Neighbors tendered the prophet’s mantle early, yet he accepted it slowly and reluctantly. He cultivated the reputation of a gifted child, yet their faith in him surpassed his own, for they also believed his good sense “was perfected by Divine inspiration.” Turner, demanding further signs, kept aloof from his neighbors and “wrapped myself in mystery.” All the while, he fasted and prayed and reflected on the Scriptures, especially a passage from the Sermon on the Mount,² which struck him most powerfully. He prayed upon it daily, even at the plow, and there the “Spirit that spoke to the prophets in former days” appeared and spoke the words himself: “Seek ye the kingdom of Heaven and all things shall be added unto you.” Only after two more years of prayer did the Spirit reveal himself a second time. And only then was Turner at long last convinced of what the slaves in his neighborhood had known all along: his “wisdom came from God.” Now his faith surpassed theirs, for he also believed God had chosen him for “some great purpose.” And Turner “now began to prepare them for my purpose.”³

Turner was sidetracked from his appointed task for some six years because the neighborhood that exalted him soon brought him low. Around 1822, just as he began to confide intimations “something was about to happen,” he came under an overseer’s hand and absconded to the woods for thirty days.⁴ Fellow slaves assumed Turner had followed in the footsteps of his father, who had run away years earlier, never to return. Then Turner reappeared, quoting the Spirit: “For he who knoweth his Master’s will and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes, and thus have I chastened you.”⁵ Fellow slaves rebuked him — “murmured against” him, as Turner put it, casting himself as Moses and his neighbors as the ungrateful Israelites who “murmured” for lack of food and drink when he led them out of Egypt into the wilderness.⁶

Turner, scorned by his neighborhood, began to conceive his plot in earnest just then. After this reproach—perhaps in response to it—he had the most vivid revelation yet of his future course: a battle between white spirits and black spirits eclipsed the sun; blood streamed, thunder rolled across the sky. Again Turner withdrew from other slaves to devote himself to the Spirit, and the Spirit rewarded him with further revelations. Blood dropped like dew on the corn in a field where Turner labored. He revealed this vision to “many, both white and black, in the neighborhood,” but it did little to uplift his standing. A reprobate white man was the only person suitably impressed by these visions, and Turner took him down into a creek, where the Spirit baptized them and onlookers “reviled us.” In May 1828, the Spirit told Turner to take up Christ’s yoke and “fight against the Serpent” when the next sign appeared in the skies and to say nothing of his mission in the interim. When a solar eclipse occurred on February 12, 1831, Turner confided his purpose to four slaves: Hark Travis, who lived on the same farm as Turner; and Sam Francis, Henry Porter, and Nelson Edwards, all of whom belonged to owners nearby. These were the men, all from the neighborhood, “in whom I had the greatest confidence.”⁷ Nat Turner’s rebellion sprang up from neighborhood soil.

The neighborhoods of the Natchez District, distinct though they were, had counterparts across the South. Slaves created them throughout the border states, along the Black Belt, across the Mississippi Valley. The prevalence of neighborhoods, moreover, points to the roots of those in the district. Neighborhoods in Mississippi, though ingenious creations, were reconfigured from those in the Upper South. Neighborhoods were pervasive in other ways, too. Fashioned in the course of visiting and storytelling and other everyday exchanges, neighborhoods were the incarnation of a sense of place that permeated slaves’ consciousness and even lent a spatial dimension to their conception of time. Neighborhoods illuminate the contours of slave society in southwestern Mississippi and beyond.

By the time of Turner’s rebellion, neighborhoods in Virginia had been a century in the making. The struggle to hitch social ties together across plantation lines was well under way between 1710 and 1740 in the Chesapeake. The small size of plantations made visiting essential to cultivating organic social bonds within slave society. After nightfall and on Sundays, slaves crowded the roads, waterways, and other byways on foot, in canoes, and by horseback, heading to nearby quarters to dance, drink, and otherwise carouse. On large plantations, men and women began the tender work of cultivating ties of kinship in adjoining quarters. Owners unwittingly lent a hand in breaking ground on neighborhoods. Upon the death of great planters, heirs parceled out slaves among nearby estates, where old ties facilitated extending bonds to these new locales.⁸ Men and women extended family ties into new precincts wherever slaves were sold or bequeathed in the vicinity. By the 1770s and 1780s, the slave population in Tidewater Virginia had grown in size and density, and the proportion of slaves living on farms with more than ten bondpeople had increased from less than half at the beginning of the century to about two-thirds.⁹ Slaves withdrew some distance away from owners to quarters, where the cabins were rampant with kinfolk. Bonds of many sorts grew apace as slaves gained the run of nearby plantations. The new field of sociability laid a new groundwork for solidarity. Many slaves harbored runaways from their neighborhood.¹⁰

Across the Virginia border in Person County, North Carolina, neighborhood was the terrain of struggle and discipline as well as solidarity and kinship, according to James Curry. His mother felt pulled in two directions — away from the neighborhood and back toward it—when she ran away and was captured fifteen miles gone, awaiting news about her family before pressing on. Shortly thereafter, she married her first husband, “a slave in the neighborhood,” Curry noted. Slaves there felt the impact of Nat Turner’s revolt in the scarcity of books. Curry had already gotten his start learning to read in a spelling book procured by his mother. Before the rebellion, slaves “in our neighborhood,” he observed, could readily buy hymnals and spellers.¹¹

The several plantations in the neighborhood, where slaves were likely to suffer the exactions of other slaveholders and overseers from time to time, comprised a single field of discipline. Curry and his two brothers realized they had not seen the last of their overseer the day he threatened to whip them before nightfall, even though he allowed he could not do it himself. They knew “there were men in the neighborhood he could get to help him,” so Curry and his brothers ran away before the overseer made good on his threat.¹²

The stories slaves exchanged about the regimes of punishment on different farms gave “a rich slaveholder in our neighborhood,” Thomas Maguhee, a perfectly dreadful reputation. “I never saw blood flow any where as I’ve seen it flow in that field,” a fellow slave told Curry as they walked by the Maguhee place. “It flowed there like water.” Curry’s companion had been strong enough to carry bushels on his shoulder before he was hired out to Maguhee the previous summer; now he could scarcely lift one. “When I went there to work, I was a man, but now, I am a boy.” Other stories about the notorious Maguhee made the neighborhood rounds. One man, having refused to submit to a whipping, drowned in a millpond where he fled from the dogs. Anyone who had the temerity to shed tears for the dead man got a whipping. Neighborhood defined a field of struggle where the terms of discipline differed from place to place. Many “slaves in the neighborhood,” Curry surmised, would have preferred to belong to his owner, if only the man were not a slave trader.¹³

Neighborhood, as the stories told in Curry’s account suggest, was the main field of the grapevine telegraph. Here slaves rapidly and extensively collected and exchanged information. Neighborhood provided fodder as well as the field for circulating every kind of news, formulated as stories in which slaves told and heard tell of each other’s struggles, families, and intimate relations as well as owners’ outrages and other doings, among other tendencies and prospects. During the 1836 presidential election, for example, word tore through Curry’s neighborhood that Martin Van Buren would free the slaves if he won. One old man prophesied amid the general rejoicing that they, like the Israelites on the shore of the Red Sea, had merely to “stand still and see the salvation of God.” If President Van Buren ultimately declined to be their Moses, slaves knew far more about politics than white people realized, Curry pointed out, because slaves “from neighboring plantations hold frequent intercourse with each other.”¹⁴

Lewis Clarke was reluctant to tell an abolitionist meeting in Brooklyn in the fall of 1842 too much about his Kentucky neighborhood, yet he made clear it was the nexus of kinship and discipline. He had second thoughts about naming a slave who was “all white,” for example, because the audience might then ask “whether I came from his neighborhood.”¹⁵ Generally speaking, though, he amply demonstrated spouses who lived in different neighborhoods had a heap of troubles. One fellow slave got whipped time and again for visiting his wife some distance away, and she begged him “to find somebody round in his neighborhood that would buy her.” After she lost patience and ran away to her husband, her owners turned more cruel than ever, and thereafter she was “the most suffering creature” Clarke ever knew. Historians still have much to learn about the geography of intimate relations.¹⁶ Marriage between spouses belonging to different owners was common in the border South. The distance between husbands and wives and all the visiting and family ties traversing it would have increased the size of neighborhoods in some regions or placed intimate relations outside the bounds of neighborhood in others. In Clarke’s neighborhood, like many others, intimate relations beyond those grounds could be unhappy affairs.

Slaveholders in the neighborhood determined the outer limits of propriety in discipline, not that such limits did the slaves much good. If an owner tied a slave to the whipping post at the local market and whipped the man until his legs gave out, Clarke observed, the “neighbors all cry out, ‘What a shame!’” Yet the neighbors’ objections to the whipping in the marketplace, he judged, had less to do with the severity of the punishment than the indiscretion of subjecting onlookers to a screaming slave. Slaveholders might go to great lengths to discipline an owner, like one of Clarke’s, who neglected to keep good order on his plantation. Yet only the most egregious departures from conventional brutality moved slaveholders to discipline one another. When Clarke was a child, his owner finally stopped pulling Clarke’s hair out after “one of the neighbors” questioned her claim he was afflicted with “scald head.” No matter how cruelly owners flogged slaves, “the neighbors” would never go so far as to testify about it in court.¹⁷

Slaves created neighborhoods all over the Upper South, from the Atlantic Seaboard to the Mississippi River. In Middle Tennessee, Elizabeth Sharp had a daughter by a white man who “slipped” off the road into her cabin. Although she did not put too fine a point on their relationship when she recounted it many years after emancipation, she scarcely knew the man, only his last name. “He didnt belong in the neighborhood,” she explained.¹⁸

Neighborhoods lined the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland as well. In 1855 Frederick Douglass opened his autobiography in Tuckahoe, the “district, or neighborhood,” on the Eastern Shore where he lived with his grandparents. Douglass apologized for describing it at length, but since he did not know when he was born, he could not situate his story in time, so he attended to the place, and “it is always a fact of some importance to know where a man is born.” Douglass’s grandparents “were considered old settlers in the neighborhood.” His grandmother, Betsey Baily, was held in especially high regard as an able nurse, “a capital hand at making nets for catching shad and herring,” and generally “born to ‘good luck.’” Douglass, however, thought her good fortune had less to do with luck than thrift. “Grandmother,” he observed, was “more provident than most of her neighbors.”¹⁹

Ann Garrison extracted her mistress’s assurance to “never sell any of us out of the neighborhood” outside Havre de Grace, where the Susquehanna River empties into the bay. Garrison was well aware some of her children were bound to be sold to settle her master’s estate after he died, which is why she sought the promise, but her mistress was true to her word, at least for a while. She sold one of Garrison’s daughters to a doctor just three miles away, but that did not prevent him from taking the girl to the Southwest two years later. One of Garrison’s sons was hired out to “a tavern-keeper in the neighborhood” but was subsequently sold to a slave trader in Baltimore. Garrison and three of her children were sold to a trader there in 1841. Only intervention by friends and abolitionists gained freedom for her and the children before they were sold south.²⁰

Slaves brought neighborhoods to the Natchez District from the border states whence they came. Ann Garrison’s neighborhood, Elizabeth Sharp’s, Lewis Clarke’s, and James Curry’s were all in states exporting slaves to the Deep South by the thousands. More than 240,000 slaves, on average, undertook this second middle passage every decade during the antebellum period. Its ebb and flow closely tracked the fortunes of the staple economy and peaked during the boom years of the 1830s, fell in the depression of the 1840s, and rose again on the speculations of the 1850s.²¹ Most left from Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Kentucky became an exporting state during the 1820s; Tennessee did so during the 1850s.²² Much of this traffic passed through Natchez, where the second largest entrepôt in the trade lay northeast of town at the mocking crossroads of Washington and Liberty. Franklin and Armfield, the leading speculators in the business, had offices in Natchez as well as New Orleans, the preeminent center for the trade. Even during the slow season, the market in Natchez was large enough for Franklin and Armfield to send a coffle there every summer. Planters from the district bought a great many people on offer at the Forks of the Road, as the market outside town was known.²³

The migration tore deeply into neighborhoods in the Upper South. Its impact differed, depending on whether slaves left with their owners or with traders. From the standpoint of kinship, traders did more damage to slave society than did planters²⁴ Yet the reverse is true from the perspective of neighborhoods.²⁵ Traders received a premium in the Deep South for slaves in the prime of life, around their peak capacity for work, after the onset of sexual maturity. About two out of three slaves caught up in the interstate trade, by the most authoritative estimate, were men and women between sixteen and thirty years old, and half were separated from husbands, wives, or children.²⁶ Slave families fared somewhat better in the migration with planters, who took many of their people south together and even tra...