Nat Turner's Rebellion

Nat Turner (October 2, 1800–November 11, 1831) led the most significant slave revolt in U.S. history. Undertaken in 1831 in Virginia, Turner's Rebellion claimed more lives than any similar uprising. It had repercussions throughout the South, redrawing the lines of the American debate over slavery in ways that led toward all-out civil war within a generation. Indeed, some suggest that it represented the first major battle of the long war to end slavery.

In 1831 Virginia's Southampton County, bordering on North Carolina, contained roughly 6,500 whites and 9,500 blacks. Almost all of the latter, whether young or old, lived in perpetual bondage, including Nat Turner, a slave of Joseph Travis. Turner had been born in Southampton on October 2, 1800, only five days before the execution of black revolutionary Gabriel Prosser in Richmond, and as a boy he must have heard stories of Prosser's intended insurrection. Tradition suggests his mother was born and raised in Africa. She told her son at an early age that, on the basis of his quick intelligence and the distinctive lumps on his head, he seemed "intended for some great purpose."

Turner learned to read as a small boy, and he built a strong and composite faith from listening to the African beliefs retained within his family and the Christian values of his first master, Benjamin Turner. Confident from childhood that he had a special role to play, Nat Turner found outward confirmations for his messianic thoughts and eventually determined that his personal calling coincided with the most pressing public issue of the day—the termination of racial enslavement.

Most of what is known about the man is drawn from his Confessions, a remarkable autobiographical statement taken down by a young lawyer named Thomas Ruffin Gray during the rebel's final days in jail. While one can question the validity of Turner's recollections and the motivations of the disillusioned and desperate Gray (who rapidly published his lurid transcript at a profit), the confession has an underlying ring of truth and represents one of the most extraordinary firsthand texts in American history.

According to this account, Turner experienced a powerful vision in 1825 in which he "saw white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened—the thunder rolled in the Heavens, and blood flowed in streams." Three years later another vision told him to prepare to slay his "enemies with their own weapons." But it was not until February 1831 that a solar eclipse

Nat Turner

"And my father and mother strengthened me…saying in my presence, I was intended for some great purpose, which they had always thought from certain marks on my head and breast."

the confessions of nat turner, the leader of the late insurrection in southampton, virginia. baltimore: t.r. gray, 1831.

signaled to Turner that he must begin. He laid plans with others to act on the holiday of July 4, but when he fell ill, the date was allowed to pass. Then, on August 13 he awoke to find the sun a dim reflection of itself, changing from one hazy color to another. Taking this as another sign, he brought together a handful of collaborators on Sunday, August 21, and told them of his plan for a terrorist attack.

His intention, Turner explained, was to move through the countryside from household to household, killing whites regardless of age or sex. He hoped that this brutal show of force would be so swift as to prevent any warning and so compelling as to convince others to join in the cause. Having rallied supporters and gathered up more horses and weapons, they could march on Jerusalem, the county seat, and take the arsenal, which would give them a substantial beachhead of resistance. From there the rebellion could spread, aided by a network of enslaved black Christians and perhaps by divine intervention as well. Turner made clear, according to the Richmond Enquirer, that "indiscriminate slaughter was not their intention after they obtained a foothold, and was resorted to in the first instance to strike terror and alarm. Women and children would afterwards have been spared, and men too who ceased to resist."

Shortly after midnight Turner and five others launched their violent offensive, attacking the home of Turner's master and killing the Travis household, then proceeding on to other farmsteads to wreak similar vengeance. As their ranks grew, the band became more disorderly and the element of surprise was lost, but the first militiamen who offered resistance on Monday afternoon beat a hasty retreat. By Monday night as many as sixty or seventy African Americans had joined the cause, and on Tuesday morning Turner's army set out for Jerusalem. Behind them at least fifty-seven whites of all ages had been killed in a stretch of twenty miles.

When some rebels stopped at James Parker's farm, within three miles of Jerusalem, to win recruits and refresh themselves, the pause proved fatal, for the local militia had regrouped. They managed to attack and disperse the insurgents, who were off guard and poorly armed. Although Turner attempted to rally his followers, he never regained the initiative, and on Tuesday white reinforcements launched a harsh and indiscriminate counteroffensive that took well over a hundred lives. One cavalry company slaughtered forty blacks in two days, mounting more than a dozen severed heads atop poles as public warnings. Turner, his force destroyed, eluded authorities for six weeks, during which time another black preacher known as David attempted to ignite an uprising in North Carolina, fueling white fears of widespread rebellion. After an enormous manhunt, authorities captured Turner in a swamp on October 30 and hanged him publicly twelve days later.

Turner's unprecedented insurgency had a complex impact. It forced Virginia's legislature to consider openly, if briefly, the prospect of gradual emancipation. It also attracted proslavery whites to the colonization movement, since many saw African resettlement as a way to remove dangerous bondsmen and reduce the free black community. For black and white abolitionists in the North, Turner's Rebellion reinforced the idea, later espoused by John Brown, that enslaved southerners were willing and able to engage in armed revolt if only weapons and outside support could be arranged. Among churchgoing slaveholders the uprising prompted tighter restrictions on black preaching and greater caution regarding slave access to the gospel. Among African Americans Turner became and has remained both a martyr and a folk hero never to be forgotten. As recently as 1969 one black Southampton resident could recall what his mother had learned in her childhood: that Nat Turner "was a man of war, and for legal rights, and for freedom."

See also Amistad Mutiny; Christiana Revolt of 1851; Demerara Revolt; Gabriel Prosser Conspiracy; Stono Rebellion; Tailor's Revolt

Bibliography

Aptheker, Herbert. Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion. New York: Humanities Press, 1966.

Morris, Charles Edward. "Panic and Reprisal: Reaction in North Carolina to the Nat Turner Insurrection, 1831." North Carolina Historical Review 62 (1985): 29–52.

Oates, Stephen B. The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion. New York: Harper, 1975.

Tragle, Henry Irving. The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation of Source Material, Including the Full Text of 'The Confessions of Nat Turner.' Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971.

Wood, Peter H. "Nat Turner: The Unknown Slave as Visionary Leader." In Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century, edited by Leon Litwack and August Meier. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

peter h. wood (1996)