The Nat Turner Insurrection (1859, by Thomas Hamilton)

THE NAT TURNER INSURRECTION (1859, by Thomas Hamilton)

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Nat Turner (1800–1831) was a slave in Southampton County, Virginia. A precocious child, Turner learned to read at a young age and eventually became a preacher renowned by both blacks and whites. Believing he was called by God to lead his fellow slaves to freedom, Turner staged a violent rebellion in 1831. Under cover of night, he and other slaves killed his master and family before marauding across the countryside. The uprising was swiftly put down the next day, but not before fifty-one whites had been murdered. Turner and some two hundred other slaves, many uninvolved with the violence, were executed in revenge. In the wake of the attacks, the South passed many punitive slaves codes, including bans on literacy among slaves. The Nat Turner Insurrection became for pro and antislavery forces alike a powerful image of the brutality inherent in slavery.

Anglo-African Magazine reprinted Thomas Gray's Confession of Nat Turner to mark John Brown's 1859 execution at Harper's Ferry. In his introduction, editor Thomas Hamilton compared the two radicals: both were compelled by conscience and God to free slaves; both were maniacal in their pursuit of emancipation. But where Turner believed freedom possible only with the destruction of the slaveholding race, Brown saw that slaves could be freed without undue bloodshed. While this characterization denied Brown's own use of violence, it served to raise the specter of armed slave rebellion, a fear never far from slaveholders' thoughts. Hamilton remarked that the South was less able to defend itself against insurrection in 1859 than it was in 1831. He posited that Turner would have succeeded were he in Brown's place at Harper's Ferry. Hamilton implored the nation to delay no longer in its decision to emancipate, a choice to be made between hatred and compassion.

Mark D. Baumann,
New York University

See also Nat Turner's Rebellion ; Slave Insurrections .

There are two reasons why we present our readers with the Confession of Nat Turner. First, to place upon record this most remarkable episode in the history of human slavery, which proves to the philosophic observer, that in the midst of the most perfectly contrived and apparently secure systems of slavery, humanity will out, and engender from its bosom forces, that will contend against oppression, however unsuccessfully: and secondly, that the two methods of Nat Turner and of John Brown may be compared. The one is the mode in which the slave seeks freedom for his fellows, and the other, the mode in which the white man seeks to set the slave free. There are many points of similarity between these two men: they were both idealists; both governed by their views of the teachings of the Bible; both had harbored for years the purpose to which they gave up their lives; both felt themselves swayed as by some divine, or at least, spiritual, impulse; the one seeking in the air, the earth and the heavens, for signs which came at last; and the other, obeying impulses which he believes to have been fore-ordained from the eternal past; both cool, calm and heroic in prison and in the prospect of inevitable death; both confess with child-like frankness and simplicity the object they had in view—the pure and simple emancipation of their fellow-men; both win from the judges who sentence them, expressions of deep sympathy—and here the parallel ceases. Nat Turner's terrible logic could only see the enfranchisement of one race, compassed by the extirpation of the other; and he followed his gory syllogism with rude exactitude. John Brown, believing that the freedom of the enthralled could only be effected by placing them on an equality with their enslavers, and unable, in the very effort at emancipation, to tyrannize himself, is moved with compassion for tyrants as well as slaves, and seeks to extirpate this formidable cancer, without spilling one drop of christian blood.

These two narratives present a fearful choice to the slaveholders, nay, to this great nation—which of the two modes of emancipation shall take place? The method of Nat Turner or the method of John Brown?

Emancipation must take place, and soon. There can be no long delay in the choice of methods. If John Brown's be not soon adopted by the free North, then Nat Turner's will be by the enslaved South.

Had the order of events been reversed—had Nat Turner been in John Brown's place, at the head of these twenty one men, governed by his inexorable logic and cool daring, the soil of Virginia and Maryland and the far South, would by this time be drenched in blood, and the wild and sanguinary course of these men no earthly power then could stay.

The course which the South is now frantically pursuing, will engender in its bosom and nurse into maturity a hundred Nat Turners, when Virginia is infinitely less able to resist in 1860, than she was in 1831.

So, people of the South, people of the North! men and brethren, choose ye which method of emancipation you prefer—Nat Turner's or John Brown's?

SOURCE: Hamilton, Thomas. Anglo-African Magazine (1859).