Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry Into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy
by Winthrop D. Jordan

In the tension-filled months of spring and summer 1861, a faction of enslaved individuals in Adams County, Mississippi, plotted to overthrow their white owners and secure their own freedom. However, the scheme was uncovered, leading to the arrest and subsequent trial of the conspirators. A minimum of forty slaves in the vicinity of Natchez were executed. By November of that year, the episode was largely swept under the rug, as local plantation owners conspired to erase the event from public memory.

In 1971, historian Winthrop D. Jordan discovered a crucial, yet overlooked, document that contained the interrogations of some of the accused slaves. This led him on a two-decade-long quest to piece together the untold story. The absence of any official reports or newspaper coverage on the conspiracy turned Jordan’s research into a true detective story. He dug through a myriad of sources: private correspondences, diaries, Confederate soldier letters, Union officer journals, postwar Southern Claims Commission records, census data, plantation documents, and even tombstones.

The result of this extensive investigation is a masterfully written account of one of the last known slave rebellions in the United States. Beyond the details of the conspiracy, the book also paints a vivid picture of the Natchez region at the onset of the Civil War. At that time, Adams County was among the nation’s most affluent areas, dominated by a small elite who held significant sway over not just the enslaved population, but also the less affluent white community.