In 1902, William Nivison Blow Jr., a retired U.S. Army captain, secured full ownership of his family’s long-neglected plantation in southeastern Virginia, aspiring to revive the lifestyle of a Southern gentleman and to foster pride in his family’s history. Yet, the records he inherited revealed a more complex and troubling legacy. Among the plantation’s financial ledgers and scattered papers were detailed accounts of the buying and selling of enslaved people and their persistent resistance to bondage. Despite professing a desire for accuracy in his unpublished account of the estate, Blow Jr. perpetuated popular myths about the loyalty of the enslaved, advising a cousin to fabricate traditions where none existed.
Historian Alan Taylor, in his new study of the Blow plantation titled "Tower Hill," draws from the family archives, now housed at the College of William and Mary, to distinguish fact from family lore. His research uncovers that the institution of slavery inflicted suffering not only on the enslaved but also on the enslavers. The Blows were acutely aware that their wealth was built upon violence, deception, and profound contradictions, and they feared an abrupt and devastating end to the system they upheld.
The story of the plantation begins with Richard Blow, a Revolutionary War-era Southern patriarch who prospered by circumventing British blockades along Virginia’s Tidewater region. Based in Portsmouth, Blow briefly entered the African slave trade and later served as president of a local bank. Tower Hill functioned as his rural retreat, yielding modest profits.
A central focus of Taylor’s study is the complicated relationship between Richard and his son George Blow, whose correspondence over forty years reveals the conflicting attitudes that embody the slaveholding class. George Blow, born in 1787 and dying shortly after the Civil War, embodied the era’s contradictions, promoting both harsh control and a paternalistic veneer. In 1839, he explicitly noted the profitability of raising enslaved children while simultaneously directing overseers to avoid punishment that was deemed excessive. He also forbade pregnant and nursing women from field labor, expressing a self-view of relative enlightenment amid a system founded on cruelty.
Underlying this paternalism was a profound fear of rebellion, a dread realized in August 1831 when Nat Turner, an enslaved man from nearby Southampton County, led a violent uprising that resulted in the deaths of 64 white Virginians, several of whom were Blow relatives. The revolt was suppressed within days, and reprisal lynchings claimed the lives of more than 100 Black people. The rebellion shook the plantation’s owners and Virginia’s leadership. Some considered gradual emancipation, while others clung to the belief that the violence was the result of a confined group of extremists rather than evidence of widespread resistance.
Taylor challenges this latter perspective, suggesting that support for violent resistance was more prevalent than the enslavers admitted, and that Turner may have acted prematurely ahead of a broader planned revolt. The Blows themselves contemplated abandoning the state, with one family member proposing relocation to "a new Country" free from slavery. Notably, letters from George Blow in the immediate aftermath of the rebellion are absent from the family archive.
Taylor, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner known for his sweeping histories of early America, situates the Blow family’s story in the wider narrative of slavery’s destructive moral and social impact. "Tower Hill" resonates with themes explored in William Faulkner’s literature—including race, violence, illusion, and inheritance—highlighting how the narratives slaveholders constructed served to mask the brutal realities they upheld. Ultimately, Taylor argues, this selective memory enabled planters to perpetuate cruelty as tradition.
The lasting effects of slavery are also evident in the region surrounding Tower Hill. Years of intensive exploitation depleted the soil, leaving behind a landscape where only sparse pine trees flourish. The plantation has since passed into private hands, often run by timber and hog farming operations that continue to exert pressure on the land. Taylor notes that the county’s largest employer is now a pair of state prisons, underscoring the enduring legacies of exploitation and racial injustice rooted in the plantation era.