did you have anything to add . When we got there, there mail was piled up. It was rat infested. We had to find a place to make our postal facility so that we could handle it. We used an old airplane hangar, and build our post office. Had we worked seven days a week. Three shifts. To get the mail out. One third of the time that they had assigned it. Was no mail, low morale. That Service People want is to be able to connect with their families. Course, want to see how their loved ones are doing. It was a very Important Mission for us to be able to have that connection. You can watch the entire talk with members of the 6888 postal battalion monday. This is American History tv, only on cspan3. Announcer next, on lectures in history, Texas University professor gene allen smith teaches a class about George Washingtons character. He examines how washington