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The trouble with conspiracies as historical subjects is that most of the people involved in them had motives to stretch the truth. The resulting fictions can become wonderful evidence if their historian is a seasoned skeptic.
In Gabriel's Rebellion, Douglas R. Egerton has read court records and other primary documents with the assumption that Virginia authorities, while not providing defendants with fair trials, were "honestly determined to get to the bottom of the affair" and that they needed to know "precisely what had happened" (p. xi). He is thus more willing to believe in the literal truthfulness of his documents than are some of the historians whose work he seeks to revise, including Gerald W. Mullin, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, and Thomas C. Parramore.
Inspired by the writings of E. P. Thompson and Eugene Genovese, Egerton contends that Gabriel, the leader of the 1800 conspiracy, was...