Virgil Stewart came from a long line of restless men. Their migrations, extended over several generations, typified those of many families of Scottish and Scots-Irish ancestry who sought improved economic circumstances, more fertile land, and higher social status on a series of American frontiers. Stewart’s great-grandfather, Lazarus Stewart, acquired property in central Pennsylvania in 1729, only to see three of his sons pick up and move in the 1750s to Rowan County in western North Carolina. One was Virgil’s grandfather, James Stewart, who remained in North Carolina for several decades but in time decided that better prospects might await him...

The overflow crowd of spectators gathered in and around the two-story brick courthouse in Jackson, Tennessee, on July 24, 1834, had come to see Virgil Stewart as much as they had to see John Murrell. The reputation Murrell had developed during his residence in Madison County, the seriousness of the crime for which he was to be tried, the audaciousness of his jailbreak, and the elusiveness that enabled him to spend two months at large might have been enough by themselves to attract a sizable audience. But it was the promise of hearing Virgil Stewart describe his travels with Murrell...

At first, what was happening near Beattie’s Bluff, Mississippi, did not seem to have anything to do with John Murrell, Virgil Stewart, or his pamphlet. Rumors passed of strange goings on, but no one could determine their source, and in any case they were too airy and uncertain to pay much mind. But the widow had a bad feeling. The young enslaved women who worked in her house seemed less inclined to listen to her than they normally were. Sometimes they spoke to her downright disrespectfully, and she often found them whispering among themselves when they should have been working....

For men who knew they might be suspected of helping plot the largest slave insurrection the United States had ever seen, Joshua Cotton and William Saunders were surprisingly easy to find. When Cotton had been summoned to Livingston on July 1, he had probably been at the home of his father-in-law in Hinds County, just south of Madison, and that was exactly where a company of men on horseback found him again on the night of July 2. Saunders was not much more of a challenge. He had had two full days and nights to disappear since being released in...

The Fourth of July began peacefully enough in Vicksburg. White residents of the city, located on the Mississippi River around fifty miles southwest of Livingston, had received word the previous day about the insurrection fears convulsing Madison County, and they had been urged to be alert. But they were not going to let anything spoil their commemoration of the nation’s founding, which they planned to celebrate much as cities elsewhere in the United States did in 1835. In conjunction with a muster of the local militia unit known as the Vicksburg Volunteers, participants in the organized public festivities gathered just...

Even as it grew commercially successful and became integrated into the national and international economies, Vicksburg remained a rootless and unformed place. Plenty of people were drawn to Vicksburg, but few were inclined to remain for very long. In the 1830s nobody was actually “from” Vicksburg. Rather, visitors and more permanent residents alike noted that it was a city filled with “strangers,” itinerants from a wide variety of places who lacked strong ties to each other or to any given community. As a new arrival to Vicksburg put it in 1836, the city attracted “men from every corner of the...

On the afternoon of July 7, 1835, after witnessing what he considered the farce of Angus Donovan’s trial, Henry Foote mounted his horse and started back toward his home in Clinton. He had gotten only about a mile south of Livingston when he came across a large crowd alongside the road. Pausing to see what was going on, Foote observed that the crowd’s attention centered on a “good-looking white man” who had been “tied to a tree, and stripped to the waist, whilst he was receiving a terrible castigation with rods.” The man had been tried by the Livingston Committee...

On July 13, after receiving the second letter in as many days from William Jones on behalf of the Clinton committee of safety imploring him to call out the state militia, Hiram Runnels replied. Refusing their entreaty, he told the committee he did not think he had “the necessary information to authorize such an extreme measure” and that he believed there was “ample power invested in the members of police” to contain the crisis, “if properly exerted.” Runnels wrote that he would “be happy to be placed in poss[ess]ion of such facts” as “would show the necessity of calling on...