Nat Turner
Nat Turner led the deadliest slave rising in the history of the United States, two days in August 1831 in which some sixty white people were killed in Southampton County, Virginia, and the reaction to which closed the American South's mind on slavery for thirty years. He was born enslaved in 1800 on a farm in the county and taught to read as a child. He grew into a preacher whose sermons carried among the enslaved of the district and who believed, on the evidence of visions he described in detail, that he had been chosen for a work. An eclipse in February 1831 was the sign he had waited for. On the night of 21 August he and six others killed the family that owned him and moved from farm to farm through the next day, gathering perhaps seventy men, some mounted, killing every white person they found - men, women and the children in their beds - until a militia scattered them on the road to the county seat. The revenge was general: the militia and the mobs that followed killed something like a hundred and twenty Black people, most of whom had had nothing to do with it, and heads were put on poles along the road. Turner hid in the woods for two months, was found in a hole under a fallen tree, and was tried and hanged on 11 November. A lawyer named Thomas Gray took down his account in the cell, and The Confessions of Nat Turner is the document, and the argument, that survives. Virginia's legislature spent the winter of 1832 debating gradual emancipation, the last time a Southern legislature would, and rejected it; the states then passed laws against teaching slaves to read and against Black preachers, and the defence of slavery hardened from apology into doctrine. William Styron's novel of 1967 and the argument it started are the twentieth century's version of the same fight.
- Lived: 1800 CE – 1831 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: rebel_leader, preacher
