Nat Turner

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Nat Turner
Nat Turner.jpg
Born Nat (Turner)
(1800-10-02)October 2, 1800
Southampton County, Virginia
Died Script error: The function "death_date_and_age" does not exist.
Jerusalem, Virginia
Cause of death Execution - Hanging
Nationality American
Ethnicity African American
Known for Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion
Spouse(s) Cherry[1]
Part of a series of articles on...
North american slave revolts.png

Nat Turner (October 2, 1800 – November 11, 1831) was an African-American slave who led a slave rebellion of slaves and free blacks in Southampton County, Virginia on August 21, 1831 that resulted in 60 white deaths.

He led a group of other slave followers carrying farm implements on a killing spree. As they went from plantation to plantation they gathered horses, guns, freed other slaves along the way, and recruited other blacks that wanted to join their revolt. At the end of their rebellion they were accused of the deaths of fifty white people.[2] Virginia legislators also targeted free blacks with a colonization bill, which allocated new funding to remove them, and a police bill that denied free blacks trials by jury and made any free blacks convicted of a crime subject to sale and relocation.[3] Whites organized militias and called out regular troops to suppress the rising. In addition, mobs attacked blacks in the area killing an estimated total of 100-200, many not involved at all with the revolt.[4]

In the aftermath, the state quickly arrested and executed 57 blacks accused of being part of Turner's slave rebellion. An estimated 200 blacks were killed by white militias and mobs, often after having been beaten.[5] Turner hid successfully for two months. When found, he was quickly tried, convicted, sentenced to death, and hanged. Across Virginia and other southern states, state legislators passed new laws to control slaves and free blacks. They prohibited education of slaves and free blacks, restricted rights of assembly for free blacks, withdrew their right to bear arms (in some states), voting, and required white ministers to be present at all black worship services.

Early years

Born into slavery on October 2, 1800, in Southampton County, Virginia, his name was recorded as "Nat" by his master Benjamin Turner, and when Benjamin Turner died in 1810 Nat became the property of Benjamin’s brother Samuel Turner.[6] By the Civil War era, sources referred to him as Nathaniel, and gave him the surname of his master in the white slaveholder custom of the time. Historians also adopted that convention. Turner knew little about the background of his father who was believed to have escaped from slavery when Turner was a young boy.

Novelist William Styron suggests that Turner remained close to his paternal grandmother, Old Bridget, who was also owned by Benjamin Turner. Further, in his Confessions of Nat Turner, Styron wrote that Old Bridget, captured at 13 and shipped to America, was of the Coromantee, also known as the Akan people from the area of present-day Ghana. The Coromantee were known to resist slavery. Robert Hanserd[7] related that through its holy men, the Coromantee participated in or even led slave revolts in the Caribbean and in New York. As Styron did not reference sources and made clear his book was a work of fiction, this depiction of Old Bridget is of unclear provenance.[8]

Turner spent his entire life in Southampton County, Virginia, a plantation area where slaves were the majority of the population.[9] He was identified as having "natural intelligence and quickness of apprehension, surpassed by few."[10] He learned to read and write at a young age. Deeply religious, Nat was often seen fasting, praying, or immersed in reading the stories of the Bible.[11]

Turner's religious convictions manifested as frequent visions which he interpreted as messages from God. Turner's belief in the visions was such that when Turner was 22 years old he ran away from his owner but returned a month later after receiving a spiritual revelation. Turner often conducted Baptist services, preaching the Bible to his fellow slaves who dubbed him "The Prophet". Turner garnered white followers such as Ethelred T. Brantley, who Turner was credited with having convinced to "cease from his wickedness".[12]

After the rebellion, a reward notice described Turner as:

5 feet 6 or 8 inches high, weighs between 150 and 160 pounds, rather bright complexion, but not a mulatto, broad shoulders, larger flat nose, large eyes, broad flat feet, rather knockkneed, walks brisk and active, hair on the top of the head very thin, no beard, except on the upper lip and the top of the chin, a scar on one of his temples, also one on the back of his neck, a large knot on one of the bones of his right arm, near the wrist, produced by a blow.[13]

Turner was proclaimed as a prophet by his fellow black slaves on the plantation. In early 1828, Turner was convinced that he "was ordained for some great purpose in the hands of the Almighty."[14][15] While working in his owner's fields on May 12, Turner

"heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first."[16]

“In connecting this vision to the motivation for his rebellion, Turner makes it clear that he sees himself as participating in the confrontation between God’s Kingdom and the anti-Kingdom that characterized his social-historical context."[17] He was convinced that God had given him the task of "slay[ing] my enemies with their own weapons."[16] Turner said, "I communicated the great work laid out for me to do, to four in whom I had the greatest confidence" – his fellow slaves Henry, Hark, Nelson, and Sam.[16]

Beginning in February 1831, Turner interpreted certain atmospheric conditions as a sign to begin preparations for a rebellion against the slave owners. On February 11, 1831, an annular solar eclipse was seen in Virginia and Turner envisioned this as a black man's hand reaching over the sun. He initially planned the rebellion to begin on July 4, Independence Day. Turner postponed it because of illness and to use the delay for additional planning and deliberation with his co-conspirators. On August 13 there was another solar eclipse in which the sun appeared bluish-green, possibly the result of lingering atmospheric debris from an eruption of Mount St. Helens. Turner interpreted this as the final signal, and about a week later, on August 21, he began the uprising.

Rebellion

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Turner started with a few trusted fellow slaves. “All his initial recruits were other slaves from his neighborhood”.[18] The neighborhood had to find ways to communicate their intentions without giving up their plot. Songs may have tipped the neighborhood members on movements. “It is believed that one of the ways Turner summoned fellow conspirators to the woods was through the use of particular songs.”[19] The rebels traveled from house to house, freeing slaves and killing the white people they found. The rebels ultimately included more than 70 enslaved and free blacks.[20]

Because the rebels 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.[21] The rebellion did not discriminate by age or sex, until it was determined that the rebellion had achieved sufficient numbers. Nat Turner only confessed to killing one of the rebellion's victims, Margret Whitehead, whom he killed with a blow from a fence post.[21]

Before a white militia was able to respond, the rebels killed 60 men, women, and children.[22] They spared a few homes "because Turner believed the poor white inhabitants 'thought no better of themselves than they did of negros.'"[23][24] Turner also thought that revolutionary violence would serve to awaken the attitudes of whites to the reality of the inherent brutality in slave-holding, a concept similar to 20th-century philosopher Frantz Fanon's idea of "violence as purgatory".[25] Turner later said that he wanted to spread "terror and alarm" among whites.[26]

Capture and execution

Nat Turner captured by Mr. Benjamin Phipps, a local farmer

The rebellion was suppressed within two days, but Turner eluded capture by hiding in the woods until October 30, when he was discovered by a farmer named Benjamin Phipps, where he was hiding in a hole covered with fence rails. While awaiting his trial, Turner confessed his knowledge of the rebellion to attorney Thomas Ruffin Gray.[27] On November 5, 1831, he was tried for "conspiring to rebel and making insurrection", convicted and sentenced to death.[28] Turner was hanged on November 11 in Jerusalem, Virginia. His body was flayed, beheaded and quartered.[29] Turner received no formal burial; his headless remains were either buried unmarked or kept for scientific use. His skull is said to have passed through many hands, last being reported in the collection of a planned civil rights museum for Gary, Indiana, despite calls for its burial.[30]

In the aftermath of the insurrection there were 45 slaves, including Turner, and five free blacks tried for insurrection and related crimes in Southampton. Of the 45 slaves tried, 15 were acquitted. Of the 30 convicted, 18 were hanged, while 12 were sold out of state. Of the five free blacks tried for participation in the insurrection, one was hanged, while the others were acquitted.[31]

Soon after Turner's execution, 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 jailhouse conversations with Turner before trial. This work is considered the primary historical document regarding Nat Turner.

Consequences

In total, the state executed 56 blacks suspected of having been involved in the uprising. But in the hysteria of aroused fears and anger in the days after the revolt, white militias and mobs killed an estimated 200 blacks, many of whom had nothing to do with the rebellion.[32] Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found. Before Nat Turner's Revolt, there was a small but ineffectual antislavery movement in Virginia,[33] largely on account of economic trends that made slavery less profitable in the Old South in the 1820s and fears among whites of the rising number of blacks, especially in the Tidewater and Piedmont regions. The push for abolition in 1831 represented the interests of Herrenvolk democracy and white male suffrage. Enraged poor whites condemned the slave-owning aristocracy for endangering their families and retaining an unfair advantage in elections as a result of the 3/5 clause. Most of the movement's members, including acting governor John Floyd, supported resettlement of blacks to Africa for these reasons. The enlightenment thinking of Virginia's forefathers played little part in the Emancipation's Debates of 1831-2. Considerations of white racial and moral purity also influenced many of these anti-slavery Virginians. These concerns illustrated that Virginia position towards slavery was no longer "apologetic".

The fear caused by Nat Turner's insurrection and the concerns raised in the emancipation debates that followed resulted in politicians and writers responding by defining slavery as a "positive good".[34] Such authors included Thomas Roderick Dew, a College of William & Mary professor who published a pamphlet in 1832 opposing emancipation on economic and other grounds.[35]

Fears of uprisings polarized moderates and slave owners across the South.[citation needed] Municipalities across the region instituted repressive policies against blacks. Rights were taken away from those who were free. The freedoms of all black people in Virginia were tightly curtailed. Socially, the uprising discouraged whites' questioning the slave system from the perspective that such discussion might encourage similar slave revolts. Manumissions had decreased by 1810. The shift away from tobacco had made owning slaves in the Upper South an excess to the planters' needs, so they started to hire out slaves. With the ending of the international slave trade, the invention of the cotton gin, and opening up of new territories in the Deep South, suddenly there was a growing market for the trading of slaves. Over the next decades, more than a million slaves would be transported to the Deep South in a forced migration as a result of the domestic slave trade.

In terms of public response and the toll of white lives, slaveholders in the Upper South and coastal states were deeply shocked by the Nat Turner Rebellion. While the 1811 German Coast Uprising in Louisiana involved a greater number of slaves, it resulted in only two white fatalities. Events in Louisiana, newly annexed by the United States in the Louisiana Purchase, did not receive as much attention in those years as uprisings in the Upper South and Low country of the Carolinas. These events had historical connections among families since colonial times. In regards to his status, Turner is regarded as a hero by many African Americans and pan-Africanists worldwide.

Nat Turner became the focus of historical scholarship in the 1940s, when historian, Herbert Aptheker published the first serious scholarly work on instances of slave resistance in the antebellum South. Aptheker wrote that the rebellion was rooted in the exploitative conditions of the Southern slave system. Based on his research in libraries and archives throughout the South, he found roughly 250 similar instances of uprisings, although none reached the scale of Nat Turner's Revolt.

Legacy

Interpretations

Nat Turner remains an "enigmatic and controversial figure", according to former University of Massachusetts Amherst history professor Stephen B. Oates. He fought the just anti-slavery cause, but his murders of women and children in the 21st century are often classified as war crimes or terrorism. African Americans in the antebellum period and up to today have generally regarded Turner as a hero of resistance, who made slave-owners pay for the hardships they had caused so many Africans and African Americans to suffer.[23] Though many people did not try to interpret Nat Turner's rebellion at the time, one article later states that Turner was ‘‘a parcel of blood-thirsty wolves rushing down from the Alps’’ and called Turner ‘‘a fanatic preacher,’’ a preacher who ‘‘pretends to be a Baptist preacher,’’ and rebelled ‘‘without any cause or provocation.’’ A second article also stated that Turner ‘‘was stimulated exclusively by fanatical revenge, and perhaps misled by some hallucination of his imagined spirit of prophecy.’’[36] James H. Harris, who has written extensively about the history of the Black church, says that the revolt "marked the turning point in the black struggle for liberation." He believed that "only a cataclysmic act could convince the architects of a violent social order that violence begets violence."[25]

In the period soon after the revolt, whites did not try to interpret Turner's motives and ideas.[26] Antebellum slave-holding whites were shocked by the murders and had their fears of rebellions heightened; Turner's name was "a symbol of terrorism and violent retribution".[23]

In 1843, Henry Highland Garnet, a former slave, and active abolitionist, called Nat Turner "patriotic", stating that "future generations will remember him among the noble and brave" in his speech at the National Negro Convention Of 1843.[37] In 1861, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a northern writer, praised Turner in a seminal article published in Atlantic Monthly. He described Turner as a man "who knew no book but the Bible, and that by heart who devoted himself soul and body to the cause of his race".[38] After the Civil War, historians who opposed slavery tended to sympathize with Turner for his resistance. In the 21st century, writing after the September 11 attacks in the United States, William L. Andrews drew analogies between Turner and modern “religio-political terrorists.” He suggested that the “spiritual logic” explicated in Confessions of Nat Turner warrants study as “a harbinger of the spiritualizing violence of today’s jihads and crusades”.[26]

In literature and film

  • The Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, a slave narrative by an escaped slave, refers to the rebellion.
  • Harriet Ann Jacobs, also an escaped slave, refers to Turner in her 1861 narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
  • The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), a novel by William Styron, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1968.[41] It prompted much controversy, with some criticizing a white author writing about such an important black figure. Several critics described it as racist and "a deliberate attempt to steal the meaning of a man's life."[42] There were cultural discussions about how different peoples interpret the past and whether any one group has sole ownership of any portion.
  • In response to Styron's novel, ten African-American writers published a collection of essays, The Second Crucifixion of Nat Turner (1968).[43]
  • The movie Goodbye Uncle Tom (1971) ends with an unidentified man's fantasy re-enactment of Styron's novel.
  • Nat Turner's Rebellion is featured in Episode 5 of the 1977 TV miniseries Roots. It is historically inaccurate, as the episode is set in 1841[44] and the revolt took place in 1831.
  • Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, a film by African-American director Charles Burnett, was released in 2003.[45]
  • In 2007 cartoonist and comic book author Kyle Baker wrote a two-part comic book about Turner and his uprising, which was called Nat Turner.[46]
  • In early 2009, comic book artist and animator Brad Neely created a Web animation entitled "American Moments of Maybe", a satirical advertisement for Nat Turner's Punchout! a video game in which a player took on the role of Nat Turner.[47]
  • The Letter Writer by Ann Rinaldi is a historical novel that is set against Nat Turner's uprising.
  • Turner is the subject of the novel, The Resurrection of Nat Turner, Part 1: The Witnesses: A Novel (2011) by Sharon E Foster and its sequel.
  • Turner is the subject of the novel, L'Ange noir by Catherine Hermary-Vieille.
  • Turner is a character in the novel, Up Jumps the Devil, by Michael Poore.
  • Robert O'Hara's play Insurrection: Holding History features a contemporary gay student of slavery studies who is transported back in time to witness the Nat Turner rebellion.
  • The Birth of a Nation (2016) the upcoming historical film written, directed and starring Nate Parker as Turner, is about Turner's 1831 liberation movement.[48]
  • "Nat Turner: Following Faith", a play by Paula Neiman, which world premiered in Los Angeles in 2015 under the direction of Dan Martin.

In music

Nat Turner is referred to in the following songs:

  • "The Point of No Return" by Immortal Technique on the album Revolutionary Vol. 2.
  • "Born Fe Rebel" by Steel Pulse.
  • "The City" by the Wu-Tang Clan on their album Wu-Tang Forever.
  • Philadelphia MC Reef the Lost Cauze released a song called "Nat Turner" on his album A Vicious Cycle.[49]
  • "Ah Yeah" by KRS-One.
  • "Somebody's Gotta Do It'" by The Roots on their 2004 album The Tipping Point
  • On Hell Razah's song "Rebel Music", Nat Turner is mentioned in verse: "Black queens havin' seeds while she's strung on dope / I resurrected Nat Turner with this song that I wrote".
  • Hell Razah also mentions Nat Turner in the songs "Runaway Sambo", "Chain Gang", "Project Love", "Iron Gorillas" and "Millennium Warfare".
  • On Kanye West's album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Gil Scott-Heron's track "Comment #1", in which Nat Turner is mentioned, is part of Track 13: "Who Will Survive in America".
  • "David Rose" by Clutch (hidden track on some copies of The Elephant Riders)
  • Public Enemy's "Prophets of Rage," on their album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.
  • American metal band Cormorant wrote a song about the rebellion titled "Blood on the Cornfields" on their Metazoa album.
  • "The People`s Champ" by R.A. the Rugged Man.
  • "Nat Turner" by Hussein Fatal.
  • "Loaded Lux vs Calicoe verse 3" by Loaded Lux. Lux made reference to this history of Turner to inspire calicoe to leave the thuggin life behind and seek a path of enlightenment
  • "Exhibit A (Transformations)" by rap artist Jay Electronica.
  • On Kendrick Lamar's 2015 track, "Mortal Man", from his album entitled To Pimp A Butterfly, Tupac Shakur (his voice is sampled from a 1994 interview) makes reference to Nat Turner, while explaining where he thinks American race relations are headed: "I think that niggas is tired-a grabbin' shit out the stores and next time it’s a riot there’s gonna be bloodshed for real. I don’t think America can know that. I think American think we was just playing and it’s gonna be some more playing but it ain’t gonna be no playing. It’s gonna be murder, you know what I’m saying, it’s gonna be like Nat Turner, 1831, up in this muthafucka. You know what I’m saying, it’s gonna happen."

See also

Notes

  1. Bisson, Terry. Nat Turner: Slave Revolt Leader. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005.
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  3. Deborah Gray White, Mia Bay, and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013), 225
  4. American History: A Survey — Brinkley
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  7. Hanserd (2011), abstract, The Gold Coast, Jamaica and New York: Akan Ideas of Freedom in the Afro-Atlantic during the Eighteenth Century. ProQuest, 346 pgs.
  8. William Styron (1993), pp. 128-9
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  10. Bisson, Nat Turner: Slave Revolt Leader (2005), p. 76.
  11. Aptheker (1993), p. 296.
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  13. Description of Turner included in $500 reward notice in the National Intelligencer (Washington, DC) on September 24, 1831, quoted in Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, p. 294.
  14. Gray (1831), p. 9.
  15. Rothman, Adam. Slavery. Teachinghistory.org. Accessed 2 June 2011.
  16. 16.0 16.1 16.2 Gray (1831), p. 11.
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  22. Oates, Stephen B. (1990 [1975]) The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion, New York: HarperPerennial ISBN 0-06-091670-2.
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  24. Bisson, Nat Turner: Slave Revolt Leader (2005), pp. 57-58.
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  28. Southampton County Court Minute Book 1830-1835, pp. 121-123.
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  30. French, 279-281.
  31. Walter L. Gordon, III, The Nat Turner Insurrection Trials: A Mystic Chord Resonates Today (Booksurge, 2009) at 75, 92.
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  37. Henry Highland Garnet, A Memorial Discourse (Philadelphia: J. M. Wilson, 1865), 44-51.
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  39. Asante, Molefi Kete (2002). 100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-963-8.
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  45. "Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (2003)", IMDb.
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References

Further reading

  • Herbert Aptheker. American Negro Slave Revolts. 5th edition. New York: International Publishers, 1983 (1943).
  • Herbert Aptheker. Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion. New York: Humanities Press, 1966.
  • Alfred L. Brophy. "The Nat Turner Trials". North Carolina Law Review (June 2013), volume 91: 1817-80.
  • Scot French. The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 2004.
  • William Lloyd Garrison, "The Insurrection", The Liberator (September 3, 1831). A contemporary abolitionist's reaction to news of the rebellion.
  • Walter L. Gordon III. The Nat Turner Insurrection Trials: A Mystic Chord Resonates Today (Booksurge, 2009).
  • Thomas R. Gray, The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrections in Southampton, Va. Baltimore: Lucas & Deaver, 1831. Available online.
  • William Stryon, The Confessions of Nat Turner, Random House Inc, 1993, ISBN 0-679-73663-8
  • Stephen B. Oates, The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion. New York: HarperPerennial, 1990 (1975).
  • Brodhead, Richard H. "Millennium, Prophecy and the Energies of Social Transformation: The Case of Nat Turner," in A. Amanat and M. Bernhardsson (eds), Imagining the End: Visions of Apocalypse from the Ancient Middle East to Modern America (London, I. B. Tauris, 2002), 212-233.
  • Kenneth S. Greenberg, ed. Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
  • Junius P. Rodriguez, ed. Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2006.

External links