Born on October 2, 1800, in Southampton County, Virginia, where he lived for his entire life, Nat Turner was the son of Nancy, an African-born slave, and her husband, about whom nothing is known. While Turner’s mother and grandmother raised him until their later separation, he was also the property of Benjamin Turner under the oppressive system of chattel slavery. Later, with the death of his first master, Turner became the property of Samuel Turner, Benjamin’s son. Eventually, Turner passed into the hands of different masters across the county, each marking a significant loss for Turner, including his separation from his wife and mother in 1822. In these formative years, Turner was regularly noted as an intelligent and mysterious young child. He frequently described events before his birth, which gave him a reputation as a prophet within the slave community. His reputation was further burnished by the fact that he knew how to read and write, and that he was knowledgeable in religious doctrine. This, along with a series of visions Turner claims to have received, are part of the mystery of Nat Turner, leader of one of America’s bloodiest slave rebellions, a figure who remains a source of fascination to the present day.
According to Turner’s own words, the first vision that he received occurred in 1821 after he ran away from his overseer for a period of thirty days. In this vision, he was told to return to his master, Samuel Turner, where he remained for the next year until his master’s death. From then on, Turner’s visions began to suggest a move toward rebellion, including images of blood coating the fields of corn like dew, and hieroglyphic images that swept across the leaves of the nearby woods. This string of visions continued through May 12, 1828, when Turner claimed that a spirit told him to put on the yoke of Christ and fight against the serpent of oppression, using the weapons of his enemies to slay them and usher in a new day. Later, in February 1831 with the advent of a solar eclipse, Turner planned his initial insurrection with four trusted men, choosing the Fourth of July as their projected date, a movement to extend that freedom Continental soldiers and militia fought so hard to achieve, this time to the slaves. A lingering illness, however, caused the men to postpone their plans until August 21, a week after another atmospheric shift. At two o’clock that morning, Turner and his growing force entered his master’s household and killed the entire family.
American Slave Rebellions: Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vesey
Although Nat Turner is certainly the name best remembered today in connection with slave rebellions in the antebellum South, he is hardly the only such figure of note. Rebel leaders such as Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vesey were inspired by the successes of Toussaint L’Ouverture in Haiti, and American slaveholders were in constant terror of the slaughter of whites they were sure would follow such a rebellion on American shores; that fear wove itself inextricably into the Southern imagination. Indeed, mythologies grew up around rebel leaders such as Turner: Prosser’s abortive rebellion in Virginia in 1800 was bedeviled by a violent storm, which grateful whites chose to see as divine intervention. On the other hand, in 1822 Vesey’s confederate Peter Poyas is reported to have made a courageous end upon the Charleston gallows that evoked the stoic heroes of antiquity.
C. Fee
As the men traveled to other homes in the Southampton County region, Turner’s forces steadily grew—a fact that reveals the mounting discontent and eagerness for change within Virginia’s slave and free black community. Turner’s followers provided a tangible expression of the epic battle between the black and white spirits of his earlier visions. They were tired of the injustices and oppression, and recognized their power as a startling 52 percent of Virginia’s population in the 1830s. For this reason, Turner and his men only targeted slave owners in the area and their families. They also attacked shop owners and small farmers, suggesting that Turner’s rebellion was not solely about the controversial institution of American slavery but rather the inequities in treatment that African Americans, both enslaved and free, faced in the region. Though Turner supposedly never faced the types of harsh mistreatment and beatings that slaves elsewhere endured daily, his desire for personal freedom in a system that kept him a perpetual slave was the driving force behind the initial killings.
The uprising continued well into the next day as a force of more than forty slaves marched toward the nearby town of Jerusalem. News of the uprising, however, had already spread and the white militia succeeding in dissolving Turner’s forces before a final exchange left one of Turner’s men dead. During the fight, Turner and many others escaped and a reward was placed on their heads. On October 30, 1831, he was discovered hiding in a cave and imprisoned in the Southampton County Jail, where he remained until November 5, the day of his trial. Though he pleaded not guilty, Turner was convicted and subsequently sentenced to death by hanging, which occurred November 11. Amid accounts of his death and unconfirmed reports that his corpse was skinned, Turner’s growing legend had a resounding effect in Virginia and elsewhere in the region. Fifty-five other people were also executed, and racial tension reached an all-time high with white mobs roaming the area in search of retribution, killing nearly two hundred African Americans, both slaves and free blacks. Turner’s rebellion certainly discredited the image of peace that proslavery writers and advocates tried to portray.
In response, the state legislature in Virginia considered abolition as a possible solution to the region’s unrest, though that too proved unsuccessful, with politicians instead voting to retain the controversial institution upon which much of Southern life was based. Despite this failure Nat Turner’s Rebellion—now known as one of the bloodiest slave revolts in American history—drew national attention to slavery and the abolition movement. Occurring on the back of other, more modest slave revolts, Turner’s rebellion ensured that slavery would become a topic that people across the United States could no longer ignore. It worked in concert with other nonviolent efforts in literature and politics—such as the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe—to bring newfound awareness of the plight of the slaves. Aiming to strike terror in the people of Southampton, Turner succeeded in achieving this particular mission even after his death. Increasingly, slave owners nationwide became fearful of another major insurrection of their slaves and, as a result, took new measures to restrict even further the gathering of slaves.
In the end, much of the information available about Nat Turner was recorded in the 1831 historical text The Confessions of Nat Turner. Recorded by Thomas R. Gray during Turner’s short imprisonment before he was sentenced to death, the text provides insight into Turner’s life and religious journey, and it has largely informed the way his history is told even today. Despite this account, however, Turner’s life is still shrouded in mystery. Many historians contended that Gray unduly embellished much of the information about Turner in this text, thus giving an inaccurate portrait of a life so vital to nineteenth-century history and the efforts of slaves to obtain their freedom. Standing alongside figures such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman who fought for emancipation in different ways, Turner is linked closest with Gabriel Prosser, a slave whose revolt also challenged the antebellum stereotype of the contented slave, and who was executed just a week before Turner’s birth. Despite their efforts to bring an end to slavery and to challenge the repressive racial hierarchy at work in the American South, these two figures unintentionally contributed to the development of a more repressive policy that affected slaves and free blacks in the slave states.
Still, Nat Turner is perceived as a significant figure in the movement against slavery and its eventual abolition. A symbol of the African American fight against oppression, his story resurged during the 1960s’ Black Power era, even garnering additional attention with the 1967 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron. Though his violent rebellion against slavery and the story of how he and his band murdered more than fifty white citizens in Virginia scandalized readers, his rebellion spoke to an undercurrent of discontentment with systematic racism and discrimination. In the end, Nat Turner and his rebellion served as a catalyst for abolition protests and nonviolent resistance to slavery, all aimed at securing freedom for blacks and crippling a socioeconomic system that divided the United States. Turner’s legend is bound together with the classic American image of resistance to tyranny and struggle for freedom, and his story is connected to the larger campaign for equal rights for African Americans and the pursuit of the American dream.
Christopher Allen Varlack
Haitian Slave Rebellion: Toussaint L’Ouverture
François Dominique Toussaint (ca. 1744–1803), who came to be known as Toussaint L’Ouverture, was a freed slave and a leader of the Haitian revolution who was instrumental in the defeat of Napoleon’s forces by a rebel army, marking the most successful slave uprising in the Americas. In addition to considerable military acumen, Toussaint was able to play French, British, and Spanish interests against each other and at one time rose to power over all Haiti. Although he was eventually defeated and captured by the French, and although he died in 1803 in a French prison, Toussaint was a major force in the overthrow of the institution of slavery in Haiti, and thus haunted the imagination of slaveholders in the American South for at least sixty more years, until the end of the U.S. Civil War.
C. Fee
See also Truth, Sojourner; Tubman, Harriet
Further Reading
French, Scot. 2004. The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Greenberg, Kenneth S., ed. 2003. Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Oates, Stephen B. 2014. The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion. New York: Harper Perennial.
Turner, Nat. 1996. The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents, edited by Kenneth S. Greenberg. Boston: Bedford St. Martin’s.