The Book Prize Index

Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry Into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy

Winthrop D. Jordan

In the war-fevered spring and summer of 1861, a group of slaves in Adams County, Mississippi, conspired to gain their freedom by overthrowing and murdering their white masters. The conspiracy was discovered, the plotters were arrested and tried, and at least forty slaves in and around Natchez were hanged. By November the affair was over, and the planters of the district united to conceal the event behind a veil of silence. In 1971, Winthrop D. Jordan came upon the central document, previously unanalyzed by modern scholars, upon which this extraordinary book is based - a record of the testimony of some of the accused slaves as they were interrogated by a committee of planters determined to ferret out what was going on. This discovery led him on a twenty-year search for additional information about the aborted rebellion.

HistoryAmerican History · medium confidenceAmerican History81 signalsLlm Classifier: American History -> American HistoryKeyword Classifier: American History -> American HistoryKeyword Classifier: War & Military -> War & MilitaryAmerican Civil WarScience & DiscoverySlavery & EmancipationWar & Military Strategy

Award History

1 wins · 1 total

AwardYearResultCategory / Notes
Bancroft PrizeMajor1994WinnerOfficial source
View all award history (1)
Experimental book profileGenerated by GPT-5.4 nano · may contain inaccuracies

This is an unverified interpretation of the catalog description, offered as an opt-in discovery experiment—not as bibliographic fact.

  1. 01 Central figures

    None extracted with sufficient confidence.

  2. 02 Central places

    • Adams County, Mississippi80%
    Show lower-confidence suggestions

    These suggestions did not meet the normal display threshold and are more likely to be wrong.

    • Natchez60%
    • Second Creek40%

  3. 03 Suggested argument

    No argument inferred with sufficient confidence.

    This suggestion did not meet the normal display threshold and is more likely to be wrong.

    The record of accused slaves’ interrogated testimony—found by Winthrop D. Jordan—supports a reconstruction of a 1861 slave conspiracy in Adams County, Mississippi, later concealed through silence.

    Model confidence 38%

  4. 04 Reading orientation

    60 / 100 academic

    Trade / academic crossover

    An estimate of intended readership and scholarly apparatus—not quality or importance.

Confidence percentages are the model's own estimates. Profile confidence: 62%.