The Old Dominion; or, the Southampton Massacre

by G. P. R. James

First published 1856

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2.5(5)

Set in Virginia in 1831, The Old Dominion places fictional households within the social terror surrounding Nat Turner’s rebellion in Southampton County. James writes about a slaveholding society in which ordinary domestic relationships are inseparable from coercion, racial hierarchy and the fear of revolt. The violence of the uprising and the reprisals that follow turn private assumptions about security and loyalty into urgent questions.

Nat Turner and a small group of followers killed dozens of white residents before the rebellion was suppressed. White militias and mobs then carried out widespread retaliation against Black people, including many who had no connection to the revolt. James’s nineteenth-century perspective reflects the attitudes and limitations of his own period, but the novel remains historically significant for the way it places slavery, insurrection and communal fear at the centre of its Virginia setting rather than treating the plantation world as neutral background.