Nat Turner

Nathaniel "Nat" Turner (October 2 1800 – November 11 1831) was an American slave whose failed slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, was the most remarkable instance of black resistance to enslavement in the antebellum Southern United States.

Early life

File:Nat Turner Slave Rebellion.jpg

Nat Turner preaches religion.

Turner was born in Southampton County, Virginia. He was singularly intelligent, picking up the ability to read without being taught and experimenting with homemade paper and gunpowder. He grew up deeply religious and was often seen fasting and praying. He frequently received visions which he interpreted as being messages from God, and which greatly influenced his life; for instance, when Turner was 21 years old he ran away from his master, but returned a month later after receiving such a vision. He became known among fellow slaves as "The Prophet".

On February 12 1831, an annular solar eclipse was seen in Virginia. Turner took this to mean that he should begin preparing for a rebellion. The rebellion was initially planned for July 4, Independence Day.

Rebellion

Main article: Nat Turner's Rebellion

Turner started with a few trusted fellow slaves, but the insurgency ultimately numbered more than 50 slaves and free blacks, most of whom were on horseback. On August 13, there was an atmospheric disturbance in which the sun appeared bluish-green. Turner took this as the final signal, and a week later, on August 21, the rebellion began. The rebels traveled from house to house, freeing slaves and killing all the white people they found.

Because the slaves did not want to alert anyone to their presence as they carried out their attacks, they used knives, hatchets, axes, and blunt instruments instead of firearms. Turner called on his group to "kill all whites." The rebellion spared no one, but a small child who hid in a fireplace was among the few survivors. Until Turner and his brigade of slaves met resistance at the hands of a white militia, 55 white men, women and children were killed.

Capture and execution

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The capture of Nat Turner

The rebellion was suppressed within 48 hours, but Turner eluded capture for months. On October 30 he was discovered in a swamp by a white farmer and then arrested. After his capture, his court-appointed trial lawyer, Thomas Ruffin Gray, took it upon himself to publish The Confessions of Nat Turner, derived partly from research done while Turner was in hiding and partly from conversations with Turner before his trial. This document remains the primary window into Turner's mind. Due to its author's obvious bias, it is a subject of much contention among historians.

On November 5 1831, Nat Turner was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.

He was hanged on November 11 in Jerusalem, Virginia, and his body was then skinned, beheaded and quartered, and various body parts were kept by whites as souvenirs.

Long-term consequences

The state legislature of Virginia considered abolishing slavery, but in a close vote, affected by the recent uprising, decided to retain slavery and instead support a repressive policy against slaves and free blacks. The freedoms of all black people in Virginia were tightly curtailed, and an official policy was established that forbade questioning the slave system on the grounds that any discussion might encourage similar slave revolts.

Ultimately, no other slave uprising inflicted as severe a blow to the community of slave owners in the United States. Nat Turner is regarded as a hero by many African Americans and pan-Africanists worldwide.

Nat Turner finally became the focus of popular historical scholarship in the 1940s, when historian Herbert Aptheker was publishing the first serious scholarly work on instances of slave resistance in the antebellum South. Aptheker stressed how the rebellion was rooted in the exploitative conditions of the Southern slave system. He traversed libraries and archives throughout the South, managing to uncover roughly 250 similar instances, though none of them reached the scale of the Nat Turner uprising.

The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), a novel by William Styron, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1968.

References

• Nat Turner biography, part of the Africans in America series Website from PBS.

Further reading

• Kenneth S. Greenberg, ed. (2003) Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-513404-4.
• William Lloyd Garrison, The Liberator (September 3, 1831): The Insurrection. A contemporary abolitionist response to the news of the rebellion.

External links

• Works by Nat Turner at Project Gutenberg