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Lot 0

[NAT TURNER'S REVOLT]. DREWRY, William Sidney (1870-1948). The Southampton Insurrection. Washington: The Neale Company, 1900.

Estimate: $200 - $300
Starting Bid
$100

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[NAT TURNER'S REVOLT]. DREWRY, William Sidney (1870-1948). The Southampton Insurrection. Washington: The Neale Company, 1900. 8vo. 201 pp, With 38 photos, including frontispiece. Publisher's full blue front board and spine stamped in gilt. FIRST EDITION OF THE FIRST ACADEMIC HISTORY OF NAT TURNER'S REBELLION, AS SEEN BY A WHITE SOUTHERNER. 

Condition

Minor rubbing, soiling to binding, text a bit toned, foxed. Near fine.

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As was the case with many white southerners in the Jim Crow era, William Sidney Drewry saw the revolt as unjustified violence against slaveowners, because he believed that conditions under slavery were fair and idyllic. Drewry casts Turner as both a crazed religious zealot and a conniving villain, who betrayed the kindness of the plantation owners. The present work tracks the movement of the insurrection the group traveled through Southampton County. The map illustrates their passage. In The Land Shall be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt (2015), Patrick Breen describes the present work as "the first academic history of the revolt" (p. 97). Breen states that Drewry's account recorded and collected, for the first time, much of the existing oral history of the revolt. Though Breen notes that Drewry's writing should always be approached with skepticism, given Drewry's proslavery convictions, the present work is, at least, a thorough synthesis of contemporary newspaper reporting and an ample collection of information on the topic of the revolt and the response of the residents of Southampton County.