The Leader of a Rebellion Agains Slavery in 1831

Origins

While the oppressive system of slavery provides the essential backdrop for the revolt, Nat Turner described his motivation for the Southampton slave revolt in religious terms. Little is known about Turner beyond what Thomas R. Gray published in The Confessions of Nat Turner. According to The Confessions, Turner was born into slavery on a Southampton plantation on October 2, 1800. He could read and write, which was unusual for an enslaved person of that time and place, and he owned a Bible. He had a family unit, including a grandmother to whom he was "much fastened"; a male parent who escaped slavery; and a married woman and son, who lived on a neighboring farm. He was deeply religious, "devoting [his] time to fasting and prayer," and experienced private revelations in which "the Spirit that spoke to the prophets in former days" spoke to him. When he was in his twenties, Turner ran abroad from his overseer. He was gone for a month, returning only, he said, at the spirit's urging.

In the late 1820s, his religious visions—which up to this bespeak appeared to be apolitical or fifty-fifty counterrevolutionary—became more overtly political. On May 12, 1828, the spirit appeared to Turner and told him that "the time was fast approaching when the offset should exist last and the last should exist kickoff." Information technology besides told him that in that location would be a sign, a prediction that Turner believed was fulfilled on February 12, 1831, when Southampton experienced a total solar eclipse. While The Confessions describes Turner's motivations in primarily religious terms, the historian David F. Allmendinger Jr. noted that the religious signs might not have been the only matter that led Turner to undertake the conspiracy. At this time, Turner lived on the farm of his master, Joseph Travis; his son lived on a neighboring farm belonging to Piety Reese. In February 1831, just days before Turner approached his future conspirators, Reese's son John W. signed a note that put Turner'southward son up as collateral for a debt that he, Reese, had struggled to pay.

Inspired by a combination of religious, familial, and perhaps other unrecorded motives, Nat Turner shared his idea of revolting with 4 other slaves in whom he "had the greatest confidence"—Henry, Hark, Nelson, and Sam. None of the four betrayed the plot, and all joined a conspiracy that they understood would probable cost them their lives. These men never had the chance to explain why they cast their lots with Turner. Many whites at the fourth dimension of the defection dismissed Turner'southward followers as pawns "who acted under the influence of their leader," as the Richmond Whig and Commercial Journal put it, merely it is unclear how many—if any—were disciples of Turner. (The only person who was named as a religious follower in The Confessions was a white human, Etheldred Brantley, whom Turner baptized.) While Turner described the revolt in religious terms, the new conspirators appear to have seen the defection in more political terms. When the conspirators selected a date to begin the defection, initially they picked the Fourth of July.

As the v conspirators tried to turn Turner'due south inspiration into a plan, they thought about the defection strategically. Nothing was more important to the conspirators than to brand sure that their plan went undetected. Turner and his men understood that "the negroes had oft attempted similar things," but because they "confided their purpose to several," the news of the conspiracy "always leaked out." Based upon this insight, the rebels decided to go on the revolt modest, deciding non fifty-fifty to stockpile weapons. Instead, the conspirators accepted Turner'southward strategy to "slay my enemies with their own weapons." While this fabricated the rebels less dangerous at the beginning of the revolt, it also decreased the chance that the conspiracy would exist detected before the revolt began.

Keeping the defection small meant that whites would not uncover the conspiracy, simply keeping it small created a new hurdle for the rebels: they had to figure out how to get slaves and free blacks who had not heard about the revolt to join them. Turner recalled the conspirators thought hard about this trouble—"Many were the plans formed and rejected past us," he noted in The Confessions—merely with petty success. On July 4, 1831, the 24-hour interval the original conspirators initially agreed upon to begin the defection, Turner "barbarous sick," in part because he had fiddling confidence that the rebels had a plan that would work.

Eventually, perhaps spurred on by a new sign from God—a solar event on August 13, 1831, where across the east coast the sun appeared silver and then green—the conspirators settled on a plan that they hoped would lead slaves and complimentary blacks to rally to their banner: they would undertake a sudden strike and kill whites, including women and children, indiscriminately. Hearing about the rebels' power and success, other slaves and free blacks would bring together. When i potential recruit objected that there were besides few rebels to begin a slave revolt, one of the original conspirators assured him that as the rebels "went on and killed the whites[,] the blacks would join them." This was just the first stage of the revolt. According to The Confessions, in one case they rebels had formed and equipped a "sufficient force," the indiscriminate killings of whites would end, and the revolt would proceed albeit using more than conventional methods of war.

The plan was clearly a long shot, as the rebels understood, but given the odds against them, the five conspirators were willing to stake their lives on it. On Saturday evening, August 20, Turner, Henry, and Hark made plans for a feast the post-obit day for the men who had joined the defection. When they gathered the side by side day, the original five conspirators had added 2. Afterwards a feast and a trip to Joseph Travis'south cider press, the conspirators were prepare to begin the revolt.

The Revolt

The revolt began on Sunday dark, August 21, 1831, at Joseph Travis's farm. During the night, the rebels caught the whites completely by surprise, and sleeping whites were in no position to escape the small rebel force. At the same time, while the rebels were in their own neighborhood, they could recruit slaves that they knew to their cause. For example, at Travis's home, the rebels recruited Austin, who despite living on the same small subcontract equally Turner had not been included in the feast that the conspirators held during the mean solar day. At the same time, yet, other slaves, even slaves with strong personal connections to the original conspirators, were hesitant to bring together the revolt. Hark's brother-in-law Jack agreed to join only reluctantly. Others, including the free black Emory Evans, who lived on Salathial Francis's farm, refused to join at all. Over the course of the dark, the rebels attacked iii households, killing eight whites, including a sleeping infant at Travis'due south.

Equally dawn approached on the morning of Baronial 22, the rebels—and so numbering virtually a dozen—changed their method of set on. During the dark, they moved stealthily and attacked in silence; during the day, they moved speedily and boldly. At Elizabeth Turner'due south, Austen shot Hartwell Peebles, the starting time time that any rebel killed someone with a gun. During the morning, the rebels as well separated into 2 squads: 1 on horseback, one traveling by foot. This allowed the i on horseback to launch more and faster strikes. These attacks were successful in terms of killing whites. At Catherine Whitehead'due south plantation, for example, rebels killed all but one of the white residents—including Margaret Whitehead, the simply person Nat Turner killed—merely the rebels continued to struggle to win supporters among slaves. Amid Whitehead's twenty-seven slaves, the rebels constitute, at most, a single recruit, and several of Catherine Whitehead'due south slaves foiled the rebels' efforts to impale Harriet Whitehead. At Newit Harris'south even larger plantation, the rebels failed to proceeds a unmarried recruit. Past late morning, it was articulate that the rebels would non inspire a mass movement, equally they had hoped. However, at about 40 slaves, the rebel regular army was a dangerous force.

By midmorning the challenge of recruiting was compounded past a new trouble for the rebels: news well-nigh the revolt had spread, making it harder for the rebels to find whites. Most whites who heard of the revolt immediately fled to the woods, eluding the insubordinate regular army. Others tried to create defensible positions. At Levi Waller'south farm, the site of a local school, word arrived of the insurrection, and Waller made the conclusion to get together the children together to defend them. This led to the almost devastating raid of the defection, equally the rebels arrived after the children had congregated but before Waller could set upward any defense. Waller's married woman and ten children died during that assault. By midday, when the rebels left Rebecca Vaughn'south house, they had encountered no more defenseless whites. Arthur Vaughn was the final person killed by the rebel forces.

Past the afternoon of August 22, 1831, the dynamic of the revolt had shifted in an of import mode. Turner and his men remained on the offensive, heading to Jerusalem where they hoped to "procure arms and ammunition," just they were existence pursued by several groups of whites who had organized to suppress the revolt. At James Parker'southward farm, a grouping of whites led by Alexander P. Peete, who had been pursuing the rebels along the road toward Jerusalem, dispersed a small group of rebels who had remained by the gate while the other rebels went to Parker's slave quarters to recruit. This white force then engaged the chief rebel forcefulness at Parker's farm. Peete and his men were driven from the field. The rebels pursued the fleeing men, but the pursuit led the rebels into an ambush set by other whites who had heard the sounds of fighting. Turner'due south men were dispersed, and the rebels were turned back from their approach toward Jerusalem.

Post-obit the defeat at Parker's farm, the rebels spent the afternoon trying to regroup. By evening, when they made their camp at Thomas Ridley'southward plantation, Turner had about twoscore men in arms. Simply the rebels were on edge. When rebel sentries went out earlier dawn to investigate potential attack, they found cipher, but their return gear up off a commotion in the rebels' camp. Awake and ill at ease, the rebels who had non fled made their manner to Samuel Blunt's plantation. They believed that the whites had abandoned the plantation, but Blunt and v other whites gear up a defense and the rebels scattered. In the commotion following the see at Blunt's, Nat Turner lost contact with the other rebels, who broke up into ever-smaller groups, pursued by more than and more whites. Although some rebels remained at big for days—and Turner himself would not exist captured for more than ii months—the revolt was effectively over by midday on August 23, a day and a one-half after it commencement began.

Backwash

News of the revolt created fear among whites, many of whom left their houses to assemble together in fundamental places. Ane reporter noted, "Jerusalem was never then crowded from its foundation." As the families gathered, whites organized paramilitary units to put down the defection and in many cases get revenge. In the days later the revolt, whites from Southampton and across killed virtually three dozen blacks without trial in Southampton County. At Catherine Whitehead's, for instance, a white unit from Greensville County was about to kill an enslaved man named Hubbard, when Harriet Whitehead stopped the execution by explaining to the whites that Hubbard had actually saved her life. Whites also tortured blacks, often past putting the suspected slave's feet in a burn. 1 white recounted how 1 suspect almost had his foot "burnt off" earlier his interrogators "found at final that he was innocent." A newspaper editor admitted that the brutality was "hardly inferior in boorishness to the atrocities of the insurgents."

The pattern of retribution and killing in the days after the revolt posed a serious threat to black community and to the county'southward largest slaveholders. Afterward the revolt, anyone could freely kill a slave and escape punishment if the killer claimed that he idea that the slave was a suspected rebel. To stop such indiscriminate killings, on August 28, 1831, General Richard Eppes, the leader of the state militia force in Southampton, issued an society calling for whites "to abjure in the future from any acts of violence to any personal belongings whatever"—in other words, enslaved men and women—"for any crusade whatever." Those who disobeyed this order would exist subject to "the rigors of the articles of war." The attempt to stop extralegal killings was largely successful and meant that thereafter, most slaves who were suspected of supporting the rebels appeared in courtroom.

The trials of suspected slave rebels began on August 31, 1831. The trials were held in courts of oyer and terminer, which meant that slaves were tried without a jury earlier a console of slaveholding judges. Accused slaves all had paid appointed defense attorneys, and the judges fabricated an try to make sure that the trials were not show trials. The court demanded properly drawn charges—it dismissed a case where the prosecutor had non properly drawn his charges—and required that the prosecutor present some credible show that the accused were guilty of a offense. In many of these cases, these formal hurdles posed no trouble for the prosecutor, Meriwether Broadnax, who was able to secure 30 convictions against accused slaves. Every one of the convictions led to a capital punishment, although in twelve of these cases, the court found some extenuating circumstance—such as youth, lack of substantive involvement in the revolt, or reluctance to join the conspirators—to recommend that Governor John Floyd commute the capital punishment to auction from the state of Virginia. (The governor followed the recommendations of the court in every case the court provided a unanimous recommendation, although he was inclined, only unable, to commute the sentence of Lucy, the one adult female convicted for a role in the revolt. In the ane case where a dissever court recommended commutation, Floyd sided with the minority and immune the execution to continue.) The judges too examined five free blacks. Four were remanded until the side by side meeting of the Superior Court of Chancery, where three would be acquitted. 1, Barry Newsom, was convicted and, on May eleven, 1832, became the terminal of xix people executed in Southampton Canton for their role in the revolt.

While the trials and executions were ongoing, Nat Turner himself remained at large. For well-nigh two months, he evaded whites, until a canis familiaris happened upon his hideout and found some meat. The dog returned a few nights later, accompanied by two blacks who were out hunting. When Turner revealed himself to them, he pleaded for them to keep his hiding identify hugger-mugger, but they ran abroad. Realizing that "they would betray me," Turner fled from his initial hiding place. Whites, who had no clear idea where Turner was up to that point, renewed their manhunt near where the revolt began. Benjamin Phipps finally captured Turner on Oct 30, 1831. Turner was brought to Jerusalem the adjacent mean solar day, where he was examined by James Trezvant and James Due west. Parker, two of the nigh prominent political figures in Southampton County. The examination lasted more than an hour and witnesses found Turner "quite communicative." Turner's willingness "to answer whatsoever questions" created an opportunity for Thomas R. Grey, a immature ne'er-do-well attorney, who offered to publish Turner's confession. Turner agreed. Gray met with Turner over a serial of three days and took down Turner's confessions. On November 5, 1831, Trezvant may take read a typhoon of The Confessions at Turner'due south trial. Gray took the terminal version of The Confessions to Washington, D.C., to annals it for copyright, something that was done even before Turner was executed on November 11, 1831. The Confessions was published by the end of November 1831.

Outside of Southampton County, the revolt had important repercussions. Whites in nearby Virginia and Northward Carolina worried that the plot extended across Southampton. This led to both extralegal and legal retribution taken confronting blacks suspected to have been privy to the plot. Elsewhere in the South, most notably in and around Wilmington, Due north Carolina, fears of slave insurrections led to terrible panics and fell reprisals against local blacks. Because the revolt reminded whites well-nigh the dangers of slavery, roughly 2,000 Virginians petitioned the state legislature to do something about slavery. A committee charged with considering the petitions reported that it was "inexpedient" for the General Assembly to pass whatever laws that would stop slavery in Virginia. Delegate William Preston offered an amendment that replaced "inexpedient" with "expedient," but the reformers lost this vote, marking the terminal time that the Virginia legislature would consider a movement away from slavery until the end of the American Civil War (1861–1865). Instead the legislature passed a serial of restrictions aimed at further suppressing blackness religion and limiting the rights of free blacks.

Legacy

Nat Turner's Revolt has been an of import part of the cultural mural in the The states. In the Cooper's Union Address, Republican presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln reminded his New York audition of what he called the Southampton Coup, suggesting that slavery revolts were a threat earlier John Chocolate-brown or the rise of the Republican Party. The abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote a history of the revolt that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in the first months of the Ceremonious War. In the twentieth century, the historian Herbert Aptheker wrote about the revolt and myriad other episodes of slave resistance as a way to combat the mutual perception that slaves were content in the antebellum Southward. Aptheker's most important work, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943), was panned by many historians of his era, but this work on Southampton nevertheless prepared the ground for a revisionist understanding of slavery as an oppressive organisation that slaves actively resisted. In 1967, the novelist William Styron gave the defection a broader audience when he wrote a acknowledged novel based upon The Confessions published by Thomas R. Grayness. The book won critical praise—including a Pulitzer Prize for fiction—but it also engendered strong protest from blackness activists who objected to the way that Styron, a white man, had portrayed the leader of the defection. In 2016, Virginia native Nate Parker released the movie Birth of a Nation, which dramatized the story of the revolt.

TIMELINE

Oct 2, 1800

Nat Turner is born into slavery in Southampton Canton.

February 1831

John Due west. Reese signs a note that puts Nat Turner'southward son up as collateral for a debt that Reese had struggled to pay.

February 12, 1831

Virginia witnesses a solar eclipse and Nat Turner interprets information technology as a sign from God to share with 4 other men his idea to revolt.

July iv, 1831

Nat Turner postpones the revolt he and four other enslaved men had planned for that twenty-four hour period.

August 13, 1831

A solar event occurs in Virginia in which the sun appears to take a dark-green hue; Nat Turner interprets the event as a sign from God to launch his revolt.

August 21—22, 1831

Nat Turner, a slave preacher and cocky-styled prophet, leads the deadliest slave revolt in Virginia's history, which in simply twelve hours leaves fifty-five white people dead in Southampton County.

August 28, 1831

To terminate the indiscriminate killings of suspected enslaved rebels, General Richard Eppes, the leader of the country militia force in Southampton, proclaims martial police force.

Baronial 31, 1831

In the wake of Nat Turner's Revolt, the trials of suspected slave rebels begin.

September 4, 1831—May 11, 1832

18 enslaved men and women and one gratis blackness man convicted of participating in Nat Turner'southward Revolt are hanged in Southampton County.

October 30, 1831

Nat Turner is captured virtually where the revolt he led began.

October 31, 1831

James Trezvant and James Due west. Parker examine Nat Turner and commit him to the Southampton County jail.

November 1, 1831

The lawyer Thomas R. Grey meets with Nat Turner, accused of leading a slave revolt, in the Southampton County jail.

Nov 5, 1831

Nat Turner is convicted and sentenced to death for leading a defection of enslaved people.

November ten, 1831

Thomas R. Greyness secures a copyright for his pamphlet The Confessions of Nat Turner, as fully and voluntarily made to Thomas R. Gray. Gray'southward account purports to tell the story of Nat Turner'southward slave insurgence in the words of Turner himself.

November 11, 1831

Nat Turner is hanged.

The Leader of a Rebellion Agains Slavery in 1831

Origins

The Revolt

Backwash

Legacy

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