Nathanial "Nat" Turner, Leader of the Southampton Slave Insurrection (1831)

Nat Turner,

• (born October 2, 1800, Southampton county, Virginia, U.S.—
• died November 11, 1831, in Jerusalem, Virginia),
• Full Name: Nat Turner
• Birth date: October 2, 1800
• Death date: November 11, 1831 (age 31)
• Zodiac Sign: Libra
• Height: 5' 8"

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Birth Name: Nathaniel “Nat” Turner

• Date of Birth: October 2, 1800
• Birth Place: Southampton, Virginia
• Death: 11 November 1831 (31 Years of Age)
• Cause of Death: Executed by Hanging
• Nationality: African-American
• Mother: Nancy
• Father: Abraham
• Occupation: Slave (Owned by Benjamin and Samuel Turner)
• Best Known For: Leader of the Southampton Slave Insurrection (1831)

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Nat Turner,
(born October 2, 1800, Southampton county, Virginia, U.S.—
died November 11, 1831, in Jerusalem, Virginia),
Full Name: Nat Turner
Birth date: October 2, 1800
Death date: November 11, 1831 (age 31)
Zodiac Sign: Libra
Height: 5' 8"

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https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nat-Turner

Black American slave who led the only effective, sustained slave rebellion (August 1831) in U.S. history. Spreading terror throughout the white South, his action set off a new wave of oppressive legislation prohibiting the education, movement, and assembly of slaves and stiffened proslavery, antiabolitionist convictions that persisted in that region until the American Civil War (1861–65).

Turner was born the property of a prosperous small plantation owner in a remote area of Virginia. His mother was an African native who transmitted a passionate hatred of slavery to her son. He learned to read from one of his master’s sons, and he eagerly absorbed intensive religious training. In the early 1820s, he was sold to a neighboring farmer of small means. During the following decade, his religious ardor tended to approach fanaticism, and he saw himself called upon by God to lead his people out of bondage. He began to exert a powerful influence on many of the nearby slaves, who called him “the Prophet.”

In 1831, shortly after he had been sold again—this time to a craftsman named Joseph Travis—a sign in the form of an eclipse of the Sun caused Turner to believe that the hour to strike was near. His plan was to capture the armory at the county seat, Jerusalem, and, having gathered many recruits, to press on to the Dismal Swamp, 30 miles (48 km) to the east, where capture would be difficult. On the night of August 21, together with seven fellow slaves in whom he had put his trust, he launched a campaign of total annihilation, murdering Travis and his family in their sleep and then setting forth on a bloody march toward Jerusalem. In two days and nights about 60 white people were ruthlessly slain. Doomed from the start, Turner’s insurrection was handicapped by lack of discipline among his followers and by the fact that only 75 Blacks rallied to his cause. Armed resistance from the local whites and the arrival of the state militia—a total force of 3,000 men—provided the final crushing blow. Only a few miles from the county seat the insurgents were dispersed and either killed or captured, and many innocent slaves were massacred in the hysteria that followed. Turner eluded his pursuers for six weeks but was finally captured, tried, and hanged.

Nat Turner’s rebellion put an end to the white Southern myth that slaves were either contented with their lot or too servile to mount an armed revolt. In Southampton county, Black people came to measure time from “Nat’s Fray,” or “Old Nat’s War.” For many years in Black churches throughout the country, the name Jerusalem referred not only to the Bible but also covertly to the place where the rebel slave had met his death.

Nat Turner, though, eluded capture for over two months. He hid in the Dismal Swamp area and was discovered accidentally by a hunter on October 30. He surrendered peacefully.

Turner has been most widely popularized by William Styron in his novel The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967).

What did Nat Turner do?

• Nat Turner destroyed the white Southern myth that slaves were actually happy with their lives or too docile to undertake a violent rebellion. His revolt hardened proslavery attitudes among Southern whites and led to new oppressive legislation prohibiting the education, movement, and assembly of slaves.

What did Nat Turner believe in?

• A deeply religious person, Nat Turner believed that he had been called by God to lead African Americans out of slavery.

How did Nat Turner die?

• After his revolt was violently suppressed by local whites and the Virginia state militia, Nat Turner went into hiding but was eventually captured, tried, and hanged.

What was Nat Turner’s legacy?

• Nat Turner destroyed the white Southern myth that slaves were actually happy with their lives or too docile to undertake a violent rebellion. His revolt hardened proslavery attitudes among Southern whites and led to new oppressive legislation prohibiting the education, movement, and assembly of slaves.

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https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/getting-to-know-nat-turner
In the Matter of Nat Turner
Available in 3 editions
Nat Turner is known to history as a thirty-year-old Virginia slave who led a bloody rebellion that resulted in the death of fifty-five whites, mostly women and children. Beyond that, he is famous for being well-nigh unknowable. He has no gravesite, no remains; there is no likeness of him. To the historian Kenneth Greenberg, Nat Turner is “the most famous, least-known person in American history.”

In the Matter of Nat Turner is an attempt to recover Turner, and his way of thinking. I call it “a speculative history” because it is a work of conjecture, of wondering about the connections between events and causes, between origins and outcomes. To put flesh on the bones of wondering my book inspects the fragments of text in which Turner is materialized and interleaves them with other texts – biblical, theological, philosophical, literary, sociological and anthropological – to tell his story.

Most of what is known of Nat Turner is to be found in a 24 page pamphlet, The Confessions of Nat Turner, written by a Southampton County attorney named Thomas Ruffin Gray who gained access to Turner in jail awaiting trial and over three days heard Turner’s account of himself and his rebellion. Circumstance suggests that much of the pamphlet’s account of the rebellion existed in draft prior to Gray’s conversations with Turner. The first part of Turner’s account, however, dwells on his life from his birth until the rebellion, matters of which Gray could have had little detailed knowledge. It tells of the ascent of a deeply religious personality to a state of grace (“made perfect”) and the consequences attending that outcome.

Turner’s narrative is almost invariably read as Gray designed it, as a single linear account in which the life’s final events appear as an outcome ordained virtually from infancy. But this is a very basic error. Turner describes his painful struggle for spiritual maturity and his search for his calling, both of which become utterly central in his life long before he turns to any clear intimation of interracial violence. The sequence of spiritual experiences, visions and revelations he recounts exhibits a coherent and sophisticated eschatological hermeneutics that moves, as his faith matures, from acceptance of God’s call to discipleship, through visions of the crucifixion and Revelation’s promise of Christ’s second coming, to Turner’s own transfiguration and his assumption of the burden of redemption. His account is of a life of preparation: a precocious infant gifted with uncanny knowledge; an adult tested in the wilderness, come to grace and baptism, confronted in his maturity by an immense task given to him by God that nearly breaks him, on the outcome of which rides the salvation of all. Throughout, Turner employs forms of typological reasoning familiar in evangelical texts for the messianic purpose of re-creating himself as the Redeemer returned.

Notwithstanding this rare opportunity to read the speech of a slave, readers have tended to discount what the slave actually said. The most influential discounter was the late William Styron, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning fictionalized autobiography, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), whose repulsion for Turner’s “religious mania” induced him to look for “subtler motives, springing from social and behavioral roots.” Ironically, though he detested the slavery that Gray defended, Styron is just like the Virginia lawyer. Both are modern, rational, and secular. For both, ideas are explained by social circumstance. For both, ideation that social circumstance is unable to explain is insanity.

Historians are not shy of writing about religion, but when they do they usually seek to secularize it. The intellectual orthodoxy of modernity, says Robert Orsi, turns religion into a social construction that “underwrites the hierarchies of power, reinforces group solidarity, and also, if more rarely, functions as a medium of rebellion and resistance.” In the Matter of Nat Turner rejects this orthodoxy.

It is of course tempting to read The Confessions of Nat Turner knowing that at the end of the spiritual odyssey they detail lies a massacre of white slaveholding families undertaken by a group of slaves, to identify that massacre as a “slave rebellion,” and to assume that The Confessions is a narrative of how that slave rebellion came to be. It is nevertheless remarkable that virtually nothing that Turner says during the first part of his confession either embraces, or even hints, that the outcome he planned, or intended, or imagined was a “slave rebellion.” As he says to Gray at the outset, “insurrection” is your word, not mine. So far as Turner was concerned, it was not insurrection that “terminated so fatally to many, both white and black” but “enthusiasm,” which Jordy Rosenberg helpfully defines as “the passionate experience of unmediated communion with God … the capacity of individual subjects to know and understand the divine order.” To discover a slave rebellion in the making in The Confessions we have to accept Gray’s own gloss, read the narrative backwards by privileging the second half’s account of the event itself, and ignore all of Turner’s actual words. We have to treat his apocalyptic eschatology as if it were a secret code referencing something other than itself.

“If one looks upon history as a text,” Walter Benjamin once wrote, “then one can say of it what a recent author has said of literary texts—namely, that the past has left in them images comparable to those registered by a light-sensitive plate. ‘The future alone possesses developers strong enough to reveal the image in all its details.’” The book I have written assembles an array of developers to press upon those fragments of text in which the revenant Nat Turner is materialized, and so reveal their image. It examines as minutely as possible the man, the mind, the events and the circumstances that we associate with the name “Nat Turner.” Its goal is to brush against the grain, to read between the lines, or as Hugo Von Hofmannsthal put it, to read what was never written. “Read what was never written” may seem like an odd injunction for a historian to embrace, but in my view to read what was never written is what the true historian is always required to attempt.

Christopher Tomlins is the Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and an affiliated research professor at the American Bar Foundation, Chicago. His many books include Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 and Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic. He lives in Berkeley.

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https://nationaltoday.com/birthday/nat-turner/
BACKGROUND
Nat Turner was born on October 2, 1800, in Southampton County, Virginia, in the U.S. He was a preacher and Black American slave who led a four-day rebellion of enslaved and free Black people in Southampton County, Virginia in August 1981. He didn’t know his father because he was born into slavery on a rural plantation in Southampton County. His mother’s name was Nancy and he learned how to read from an early age. This allowed him to become educated and he was also a devout Christian who later became a prophet to the slaves on the plantation where he worked. He was simply known as Nat on the plantation.

He was regarded as a prophet and preacher to other enslaved people working on the plantation and Turner would often host religious services for them. He would also claim to see visions from God and interpret them for his fellow plantation workers. Turner worked on several plantations throughout his life and he ran away from the one he was born on in 1921, but he later returned after having a vision from God. In 1824, he had another vision of a future judgment day and he decided to put this into action himself. His decision was finalized when, in 1828, he was convinced that he was divinely ordained to bring justice to the plantation owner, Samuel Turner, and to free his followers.

In 1831, Turner planned and executed a rebellion and killed the plantation owner and his wife. Unfortunately, Turner was caught after being in hiding and he was hanged for his crimes. Despite this, Turner died a hero and he inspired many rebellions after his death.

• History of Nat Turner

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Nat Turner (October 2, 1800 – November 11, 1831) was an American slave owned by Benjamin Turner who led a rebellion of slaves and free blacks in Southampton County, Virginia on August 21, 1831. The rebels went from plantation to plantation, gathering horses and guns, freeing other slaves along the way, and recruiting other blacks who wanted to join their revolt. During the rebellion, Virginia legislators targeted free blacks with a colonization bill, which allocated new funding to remove them, and a police bill that denied free blacks trials by jury and made any free blacks convicted of a crime subject to sale and relocation. The slaves killed approximately sixty white men, women and children. Whites organized militias and called out regular troops to suppress the uprising. In addition, white militias and mobs attacked blacks in the area, killing an estimated 120, many of whom were not involved in the revolt.

In the aftermath, the state tried those accused of being part of Turner's slave rebellion, 18 were executed, 14 were transported out of state and 32 were acquitted. Turner hid successfully for two months. When found, he was tried, convicted, sentenced to death, and hanged.

from: Wikipedia

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