Danver Steven L. (Edited). Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History: An Encyclopedia (ENG)

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deliberate co mposure with which h e spoke of his late deed s and intentions, the

expression of his ﬁend-like face when excited by enthusiasm; still bearing the

stains of the blood of helpless innocence about him; clothed with rags and covered

with chains, yet daring to raise his manacled hands to heaven; with a spirit soaring

above the attributes of man, I looked on him and my blood curdled in my veins.”

Turner was convicted of leading the uprising a nd sentenced to death, He was

hanged in Jerusalem, Virginia, on November 11, 1831. After his death, Turner’s

body was dismembered and actually distributed as souvenirs to white people des-

perate for some form of revenge; as recently as 2003, his skull was reported to

have been found in Indiana, where it was to be the centerpiece of a new museum

located there. All told, the Commonwealth of Virginia executed 56 blacks accused

of participating in the insurrection.

Nat Turner’s Rebellion in History and Memory

The instant celebrity of Nat Turner, who came to be known as the mastermind of

the Southampton rebellion, led the Virginia General Assembly to begin discussing

long-term plans for addressing the problem of slavery. The fact that the insurrec-

tion is commonly known as Nat Turner’s Rebellion, and was even then, indicates

that the myth of Nat Turner continues to drive interpretations of what caused it

and what it means in the larger context of American history and the history of slav-

ery. Horriﬁed by the symbolism o f Turner’s rebellion—the fact that the o riginal

plan had been to execute the insurrection on July 4, and the overtly religious and

militaristic tone used by Turner to explain the event in his “confession”—and

aware of Gray’s depiction of Turner as a li terate and highly intelligent slave, the

General Assembly passed a series of laws that forbade the education of slaves

and restricted their ability to hold religious meetings without white people present.

The Virginia General Assembly’s session of 1831–1832 was a remarkable one,

for it helped cement the response of white southerners to the issue of slavery and

slave rebellion. Thomas Jefferson had warned in 1820, during the crisis brought

about by Missouri’s application for admission to the Union, that the slavery issue

would event ually explode into something terrifying politically. “We have a wolf

by the ear, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go,” he wrote to his

friend John Holmes. “Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in t he other.”

Jefferson’s prescient words did little to advance the arguments of the small cadre

of abolitionists and moderates in Virginia in the 1820s. Even Virginia’s governor,

John Flo yd, had supported resettlement of slaves outs ide of Virginia (a posi tion

also favored by former president James Monroe, for whom the capital of Liberia,

a country on the west coast of Africa established as a potential landi ng place for

exported slaves, was named), but these plans were abruptly halted in the aftermath

274 Nat Turner ’s Rebellion (1831)

of the Southampton insurrection. It is unclear whether t he insurrection put

the southern states on an inexorable collision course with the federal government

over the issue of slavery—the issue itself was much larger than a single uprising

in Virginia, no matter how si gniﬁcant that uprising was—but the Southampton

revolt almost certainly hardened the views of slave owners across the South and

likewise changed the positions of white moderates in the region. It also r esulted

in yet more harsh restrictions being placed on the black populations of southern

states. In the end, faced wit h a decision on how to handle the future of slavery in

Virginia, t he General Assembly decided to up the ante rather than search for a

viable long-term solution. The state’s elite would tighten its hold on the slave

population.

The tightening grip of the state on slaves did not just represent the growing par-

anoia of whites about the nature of the slave population, however. Just as other

states and cities had responded to slave uprisings by cracking down on the move-

ments of free blacks and limiting the educational and cultural opportunities

afforded to slaves, Virginia chose to make slavery even less defensible and toler-

able as an institution, if such a thing was possible. Ironically, the “positive good”

argume nts made to justify slavery during the Missouri crisis and later given new

voice by the social theorist George Fitzhugh in his books Sociology for the South

(1854) and Cannibals All! (1857) were crippled immensely by the responses of

various government entities to slave uprisings. In a simple sense, it was reasonable

for abolitionists in the North to ask why slaves had to be treated so poorly if the

institution itself was good for them.

Despite careful attempts to classify slave insurrections as isolated events engi-

neered by charismatic madmen like Nat Turner, it became increasingly clear to

many in bot h the North and South after 1830 that the mo ral concerns expressed

about slavery by abolitionists should be taken very seriously. Social commentators

began to wond er how the denial of basic rights to slaves by their owners could

result in anything but violence and resentment.

Moreover, decisions to tighten black codes in the South after the Southampton

rebellion paved the way for the harsh Fugitive Slave Law that was passed as part of

the controversial Compromise of 1850, which was necessitated by the acquisition

of new territory following the U.S. war with Mexico. Southern congressmen

dema nded such a law be included in the Compromise, perhaps only delaying the

inevitable: a full-scale war between the states to settle the question of whether slavery

should be legal once and for all. To say that Nat Turner’s decisions set in motion this

extraordinary series of ev ents is not entirely correct—it is not difﬁcult to imagine the

Civil War happening even without Turner’s rebellion having ever taken place, after

all—but certainly the insurrection itself and its aftermath helped sharpen the lines that

separated those who supported slavery from those who opposed it.

Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831) 275

Regardless, Turner continues to liv e on in American history and cultural memory

as something of an enigma, if not a completely unknowable individual. Because

Turner was a slave, and therefore considered property and not fully a person in a

legal sense, the only real record of his life comes from the “confessions” he allegedly

made to Gray at the Southampton County jail in November 1831. Thus, while the

historical record of T urner’s insurrection and the its consequences reﬂects the actions

of such parties as the Virginia General Assembly, the U.S. Congress, and countless

individuals, the memory of Nat Turner in American life is somewhat more difﬁcult

to pin dow n. Whereas history depends on the written record, almost no record exists

of Turner’s life with the exception of Gray’s pamphlet.

As a result, historians and cultural observers continue to be vexed by the confes-

sions, since there is no way of knowing whether the words attributed to Turner by

Gray were actually his own. On the one hand, Gray clearly may have been moti-

vatedbythesamethingthatmotivatedmanyprominentwhitesatthetimehe

met Turner: namely, a desire to attach some kind of explanation to the insurrection

so that the fears of white people could be assuaged. On the other hand, it is entirely

possible that Gray lacked either the creativity or the initiative to create a proﬁle of

Turner entire ly on his own. To have done so would have been remarkable,

given the short time between Gray’s interview with Turner and the subsequent

publication of The Confessions of Nat Turner. Moreover, Gray claimed on the

cover of the pamphlet that the entire transcript of the “confessions” had been read

in court in Southampton County on November 5, 1831, where Turner allegedly

acknowledged the veracity of the account.

Nevertheless, the confessions raise more questions about Nat Turner than

answers. The pamphl et has allowed Turner to be portrayed differently by people

with disparate motives for remembering him. Gray’s insistence that the confes-

sions were accurate provide cover t o historians an d others inte nt on portrayi ng

Turner as something of a hero, as a person who responded to horrors of slavery

with a t errifying rampage of his own, and who s poke of his exploits calmly and

with conviction and intelligence. To many, Turner’s actions are made understand-

able, if not necessarily justiﬁable, by the dehumanization and violence engendered

by the insti tution of slavery; and to these observers, Turner’s confessions offer a

glimpse into the deep sense of frustration and religious evangelism that must have

driven him to do what he did. Others demonize Turner not only for recounting the

deaths of so many people to Gray, but for doing so in such grisly detail. In th eir

view, Turner is no thing but a monster, a fanatic bent on exacting revenge blindly

from any white person who had the misfortune of crossing his path on the morning

of August 22, 1831.

At the same time, doubts about the role Gray may have played in recording

Turner’s alleged confessions make it possible to discount the more gruesome

276 Nat Turner ’s Rebellion (1831)

aspects of Turner’s account and focus on the fact that Turner was bold enough to

take up arms to ﬁght against slavery. This point is easy for observers to overlook

today, but to generations of historians who believed tha t slaves w ere irrevocably

dama ged psychologically and emotionally by slavery, the idea that a slave could

have the wherewithal and the desire to foment such an insurrection was a profound

one indeed.

The many competing visions of Turner came to a head with the 1967 publica-

tion of a novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, written by William Styron. Styron

has said that he w as encouraged to write the novel from the perspective of Nat

Turner by his friend and fellow writer James Baldwin, who praised Styron, after

the novel was published, for beginning “to write the common history—ours.”

The book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for ﬁction in 1968 but did not receive

universal acclaim. Styron’s book was the subject of especially biting criticism

from a group of African American writers who were offended by Styron’s sugges-

tion in the novel that Turner had harbored amorous feelings for Margaret White-

head, the young white woman he said he had killed with a fence post during the

insurrection. In 1968, a rebuttal to the novel titled William Styron’s Nat Turner:

Ten Bla ck Writers Respond was published, detailing a litany of complaints about

the liberties Styron had taken in his portrayal of Turner and the rebellion. The

resulting furor made the book more popular than ever and raised serious questions

about issue s of race, violence, slavery, a nd reconciliation simmering below the

surface of American culture in the 1960s. The controversy was revealing in many

ways, not least of all because it exposed the simple reality that Styron’s novel

could be considered no more or less reliable as an authentic account of the event

than was Thomas Rufﬁn Gray’s own report of Turner’s “confessions” from 1831.

Today, nearly 200 years after the Southam pton rebellion occurred, historians

and other cultural commentators continue to investigate the character at its very

epicenter: Nat Turner. Many historians, and certainly many teac hers, are simply

unsure of what to do with Turner, and for many American students, the rebellion

he led remains an uninvestigated mystery. Nevertheless Nat Turner’s rebellion is

remembered by nearly everyone who studies it as a tragic consequence of the

United States’ long and calamitous association with the “peculiar institution” of

legalized slavery.

—Dave Powell

See also all entries under Stono Rebellion (1739); New York Slave Insurrection (1741);

Antebellum Suppressed Slave Revolts (1800s–1850s); New Orleans Riot (1866); New

Orleans Race Riot (1900); Atlanta Race Riot (1906); Springﬁeld Race Riot (1908); Hous-

ton Riot (1917); Red Summer (1919); Tulsa Race Riot (1921); Civil Rights Movement

(1953–1968); Watts Riot (1965); Detroit Riots (1967); Los Angeles Uprising (1992).

Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831) 277

Further Reading

Aptheker, Herbert. Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion, Together with the Full-Text of the

So-called “Con fessions” of Nat Turner Made in Prison in 1831. New York: Humanities

Press, 1966.

Drewry, William Sidney. The Southampton Insurrection . Washington, DC: The Neale Co.,

1900.

French, Scot. The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in A merican Memory. Boston and New

York: Houghton Mifﬂin Company, 2004.

Gray, Thomas Rufﬁn. The Confession, Trial, and Execution of Nat Turner, the Negro

Insurrectionist; Also a List of Persons Murdered in the Insurrection in Southampton

County, Virginia, August 21st and 22nd, 1831, with Introductory Remarks. Petersburg,

VA: J. B. Edge, Printer, 1881.

Greenberg, Kenneth S., ed. Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in H istory and Memory.New

York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Oates, Stephen B. The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion. New York: Harper

& Row, 1990.

Styron, William. The Confessions of Nat Turner. New York: Random House, 1967.

Tragle, Henry Irving. The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation of Source

Material. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971.

Wolf, Eva Sheppard. Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from

the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University

Press, 2006.

278 Nat Turner ’s Rebellion (1831)

Abolitionists

Abolitionists advocated the immediate a nd unconditional end of slavery in the

United States, primarily in the 18th and 19th centuries. Typically, references to

abolitionists relate to American writers, intellectuals, former slaves, freedmen,

and social activists who labored to end slavery in the United States beginning in

the 1830s.

Although some abolitionists worked tirelessly through well-organized antislav-

ery societies to abolish the institution, abolitionism more broadly describes efforts

to en d slavery th at held ad he rent s together through a shared s ense of mora l and

intellectual purpose. Their work was undertaken with awareness of the fact that

the United States had been founded on the premise that “all men are created equal”

even though the institution of slavery was very much present at the nation’s

moment of creation. Although neither the word “slave” nor the word “slavery”

are explicitly mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, discussion of the future of

slavery was prominent at the Constitutional Convention.

The idea that all men are, in fact, created equal helped galvanize the abolitionist

movement. Spurred by Enlightenment philosophy (as the architects of the nation’s

government had been) and by no small measure of religious fervor, abolitionists

formed societies and founded newspapers devoted to the proposition that slavery

should be immediately abolished. Abolitionists were not merely antislavery advo-

cates; they saw themselves as participants in a zero-sum game where the complete

dismantling of the slave system could be the only acceptable outcome.

Of course slavery was very de eply entrenched in the society of 19th-century

America. Ab olitionists in the United States—mo st of whom lived and worked in

the North—labored tirelessly to turn the tide of public opinion against slavery. Per-

haps the most prominent abolitioni st was a newspaper editor named William

Lloyd Garrison. He edited a radical abolitionist newspaper known as The Liberator ,

which argued for the “immediate and complete emancipation of all slaves” held in

the United States. Garrison, along with Arthur Tappan, founded the American

Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, and saw its membership ranks swell in the years that

followed. Former slaves, including Frederick Douglass, were frequently featured

speakers at meetings of the society, and many prominent white writers, such as John

Greenleaf Whittier and Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), were

also widely recognized as abolitionists.

Although earlier attempts to end slavery had focused on such schemes as repa-

triating slaves to Africa either wholesale or by creating colonies there (such as

Liberia, which took its capital city’s name from a well-known proponent of colo-

nization, President James Monroe), abolitionism was recognized after the 1830s

279

asamovementnotonlytoendslavery,buttoseetotheintegrationofformer

slaves into American society a s well. Even after the Emancipation Proclamation

was issued by President Lincoln in 18 63, abolitionists contin ued to ﬁght for the

total destruction of slavery in all parts of the United States. The Thirteenth

Amendment to the Constitution ﬁnally put a legal end to slavery in 1865, but the

cause of abolishing social, economic, and other forms of discrimination based on

race has continued unabated. Abolitionists left a legacy of literary and political

discourse on human freedom tha t distinguishes their efforts and provides inspira-

tion to millions who believe in social justice even today.

—Dave Powell

Further Reading

Alonso, Harriet Hyman. Growing up Abolitionist: The Story of the Garrison Children.

Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002.

Harrold, Stanley. American Abolitionists. New York: Longman, 2001.

Lowance, Mason, ed. Against Slavery: An Abolitionist Reader. New York: Penguin Books,

2000.

Confessions of Nat Turner

The Confessions of Nat Turner refers simultaneously to a ﬁctional literary sensa-

tion published in 1967, an extant document published in the form of a pamphlet

in early 1832, and an actual historical event that occurred in the fall of 1831. That

event was a meeting that took place in the Southampton County jail in Virginia

following the largest slave insurrection in the history of the United States . The

insurrection’s mastermind was a slave named Nat (he has since been known by

the surname Turner, after his master), one of the more controversial ﬁgures in

the history of the antebellum United States. Remembered as an intelligent and reli-

gious man, Nat Turner conceived and led a rebellion in the Virginia Tidewater in

August 1831 that resulted in the murder of 60 white men, women, and c hildren

on various plantations in Southampton County.

By October of that year, Nat Turner had been captured and was brought to trial.

While awaiting his eventual execution, Turner was interviewed by Thomas Rufﬁn

Gray, a local white lawyer and scion of a wealthy Virginia family. Gray took it

upon himself to record Turner’s “confession” of the crimes he had committed so

that posterity may note both the causes of the insurrection and the singular charac-

ter of Nat Turner, its mastermind. Gray reported that Turner took sole responsibil-

ity for plotting the insurrection and claimed to not have shared his plans with

280 Nat Turner ’s Rebellion (1831)

anyone other than a few close conﬁdants. Furthermore, Gray said that Turner

claimed to have no knowledge of any wider plot to rebel against slavery in other

parts of Virginia or the south. Historians have since suggested that Gray made

these claims, with Turner as their m outhpiece, to help quell the fears of whites

deeply shaken by Turner’s insurrection. Signiﬁcantly, Gray’s motives have also

been ascribed to demonstrating to northern abolitionists and evangelist preachers

that Turner’s intelligence was their fault: by sharing with him the possibility of

freedom, Gray argued, abolitionists had turned Turner into a fanatical killing

machine.

Gray’s report of Turner’s “confession” has since ignited controversies that

reveal the limitations of historical research even as they shed light on the character

of the man who led the largest (and, by some measures, most successful) slave

uprising in the history of the United States. Gray’s description of h is interactions

with Turner cemented the v iew of Nat Turner as a larger-than-life ﬁgure who

was literate, passionate, and eminently capable of narrating his own story. This

image of the intelligent slave did much to humanize Turner and rendered him at

once both a see ming ly knowable and unknowable hist or ical ﬁgure. At the same

time, Gray’s a ccount disarmed a key component of the proslavery worldview,

namely that s laves were practically inhuman and thus incapable of intelligent

thought and feeling.

Nat Turner’s rebellion and confession also inspired novelist William Styron, a

Virginia native born in 1925, to write an eponymous ﬁctional account of Turner’s

“confession” that won the Pulitzer Prize for ﬁction in 1968. Despite the acclaim,

Styron received heavy criticism from African American historians and writers

for repeating ma ny of the stereotypes of slaves given credence by Thomas Gray.

The controversy over Styron’s novel revealed with great intensity the ﬁne line that

runs between “truth” and ﬁction and illustrated that “historians,” such as Thomas

Gray, often act with particular motives in mind. Whereas Gray presented himself

to the public as a chronicler o f Turner’s confession, historians now largely agree

that Gray’s own motives played a signiﬁcant part in shaping whatever Turner

may have said to suit Gray’s own aspirations as a lawyer and pamphleteer. In the

end, the conversations between Gray and Turner are lost to history, but the legend

of Nat Turner lives on, largely because of the confessions he made to Thomas

Gray.

—Dave Powell

Further Reading

French, Scot. The Rebellious Slave: N at Turner in American Memory. Boston and New

York: Houghton Mifﬂin Company, 2004.

Gray, Thomas Rufﬁn. The Confession, Trial, and Execution of Nat Turner, the Negro

Insurrectionist; Also a List of Persons Murdered in the Insurrection in Southampton

Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831) 281

County, Virginia, August 21st and 22nd, 1831, with Introductory Remarks. Petersburg,

VA: J. B. Edge, Printer, 1881.

Greenberg, Kenneth S., ed. Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in H istory and Memory.New

York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Styron, William. The Confessions of Nat Turner. New York: Random House, 1967.

Wolf, Eva Sheppard. Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from

the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University

Press, 2006.

Moses Story

The Moses story refers to biblical passages that provided inspiration to African

Americans who sought freedom from the bonds of slavery in the years before the

Civil War. Moses was a ﬁgure in the Old Testament who led the Israelites out of

slavery and into the Promised Land. The story of Moses served as a powerful alle-

gory for slaves hopeful that they could one day b e delivered from their captivity

through religious faith and perseverance. It also reﬂected the inﬂuence of Western

biblical traditions on slaves who integrated the teachings of Western C hristianity

with African rhythms and religious customs to forge a distinct culture of their own.

The story of Moses is one of pain, suffering, and deli v erance. In the Bible, Moses,

the child of a Hebrew slav e, is sentenced to death along with other slave children but

saved when his mother places him on a makeshift raft and sends him ﬂoating down

the Nile River. Moses was eventually raised by an Egyptian princess and educated in

the advanced Egyptian society. His religious visions began when, at about age 40, he

was instructed by a burning bush to lead the Hebrews out of slavery and into the so-

called “Promised Land.” Moses persuaded the Israelites to follow him, but the Phar-

aoh would not let them go; this passage became the inspiration for the spiritual hymn

“Go Down Moses (Let My People Go)”:

Go down, Moses,

Way down in Egypt land,

Tell ole Pharaoh

Let my people go!

The Pharaoh’s refusal to allow the Israelites to follow Moses resulted in the vis-

itation of 10 plagues upon the people of Egypt, and eventually Moses parted the

seas to permit the exodus of the Israelites out of captivity.

282 Nat Turner ’s Rebellion (1831)

The story of Moses provided powerful inspiration for slaves who feared that

they may never taste the fruit of freedom. Like the Israelites, many slaves believed

they would eventually reach the Promised Land despite their many years of

debasement, pain, and turmoil. Also like the Israelites, slaves believed that their

connection to one another, and their faith in a higher power that believed in justice,

would end their misery. The story of Moses and the Israelites inspired countless

slaves to resist the institution of slavery and helped sow the seeds of rebellion

against it.

The story of the Isr aelites’ exodus from Egypt also had a very real contempo -

rary corollary for many slaves: the Underground Railroad. “Conductors” on the

“railroad” led slaves out of the South and into freedom in the North. N one was

more daring than Harriet Tubman, a slave born in Dorchester County, Maryland,

around 1820. During a 10-year period prior to 1860, Tubman made no fewer than

19 trips into the South to escort more than 300 slaves to freedom, inclu ding her

own parents who had aged into their seventies at the time. For her efforts, Tubman

was later anointed “The Moses of Her People”—a ﬁtting moniker for someone

who led so many from the darkness of captivity to the light of freedom.

—Dave Powell

Further Reading

Clinton, Catherine. Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom. Boston: Back Bay Books,

2005.

Johnson, James Weldon, and J. Rosamond Johnson. The Books of the American Negro

Spirituals. New York: Viking Press, 1925.

Weathe rford, Carole Bost on, and Kadir Nel son. Moses: When Harriet Tubman Led Her

People to Freedom. New York: Hyperion Books, 2006.

WGBH Educational Foundation and the Public Broadcasting System. “Africans in

America: America’s Journey through Slavery.” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/

home.html (accessed November 10, 2008).

Slave Preachers

Slave preachers played an extraordinarily importan t role in shaping the cultural

institutions and personal relationships of slaves in the years prior to emancipation.

As new scholarship on the nature of slavery has proliferated in the past three dec-

ades, slave preachers have rec eived increased attention from historians interested

in understanding th e dynamics of life among slaves a nd how slaves expressed

themselves through the institutions of family and church. Much of this scholarship

Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1831) 283