Nat Turner’s Rebellion
What was Nat Turner’s rebellion?
What were the immediate consequences of the rebellion?
What triggered Nat Turner to plan the rebellion?
What was the outcome of Nat Turner’s trial?
The rebellion of Nat Turner was a revolt by enslaved African Americans that occurred in southeastern Virginia in August 1831. Over two days, several dozen enslaved men brutally killed 55–60 white Virginians, including a number of children—more victims than in any other slave revolt in U.S. history. Turner was convicted and hanged. Before he died he gave a detailed confession and testament. In the short term the uprising provoked a wave of new state laws throughout the South, restricting enslaved people’s education and their ability to congregate. In the longer term, some historians have argued, it contributed to the hardening of attitudes on both sides of the abolition debate and played a role in eliminating any possibility of a peaceful end to slavery.
Early life
Nathaniel Turner was born into an enslaved Black family in Southampton, Virginia, in October 1800. According to oral tradition, his mother, who took on the name Nancy in the United States, grew up in North Africa and was brought on the Middle Passage as a teenager. Turner’s father reportedly escaped the plantation where they lived and headed north. Turner somehow learned to read as a child—he said later that it had come to him with “perfect ease,” though he had no memory of how he had picked up the alphabet. He was regarded as a wunderkind, and he later claimed that some people thought he was destined to become a prophet.
He married a young enslaved woman named Cherry in the early 1820s. She bore a daughter and one or two sons.
In 1825 Turner had a vision of white and black spirits engaged in a bloody battle. The sun was dark, and it was thundering. “I heard a voice saying, ‘Such is your luck, such you are called to see,’ ” Turner later recalled. He started to withdraw from others as much as he could and double down on his fasting and praying. Turner later described 10 supernatural encounters he had experienced during the 1820s. Ultimately he emerged from his solitude and declared himself a Baptist preacher, holding praise meetings that other enslaved people attended.
Rebellion
Nat Turner’s account of the rebellion, given to his lawyer and published several weeks after his execution, can be read in its entirety here.
A solar eclipse occurred in February 1831, and Turner took this as a sign that the time had come to plan a violent uprising. He initially told four other enslaved men about his intentions. Records suggest that several African Americans in Southampton and nearby counties received word that a rebellion was coming. It began on the night of August 21, a Sunday. Turner and his accomplices broke into his master’s house while he, his wife, and five children were sleeping. The group killed them with axes. They seized guns and ammunition, and Turner led the others through military-like drills.
From there they marched to other houses, killing nearly all the white people they encountered and freeing the enslaved people. By midday Monday the band of rebels numbered 50 or 60—“all mounted,” Turner recalled, “and armed with guns, axes, swords and clubs.” Meanwhile, word was spreading about the revolt. White authorities sent for military help. Turner’s group marched on, toward the town of Jerusalem, where they planned to seize stores of arms and ammunition. Some historians have speculated that they planned to then barricade themselves at Dismal Swamp, 20 miles to the east. However, as they traveled they found more and more homesteads deserted and all routes into Jerusalem blocked. They spent that night in the woods near a plantation.
By dawn Tuesday their numbers had dropped to 20. They were ambushed at a farm, and those who weren’t captured dispersed. All told, 55–60 white people were killed in the uprising. Turner evaded capture for weeks by hiding in a hole under a pile of fence rails. He was eventually found by a dog.
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Capture, trial, and punishment
After his capture Turner was approached in jail by Thomas R. Gray, a lawyer who had defended some of the other rebels. Turner agreed to give Gray a full account of the rebellion: his motives, his preparations, and how he carried it out. Gray took detailed notes and had his manuscript published a few weeks later, under the title The Confessions of Nat Turner. There is little doubt that Gray embellished some of Turner’s language, but historians tend to agree that the memoir is broadly accurate.
Turner was put on trial on November 5, 1831. He was convicted and was hanged on November 11. Altogether roughly 50 African Americans stood trial for the rebellion, and 21 were hanged.
Legacy
In the months and years that followed, Southern states took many measures to make sure similar insurrections would never happen again. The South became a “closed, martial society determined to preserve its slave-based civilization at whatever cost,” historian Stephen B. Oates has written. As long as slavery persisted, Southern whites were haunted by the fear of violent retaliation. Meanwhile, abolitionists held up the rebellion as an illustration of how much enslaved people hated their captivity. And for African Americans, both in the antebellum era and since, Turner came to be remembered as a hero and a martyr.
A 1967 novel by William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner, helped broadly popularize his story. It won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for fiction but was criticized by some Black writers.