ABSTRACT
The publication of William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner in early 1968, and the subsequent negative response to it by ten black writers, created a minor literary stir. In the years following the publication of Aptheker's book the Journal of Negro History published numerous studies of slave insurrections and other varieties of slave resistance, several of which are cited in the bibliography. A slave state offered the following definition of the term slave insurrection: "By 'insurrection of slaves' is meant an assemblage of three or more, with arms, with intent to obtain their liberty by force". The elements of the definition subscribed to are: a minimum of ten slaves involved; freedom as the apparent aim of the disaffected slaves; contemporary references labelling the event as an uprising, plot, insurrection, or the equivalent of these terms. The study, moreover, excludes, with a few exceptions, the scores of outbreaks and plots that occurred upon domestic or foreign slave-traders.
