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THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER

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On 21 August 1831 the black minister Nat Turner (1800–1831) raised a brief but bloody slave insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia. In about two days' time, Turner and a small band of slaves and free blacks killed fifty-five white people, including many women and children. Hundreds of local militiamen and vigilantes from Virginia and nearby North Carolina responded to crush the insurrection, killing many of the participants plus dozens of innocent blacks. Surviving participants were captured and tried immediately; many were sentenced to death, with the exception of Turner, who evaded capture for two months. He was eventually found and then executed on 11 November 1831.

THE CONFESSIONS: BACKGROUND AND CONTENT

While Turner waited in a jail cell for his perfunctory trial, Thomas R. Gray (d. 1845), an attorney, visited him and recorded his account of the insurrection. Gray entered Turner's confession as evidence at his trial and then published the account as a pamphlet after his execution. Although numerous personal and newspaper accounts of the insurrection survive, Gray's pamphlet is the only document that purports to record Turner's first-person account of the reasons for and the events of the insurrection. Thus Gray's account has often been accepted as the most authentic description of the insurrection.

But authenticity in this case is a complex issue. As a slaveholder and a resident of Southampton County, Gray had no reason to present an objective depiction of Turner or his motives for raising the insurrection. On the contrary, Gray appears to portray Turner in a way calculated both to mitigate the insurrection's impact and to sell numerous copies of the pamphlet. He overtly characterizes Turner as a "gloomy fanatic" (p. 304), and he argues that the insurrection was an isolated event solely instigated by Turner's religious fanaticism and thus not a response to slavery as an institution. Gray contends that his own reason for making Turner's narrative public is to allay fears that another insurrection may occur in the immediate future, ameliorating the "greatly excited public mind" (p. 303).

To relate Turner's confession, Gray takes an unusual rhetorical position. He claims that, "without being questioned at all, [Turner] commenced his narrative in the following words" (p. 306). This statement implies, first, that Turner gave his story freely and honestly and, second, that Gray transcribed Turner's story verbatim, suggesting that he acted solely as an amanuensis. But the text of the confession suggests that neither of these qualifications is accurate. While nothing about the narrative suggests that Gray coerced Turner into telling his story, Gray structures the narrative to emphasize Turner's religious convictions and the insurrection's vindictive violence, portraying Turner as fanatical and bloodthirsty. Also, the voice Gray represents as Turner's speaks not as an uneducated slave would but as an educated lawyer would. For example, the first line supposedly in Turner's voice reads, "Sir—you have asked me to give a history of the motives which induced me to undertake the late insurrection, as you call it" (p. 306). The disconnect here between the voice purportedly speaking and the language used destabilizes the pamphlet's claim to authenticity.

Yet even if not credibly authentic, Gray's pamphlet represents Turner provocatively. Rather than simply recounting the events of the insurrection, the narrative delves into Turner's character, beginning with a rendering of events from his childhood that, in Gray's account, led him to believe that he had a gift for prophecy. Gray records Turner as describing himself as uncommonly intelligent. He claims to have learned to read with no assistance, and he says that religion "principally occupied my thoughts" (p. 307). He also says that he had a natural talent for planning and leadership, so that, even when he was a child, the other black children expected him to plan their "roguery" because of his "superior judgment" (p. 307).

When he grew older, according to Gray's depiction, Turner determined that he should live as an ascetic, separating himself from society and fasting and praying. One day, he claims to have heard the voice of "the spirit that spoke to prophets in former days" (p. 308). He felt himself to be "ordained for some great purpose" (p. 308), and he began to minister to blacks in the community. On one occasion, he escaped from his overseer for thirty days but surprised the other slaves and ostensibly proved his faith by returning voluntarily. After his return he heard voices, saw visions, and found supernatural signs with more frequency. He shocked the community at one time by baptizing a white man, Ethelred T. Brantley.

Turner's ministry culminated in a vision he claims to have seen on 12 May 1828. Gray records him as saying, "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 last should be first" (p. 310). In the narrative, Gray asks Turner if he feels that he was mistaken about his vision, to which Turner replies enigmatically, "Was not Christ crucified?" (p. 310). A solar eclipse in 1830 convinced Turner that the time had come when he should fight against the serpent, presumably white slaveholders.

To accomplish his mission, Turner tells Gray he took four other slaves into his confidence, and they planned to commence their murderous work at the home of Turner's master, Joseph Travis. They stipulated that "until we had armed and equipped ourselves, and gathered sufficient force, neither age nor sex was to be spared" (p. 311). At the Travis family home, Turner and his men murdered the family, "five in number" (p. 311), in their beds, including Putnam Moore, Travis's apprentice and Turner's legal owner. Gray highlights two events in the account of the events at the Travis home that portray Turner as both impotent and bloodthirsty. First, Turner was incapable of killing Mr. Travis, and second, after forgetting to kill a sleeping infant, Turner sent one of his followers back into the home to kill it. After murdering the Travis family, Turner and his followers repeated the process at several other homes, gathering recruits, horses, and weapons. At the height of the insurrection, Turner's followers numbered more than fifty armed men, most on horseback. While his followers killed as many as fifty-five white people, Turner himself killed only one person, Margaret Whitehead, a young girl.

By the afternoon of 22 August, the insurrection was discovered and a general alarm sounded. An initial skirmish with hastily assembled militiamen dispersed many of Turner's followers. He and the remaining force retreated to an abandoned homestead under cover of darkness. At daybreak, a larger militia force attacked, killing or capturing Turner's remaining followers. Only Turner managed to escape. For more than two months he hid in various locations near the Travis home, until discovered by Benjamin Phipps on 31 October and delivered to the authorities for trial.

NAT TURNER'S REBELLION AND THE SLAVE DEBATE

After relating Turner's account of the insurrection, Gray describes his own apprehension of him in terms that demonstrate the insurrection's effect on slave-holders and betrays Gray's personal attitude toward Turner: "The calm, deliberate composure with which he spoke of his late deeds and intentions, the expression of his fiend-like face when excited by enthusiasm, still bearing the stains of the blood of helpless innocence about him; clothed with rags and covered with chains; yet daring to raise his manacled hands to heaven, with a spirit soaring above the attributes of man; I looked on him and my blood curdled in my veins" (p. 317). Gray's visceral reaction to Turner suggests the panic the insurrection caused among whites throughout the slaveholding areas of the United States.

The response to Turner's insurrection reveals the complexity of slavery in American history. Immediately, a wave of violent hysteria gripped the region as hundreds of whites directed their outrage at innocent blacks. The extent of the panic may be glimpsed in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897), in which a white mob searches Jacobs's grandmother's home. As a result of the insurrection, the Virginia legislature debated a bill to abolish slavery out of respect for public safety, but the measure failed. Instead, virtually every slaveholding state soon passed repressive laws forbidding slaves to meet for religious purposes or to be educated. Turner's insurrection was the only successful slave rebellion in the United States—two other rebellions, planned by Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vesey, respectively, were discovered before they began—but American slaveholders were aware of the Haitian revolution of 1791 during which slaves massacred their white masters and assumed control of the national government. The Haitian revolution instilled a deep paranoia in American slaveholders, which Turner's insurrection actualized.

Turner's insurrection occurred at a critical moment for the growing abolitionist movement in the United States. David Walker's (1785–1830) Appeal, a militant pamphlet urging slaves to overthrow their masters, had appeared in 1829. A few months before the insurrection, William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879) had begun publishing The Liberator, a radical abolitionist newspaper. The insurrection lent credibility to the nascent abolitionist movement's claim that slaves desired liberty as much as any other Americans. Between 1831 and 1861 tension between slaveholding states and anti-slaveholding states escalated, reaching a climax with John Brown's raid on the U.S. armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), in October 1859. Influenced by Turner's insurrection, Brown intended to use the weapons in the armory to outfit a mass rebellion of American slaves against their masters.

For many fugitive slaves and other members of the abolitionist movement, Turner became a hero. For example, William Wells Brown (c. 1814–1884), a fugitive slave and author of Clotel (1853), the first novel published by an African American, described Nat Turner in messianic terms in his history of prominent African Americans, The Black Man (1863). Turner's insurrection also inspired several nineteenth-century novels, including Harriet Beecher Stowe's (1811–1896) Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856). Unlike the submissive Uncle Tom of her earlier novel, Dred defies white slaveholders by escaping his master and plotting an insurrection. The plot is eventually discovered and aborted, but the character Dred prophesies imminent dissolution, presaging the Civil War. Literary portrayals of Turner ranged from mythic and heroic to deranged and monstrous, reflecting the various sentiments of the individual writers toward either slavery in particular or African Americans in general.

MODERNIST PORTRAYALS

Although Turner figured prominently in popular discourse in the nineteenth century, he fell into relative obscurity until 1967. In that year, as the civil rights movement moved into a more militant phase, two radically different portrayals of Turner emerged. In Ol' Prophet Nat, Daniel Panger adopted Turner's voice to describe slavery as a moral outrage and to explain the inherent urge to freedom in terms that echoed integrationist rhetoric. In The Confessions of Nat Turner, William Styron adopted Turner's voice to probe Turner's psychology, attempting through fiction to understand what caused one specific slave out of millions to attempt an insurrection. Styron thus depicted Turner as manic and sexually obsessed with the girl he killed, Margaret Whitehead. Styron's book became a critical success—winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1968—and a source of great controversy. Many black intellectuals resented that Styron, a white southerner, presumed to understand a black man's psyche; even more, they resented the implication that a historical event represented as an act of black heroism could be portrayed as a glorified act of sexual aggression against white women. These and other objections were articulated in the 1968 collection William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. Curiously, while the essays in this collection attack Turner's characterization, the editors included Gray's account as an appendix.

The conflicting representations of Turner may in fact be a product of Gray's account of Turner's confessions. Gray set a precedent of adopting Turner's voice to serve his own complex purposes. Since no direct, unmitigated first-person account of Turner's motives and his role in the insurrection exists, his actual purpose remains open to conjecture.

See also Abolitionist Writing; An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans; Crime and Punishment; History; Slave Rebellions; Slavery

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Bouvé, Pauline Carrington Rust. Their Shadows Before. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1899.

Brown, William Wells. The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements. 1863. New York: Kraus Reprint, 1969.

Edmonds, Randolph. "The Nat Turner Story": Six Plays for a Negro Theater. Boston: Walter H. Baker, 1934.

Gray, Thomas R. The Confessions of Nat Turner. 1831. In The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation of Source Material, edited by Henry I Tragle. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971.

James, G. P. R. The Old Dominion; or, The Southampton Massacre. 1856. London: G. Routledge and Sons, 1903.

Panger, Daniel. Ol' Prophet Nat. Winston-Salem, N.C.: J. F. Blair, 1967.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. 1856. New York: Penguin, 2000.

Styron, William. The Confessions of Nat Turner. New York: Random House, 1967.

Tieran, Mary Spear. Homoselle. Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1881.

Secondary Works

Burnett, Charles, director. A Troublesome Property. Film. San Francisco: California Newsreel, 2002.

Davis, Mary Kemp. Nat Turner before the Bar of Judgment. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999.

French, Scot. The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

Genovese, Eugene D. From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts and the Making of the Modern World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979.

David A. Davis