Nat Turner

American slave rebellion leader

• Born: October 2, 1800
• Birthplace: Southampton County, Virginia
• Died: November 11, 1831
• Place of death: Jerusalem (now Courtland), Virginia

Turner led the largest slave rebellion in the history of the United States. As a slave preacher, he linked religion, liberation, and black militancy, thus providing a model for many future black liberation movements.

Early Life

Nat Turner was born a slave on the Benjamin Turner plantation in Southampton, Virginia. His mother was African born, and his father escaped from slavery to the North when Turner was a young child. From the beginning, Turner was perceived as a remarkable child by both his family and his white owner. Born into a slave culture that mixed elements of African tradition with Christianity, Turner exhibited birthmarks that, according to African custom, marked him as a person with spiritual gifts and power. He was treated accordingly by his relatives and the local slave community.

Turner’s owner saw his early intelligence and encouraged him to learn to read and write. Turner’s paternal grandmother was extremely religious and provided religious education. Turner attended services and received religious education at Benjamin Turner’s Methodist meeting house, where the slaves were encouraged to worship with their master and his family. Turner, from his childhood, read the Bible regularly and engaged in prayer and meditation, coming to believe that he had a special calling. His religious study and his visions convinced him that Christianity affirmed the equality and dignity of all people and that slavery was a sin against God and his teachings.

By the 1820’s, Turner had already acquired a reputation among other slaves in terms of his intelligence and spiritual gifts. He also began to have regular religious visions. Most important was his report of an encounter with a spirit that approached him and spoke the Biblical verse, “Seek ye the Kingdom of Heaven and all this shall be added unto you” (Luke 12:31). Turner interpreted this as a sign that he had a special religious mission. Later, in 1821, he escaped after a dispute with his master; however, after thirty days and another vision, he returned to his enslavement.

Turner believed that personal escape was an evasion of the greater mission to which he had been called. After this, his mystical experiences increased in number and intensity as he began to find signs in the heavens and in hieroglyphic figures that he discovered on leaves. During this time, he took on the role of a Baptist preacher. His reputation as a preacher spread, and he was allowed some freedom in traveling about, reportedly journeying as far as Hartford County, North Carolina, in 1828. His power as a preacher was so great that even some white people were impressed by his message, including a plantation overseer, Ethelred T. Brantley, who, despite disapproval from the white community, was baptized by Turner.

During this time period, Turner had a vision that was to shape future events. He saw a battle in the air between black and white spirits in which streams of blood flowed. Later, in May of 1828, he was informed by the spirit that, like Christ, he was to wage a “fight against the Serpent” and that he would receive the appropriate sign when the battle was to begin. Drawing heavily on the judgment motifs of the Old Testament prophets and the biblical apocalyptic visions of a battle that is described as the final war between good and evil, Turner came to understand himself as a messianic figure who was called to initiate an upcoming battle between good and evil that would end with the freeing of the slaves.

Life’s Work

The sign that Turner was seeking and the events that gained Turner historical notoriety began with a solar eclipse in February, 1831. Turner saw this as the sign that the battle would soon begin. He began planning a slave revolt with four other slaves—Henry Porter, Hank Travis, Nelson Williams, and Sam Francis—that was to begin on July 4. The plan was to kill local slave owners, seize their weapons, rally other slaves to their cause, and then march on the county seat, Jerusalem, Virginia, and seize weapons from an armory. The hope was that by then, a well-armed slave army would be formed to engage in a final battle to end slavery. On July 4, however, Turner fell ill, and the attack was postponed.

Turner waited for another sign. It came in August, 1831. For three days—the “Three Blue Days of 1831”—the sun over North Carolina and Virginia had a strange blue cast. In response, on August 21 Turner called together his group of followers, which now numbered eight. They gathered for an evening meal, finalized their plans, and then, just after midnight on August 22, put the plan into action. They first went to the house of Turner’s current owner, John Travis, and, armed with a hatchet and broadax, killed Travis, his wife, and their children—six people in all. They gathered some guns and ammunition and moved from farm to farm in the region. By Tuesday morning, August 23, the group with Turner numbered about seventy, and they had killed fifty-seven white people, over half of which were women and children, in the twenty-mile area of the Boykins district of Southampton.

As the rebels moved down the road from Cross Keys to Jerusalem, they met their first resistance in the form of a white militia under the command of Captains Alexander Peete and James Bryant. After some initial success, Turner’s group was subsequently scattered. Soldiers from Fort Monroe and white militia from surrounding areas were dispatched to put down the rebellion. Many of the slave insurgents were quickly captured. White people retaliated with a terrorist campaign against black people in the area, both slave and free. As many as two hundred black people may have been murdered; many of them were lynched, and many were tortured. The massacre would have become worse had not General Eppes intervened and dismissed the militia groups.

Turner escaped and lived in the woods near Cabin Pond, eluding capture for six weeks. He was discovered by a white man, Benjamin Phipps, on Sunday, October 30, hiding in a hole he had dug under a fallen tree. He was taken to Jerusalem on November 1, convicted during a five-day trial, and hanged on November 11. During the time he was in prison, he made lengthy verbal confessions to his attorney, Thomas R. Gray, which were subsequently published and became the primary source of information about Turner and his planned revolt. When asked at his sentencing whether he had more to say, Turner showed no remorse, but only replied, “Was not Christ crucified?” Fifty-three black people, including Turner, were arrested. Twenty-one were acquitted, twelve were transported out of state, and nineteen others, in addition to Turner, were hanged.

At the time of Turner’s revolt, antislavery sentiment had become strong in the North and some parts of the South. David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World , which advocated the violent overthrow of slavery, had been published in 1829, and William Lloyd Garrison was already actively involved in advocating the abolition of slavery through political action. The Southampton rebellion intensified the debate and tended to harden positions on both sides. As a response to the revolt, legislation was passed throughout the South that set new penalties for teaching slaves to read, limited the rights of slaves to preach, and placed limits on the rights of slaves to gather for religious services. The education of free black people was also severely limited as many of the informal black schools were closed. Many free black people were pressured to move North.

The debate surrounding the rebellion emerged again during the 1960s with the publication of William Styron’s fictionalized account of the life of Turner, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1966). According to African American critics, the book portrays Turner as a crazed fanatic and a precursor of the black militants who were gaining prominence during the 1960s and thus is a veiled criticism of black radicalism. African American scholars responded to the book with a period of intense historical research and inquiry to present a more accurate portrayal of Turner.

Significance

Nat Turner’s notoriety came as a result of his leading the largest slave revolt in the history of the United States. More important, however, Turner was a black religious leader who embodied a central theme of the black religious tradition in the United States. Like those who would follow, including Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, he proclaimed that the God of the Old Testament was a god that set slaves free and demanded social justice, a god who exacted judgment on societies that were not just and who required people to take action to rectify social injustice. Turner’s actions also highlight the fact that slaves did not passively accept slavery but acted to obtain their freedom and equal rights. Turner’s confessions have been an important historical source that demonstrates the continued influence of African traditions on slave culture and African American religion.

The historical debates surrounding the portrayal of Turner are significant in understanding the racial divide that exists in the United States. The focus on the brutality of Turner’s revolt in the debate following the rebellion and in later portrayals by people such as Styron shows the refusal of white America to understand the context of black radicalism. Turner’s revolt was a demand for freedom and rights, a response to a system that bought and sold people, separated families, and arbitrarily tortured and executed slaves. To understand the violence of some forms of black radicalism, it is necessary to understand the violence of the system to which it is a response.

Bibliography

Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. New York: International, 1943. Print.

Clarke, John Henry, ed. William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. Westport: Greenwood, 1968. Print.

Duff, John B., ed. The Nat Turner Rebellion: The Historical Event and the Modern Debate. New York: Harper, 1971. Print.

Foner, Eric, ed. Great Lives Observed: Nat Turner. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1971. Print.

French, Scot. The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Print.

Greenberg, Kenneth S., ed. The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996. Print.

Greenberg, Kenneth S., ed. Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. Print.

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

Styron, William. The Confessions of Nat Turner: A Novel. New York: Random House, 1966. Print.

Tragle, Henry Irving, ed. The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation of Source Material. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1971. Print.

Wilmore, Gayraud. Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of Afro-American People. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1983. Print.