Fear of Insurrection
- Word spreads of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in Virginia.
- Worried that the slaves may be planning a revolt, the slaveholders in Edenton hire poor whites to search everyone.
- Dozens of slaves—men, women and children—are whipped and tortured.
- Linda cleans her grandmother’s house to get the searchers off her back.
- Mr. Litch, a neighboring slaveholder, leads the search of Aunt Martha’s house. They ask her what she's doing with so many letters, and she says they're poetry from one of her white friends.
- The search team leaves after not finding anything incriminating, and you can imagine they're a little disappointed.
- This goes on for weeks. It doesn't manage to turn up any plots for rebellion—although if you're just looking at numbers of people tortured and jailed, it's a huge success.