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In the war-fevered spring and summer of 1861, a group of slaves in Adams County, Mississippi, conspired to gain their freedom by overthrowing their white masters. The conspiracy was discovered and at least forty slaves in and around Natchez were hanged and several were whipped to death. By November the affair was over, and the planters of the district united to conceal the event behind a veil of silence. In 1971, Winthrop D. Jordan came upon the previously unanalyzed transcript of the testimony of some of the conspiring slaves as they were interrogated by a committee of planters, a discovery that led him on a twenty-year search for additional information about the aborted rebellion. In Tumult and Silence at Second Creek, he provides an exhaustive analysis of his findings, and the result is a landmark contribution to the history of slavery and how its tragedy can be understood. This paperback edition has two new appendices that contain documents relating to the conspiracy that have come to light since publication of the hardcover edition, along with the author’s commentary on this new information.
Winthrop D. Jordan, the William F. Winter Professor of History at the University of Mississippi, is the author of several books, including White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812, for which he received the Bancroft Prize, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, the National Book Award, and the Francis Parkman Prize.
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