Nat Turner

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Nat "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. His methodical slaughter of white civilians during the uprising made him a controversial figure, but he is still considered by many to be a heroic figure of black resistance to oppression.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Rebellion 3 Capture and execution 4 Consequences 5 Notes 6 References 7 Further reading 8 External links

[edit] Early life

Turner was born in Southampton County, Virginia. He was singularly intelligent, picking up the ability to read at a young age 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. Nat took this to mean that he should begin preparing for a rebellion. The rebellion was initially planned for July 4, Independence Day, but was postponed due to deliberation between him and his followers and illness. On August 13, there was an atmospheric disturbance, a solar eclipse, in which the sun appeared bluish-green. Nat took this as the final signal, and a week later, on August 21, the rebellion began.

[edit] Rebellion

Main article: Nat Turner's slave rebellion

Nat started with a few trusted fellow slaves. The rebels traveled from house to house, freeing slaves and killing all the white people they found. The insurgency ultimately numbered more than 50 slaves and free blacks.

Because the slaves did not want to alert anyone to their presence as they carried out their attacks, they initially used knives, hatchets, axes, and blunt instruments instead of firearms. Nat called on his group to "kill all whites." The rebellion did not discriminate by age or sex, although Nat later indicated that he intended to spare women, children, and men who surrendered as it went on. Before Nat and his brigade of slaves met resistance at the hands of a white militia, 55 white men, women and children had been killed. ^[1]

[edit] Capture and execution

The rebellion was suppressed within 48 hours, but Turner eluded capture for months by hiding and running away from his master. On October 30 he was discovered in a swamp by a white farmer who arrested him. After his excecution, a lawyer who had access to the jail in which he was held, 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 is the primary historical document regarding Nat. However, its author's bias is problematic. It is probable that Gray suppressed some facts and gave undue emphasis to others. Nat probably did not say that “we found no more victims to gratify our thirst for blood.” It does contain lines which appear genuine, particularly the passages in which Turner describes his visions and early childhood.

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

He was hanged on August 21 in Jerusalem, Virginia, now known as Courtland, Virginia. His body was then flayed, beheaded and quartered, and various body parts were kept by whites as souvenirs.

[edit] Consequences

Prior to the Turner Revolt there was a fairly substantial abolition movement in the state, largely on account of economic trends that made slavery less profitable in the Old South in the 1820's and fears of the rising number of blacks in whites, especially in the Tidewater and Piedmont regions. Most of its members, including acting governor John Floyd, supported resettlement for these reasons. Considerations of white racial and moral purity also influenced many of these abolitionists. However, fears of repititions of the Turner Revolt served to polarize moderates and slave owners across the South. Municipalities across the region instituted repressive policies 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. There is evidence of trends in support of such policies and for slavery itself in Virginia before the revolt. This was probably due in part to the recovering Southern agricultural economy and the spread of slavery across the continent which made the excess Tidewater slaves a highly marketable commodity. Nat's actions probably sped up existing trends.

In terms of public response and loss of white lives, no other slave uprising inflicted as severe a blow to the community of slave owners in the United States^{[citation needed]}. Because of this 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 Turner Revolt.

The Confessions of Nat Turner, a novel by William Styron, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1968. This book had wide critical and popular acclaim, but several black critics considered it racist and "a deliberate attempt to steal the meaning of a man's life" in the words of Lerone Bennett Jr.

Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, a film by Charles Burnett was released in 2003. It carefully explores Nat's highly contentious legacy and the way that many authors have used him to serve their own agenda.

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

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

[edit] Further reading

• Kenneth S. Greenberg, ed. (2003) Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN.
• Scot French, The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in AMerican Memory. 2004
• William Lloyd Garrison, The Liberator (September 3, 1831): The Insurrection. A contemporary abolitionist response to the news of the rebellion.
• Herbert Aptheker, (1966) Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion. Humanities Press, Inc.

[edit] External links

• Works by Nat Turner at Project Gutenberg

Persondata
NAME	Turner, Nat
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Turner, Nathaniel (full name)
SHORT DESCRIPTION	slave rebellion leader
DATE OF BIRTH	October 2, 1800
PLACE OF BIRTH	Southampton County, Virginia, United States
DATE OF DEATH	November 11, 1831
PLACE OF DEATH	Jerusalem, Virginia, United States