Nat Turner

Early life and faith

According to The Confessions of Nat Turner, Turner was born into slavery in Southampton County, Virginia, on October 2, 1800. He could read and write and owned a Bible, which is now in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. By 1831 he lived on the farm of Joseph Travis, while his wife and son lived on a neighbouring farm.

Turner was known as a preacher, and he described a series of religious visions. He said that on May 12, 1828, a spirit told him that the first would be last and the last first, and he took a solar eclipse in February 1831 as the sign to act. Historian David F. Allmendinger Jr. has suggested that family pressures may also have mattered: in early 1831 Turner's son was pledged as collateral for a debt.

The revolt

Turner shared his plan with a small group of enslaved men, including Henry, Hark, Nelson and Sam. A first date of July 4, 1831, was postponed. On the night of August 21 the group began at the Travis farm, killing the family, and moved from farm to farm using weapons they seized along the way. They grew from about a dozen men to about forty, but did not win the wider support they had hoped for. About 55 white men, women and children were killed; some sources give a range of 50 to 65. The rebels were defeated at James Parker's farm on the afternoon of August 22, and the revolt was over by midday on August 23.

Reprisals and trials

White men from Southampton and beyond killed about three dozen Black people without trial, many of whom had nothing to do with the revolt. Courts of slaveholding judges, sitting without juries, convicted 30 enslaved people. Encyclopedia Virginia reports that the governor commuted twelve of those sentences to sale out of the state and that, with one free Black man, nineteen people were executed in Southampton County.

Turner hid for about two months. He was captured on October 30, 1831, convicted on November 5 and hanged on November 11.

The Confessions

While Turner was in jail, Thomas R. Gray, a local lawyer and slaveholder, interviewed him and published The Confessions of Nat Turner that November. It is the main source for Turner's life. Scholars at UNC's Documenting the American South caution that Gray controlled the text, framed it to reassure white readers, and openly scorned Turner's religious claims, so it reveals Gray's views as well as Turner's.

Aftermath and legacy

In the 1831–32 session the Virginia legislature debated gradual emancipation and rejected it. It then passed laws further restricting Black religious gatherings and the rights of free Black people. Turner has remained a contested figure. William Styron's 1967 novel about him won a Pulitzer Prize but drew protests from Black writers and activists who objected to its portrayal of him.