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The Nat Turner Revolt of 1831 |
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Nat Turner was born into slavery in 1800. He was thirty-one years old when he led a small army on a bloody rampage through Southampton County, Virginia. A self-made preacher, he believed that God had called upon him to avenge slavery. "I was ordained for some great purpose in the hands of the Almighty," he said.
Turner grew up in a religious home, where he prayed and studied the Bible every day. He had his first religious vision when he was twenty-five. "I saw white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle," he recalled, "and the sun was darkened."
One day when Turner was working in the fields, he thought he saw drops of blood on the corn. The drops looked like "dew from heaven" to him. While in the woods, he believed he saw a mysterious alphabet written in blood on the leaves. The symbols were his sign that "the great day of judgement was at hand."
Another sign came on May 12, 1828, when Turner heard a loud clap in the sky. "The spirit instantly appeared and said the serpent was loosened," he later recalled. "The time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first."
He planned to begin his "work of death" on July 4, 1831, but decided to wait for one more revelation. On August 13, 1831, the moon passed in front of the midday sun. To Turner, the eclipse was a divine message. He would not postpone his mission any longer. On August 21, 1831, he decided to fulfill his destiny as an angel of death.
He instructed five slaves - Hark, Sam, Nelson, Will, and Jack - to meet in the woods at three o'clock that afternoon. Turner later joined them, and the men planned the slaughter. They agreed not to spare women and children.
Their gruesome killing spree began in the nearby village of Cross Keys, Virginia. Two hours after nightfall, the men went to the house of Joseph Travis, the slaveholder who held Nat Turner in bondage. Using hatchets, Turner's men murdered Travis, his wife, and three children in their sleep.
As the small army moved silently through the countryside, forty other blacks joined them. These included four boys, five free men, and one woman. In the next thirty-six hours, they axed or beat to death fifty-nine white men, women and children in Southampton County.
When news of the insurrection reached Washington, D.C., the Federal government sent 3,000 troops to Virginia. Cross Keys was near the North Carolina border. Fearful of more uprisings, the governor of North Carolina sent a state militia to Northampton County, North Carolina, just south of Cross Keys. The governor's guards killed forty innocent slaves and free blacks there.
Hysterical militia units formed throughout the area. One volunteer became so agitated that he accidentally shot one of his fellow patrollers. When slaveholders heard rumors of more revolts, some even murdered their own slaves. But whites had little reason to fear more rebellions, for African Americans were terrified, too.
"Never was there a time when the Negroes were so far removed from revolt," reported a seventeen-year-old volunteer guard. "They were ten times more scared than the whites."
Most of Turner's men were killed or arrested within a few days. Meanwhile, Turner took food from Joseph Travis' house and dug a hole under a pile of fence rails. He hid there for six weeks. Two slaves with a hunting dog discovered him, but he managed to escape again.
Two weeks later, a white farmer with a shotgun spotted Turner in a small hole he had dug with his sword. The fugitive surrendered his weapon and was taken to the county jail in Jerusalem, Virginia. For three days, Thomas Gray, a journalist, interviewed him in his cell. "The Confessions of Nat Turner" is Gray's written record of Turner's account.
Nat Turner was hanged two months after the killing, but the effects of his mutiny lasted for decades. No other rebellions occurred, yet whites continued to suspect black ministers of holding secret meetings to plan more revolts. Slave churches were torn down, and white churches enforced segregated seating. For the next twenty years, the laws that governed slaves and free blacks became more brutal and oppressive.
Wealthy planters in eastern Virginia owned almost 20% of all slaves in the United States. But few whites in the piedmont and western parts of the state depended on slave labor. After Nat Turner's revolt, they petitioned lawmakers in Richmond to abolish slavery.
"If we are to remain united," wrote one man, "we must have some guarantee that the evils under which you labor shall not be extended to us."
The wealthy planters had their way. The planters wanted to protect their investment in human flesh, so they pressured the legislators in Richmond to reject abolition. Some historians believe that if Virginia had ended slavery in the 1830's, the Civil War might have been avoided. But the cruel institution lasted another thirty years and led to America's bloodiest war.
Notes
Nat Turner's words are from Thomas R. Gray, "The Original Confessions of Nat Turner" in William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner: A Critical Handbook, edited by Melvin J. Friedman and Irving Malin. Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1970.
Information on North Carolina is from "Panic and Reprisal: Reaction in North Carolina to the Nat Turner Insurrection, 1831" by Charles Edward Morris, North Carolina Historical Review, Volume LXII, Number 1, January 1985, pp. 29-52.
Information on Virginia politics is from "The Slave Revolt That Shook Virginia" by Frank Ahrens, The Washington Post, 14 December, 1994, H-1, H-5.
1997 Mary E. Lyons
Confessions of Nat Turner
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