"Some seventy miles below Richmond, in the southeastern part of Virginia along the North Carolina border, lay a little-known backwater called Southampton County. It was a rolling, densely forested area, with farms, plantations, and crossroad villages carved out of the woods. In 1831 most of the farms were hardly distinguishable from one another--the houses were charmless, two-story rectangles, surrounded by haystacks and corn and cotton patches."

                                                                                               - Stephen Oates, The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion