Nat Turner was an American slave and a leader of slave insurrection.
Background
Born into slavery on October 2, 1800, in Southampton County, Virginia, Turner was recorded as "Nat" by Benjamin Turner, the man who held his mother and him as slaves. When Benjamin Turner died in 1810, Nat became the property of Benjamin's son Samuel Turner. For most of his life he was known as "Nat", but after the 1831 rebellion, he was widely referred to as "Nat Turner". Turner knew little about the background of his father, who was believed to have escaped from slavery when Turner was a young boy.
Education
Nat, who was precocious, was given the rudiments of an education by one of his master's sons. He learned to read and write at a young age.
Career
A fiery preacher, he soon acquired leadership among the Negroes on the plantation and in the neighborhood. According to his sworn confession, he deliberately set about convincing them of his divine inspiration, and presently believed himself chosen to lead them from bondage. He began to see signs in the heavens and on the leaves, and to hear voices directing him.
An eclipse of the sun in 1831 convinced him that the time was near and caused him to enlist four other slaves, to whom he communicated his plans.
They plotted an uprising for July 4, but abandoned it. After a new sign was seen in a peculiar solar phenomenon on August 13, they settled upon August 21 as the day of deliverance.
With seven others Nat attacked the Travis family and murdered them all. Securing arms and horses, and enlisting other slaves, they ravaged the neighborhood. In one day and one night they butchered horribly and mangled the bodies of fifty-five white persons--thirteen men, eighteen women, and twenty-four children. With the blood of the victims Nat sprinkled his followers.
At the first armed resistance the revolt collapsed and on Aug. 25 Nat went into hiding in a dugout, less than two miles from the Travis farm, where he remained, successfully concealed in the daytime, for six weeks.
Discovered by accident, he was at once tried, and after conviction was hanged at Jerusalem, the county seat. He faced his fate with calmness. Thomas R. Gray, who was assigned to defend him, said: "He is a complete fanatic, or plays his part most admirably".
Of his sixty or seventy followers, twenty-eight were convicted and condemned; sixteen, including the one woman involved, were executed, and twelve were transported. The number that were killed in the suppression of the uprising has never been ascertained.
The revolt, following closely upon slave insurrections in Martinique, Antigua, Santiago, Caracas, and the Tortugas, caused a profound shock in the slaveholding states. Exaggeration magnified both the real and the false, and for weeks there was widespread terror.
As a result almost every Southern state enacted new laws which greatly increased the severity of the slave codes, though, after a brief time, most of them were more honored in the breach than in the observance.
The insurrection dealt a death blow to the manumission societies which had flourished in the South, and put an end there to the organized emancipation movement. Further, the blame for the uprising was placed upon the Garrisonian abolitionists, though not a scintilla of evidence ever connected them with it, and intensified the detestation and dread with which the South regarded them.
Perhaps the most important result of all was that never again was the slaveholding South free from the fear, lurking most of the time, of a wholesale and successful slave uprising, a fact potent in the history of the republic during the next thirty years.
Religion
Deeply religious, Nat was often seen fasting, praying, or immersed in reading the stories of the Bible.
Turner's religious convictions manifested as frequent visions which he interpreted as messages from God. His belief in the visions was such that when Turner was 22 years old, he ran away from his owner; he returned a month later after claiming to have received 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 Etheldred T. Brantley, whom Turner was credited with having convinced to "cease from his wickedness".
In early 1828, Turner was convinced that he "was ordained for some great purpose in the hands of the Almighty. " 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. "
Personality
He was identified as having "natural intelligence and quickness of apprehension, surpassed by few. "
Quotes from others about the person
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. " According to Harris, Turner believed that "only a cataclysmic act could convince the architects of a violent social order that violence begets violence. "
In an 1843 speech at the National Negro Convention, Henry Highland Garnet, a former slave and active abolitionist, described Nat Turner as "patriotic", stating that "future generations will remember him among the noble and brave. " 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. "
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. "
