re: #308 Decatur Deb

Yeah—the Nat Turner Effect.

Toussant L’Ouverture being the other boogey man.

I’m actually listening to a book called Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad. The actual rescue stories are amazing and uplifting, but the accounts of the arbitrary personal violence that led to individual slaves taking the huge risk of escape are hard slogging. And even worse are the accounts of coordinated group violence against free blacks and slaves both. For example, everyone knows how terrible Nat Turner was, but don’t talk about the insane retaliatory violence…rape, murder, and burnings…that Southern whites committed in response. Which they also did after the uncovering of the plots by Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vessy: even before Turner’s Rebellion the slightly hint of a slave conspiracy was met with arbitrary executions, brutal violence, and sexual assault.