4. “Horrid Massacre in Virginia,” fold-out frontispiece from Samuel Warner, Authentic and Impartial Narrative of the Tragical Scene (Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society)
Some who warned against further revenge did so out of a desire to protect the owners of those slaves who did not participate in the insurrection and to re-establish the rule of law. “A public execution in the presence of thousands,” advised the military commander, “will demonstrate the power of the law, and preserve the right of property. The opposite course, while it is inhuman and therefore not to be justified, tends to the sacrifice of the innocent … . This course of proceeding dignifies the rebel and the assassin with the sanctity of martyrdom.”
Between private revenge and public justice resided conflicting messages. Barbaric revenge told the enslaved that, should they ever try to revolt again, genocide would be the result: “Another insurrection will be followed by putting the whole race to the sword.” And yet such a threat carried with it a tacit acknowledgment that the enslaved were not loyal and contented, that slavery was not benign, and that the outnumbered white population could rule only through terror and fear. The enactment of legal, public justice demonstrated that whites could maintain civil society and that they viewed rebellion, however horrific, as an aberration. Yet it also suggested a concern with the property rights of slaveholders and a desire not to provoke the enslaved by creating martyrs to the cause of freedom. Either way, in the immediate aftermath of the rebellion, editors worried about accounts and actions that would “give the slaves false conceptions of their numbers and capacity, by exhibiting the terror and confusion of the whites, and to induce them to think that practicable, which they see is so much feared by their superiors.”5
Stories of loyal slaves provided some solace. On the morning of August 23, before dawn, Turner and the rebels attacked the house of Dr. Simon Blunt, who by this time had heard of the insurrection. Crippled by gout, he chose to defend his ground. Alongside stood his fifteen-year-old son, an overseer, and three other white men. They had six guns and plenty of powder. Entering the yard, one rebel fired his weapon to test whether anyone was home. Twenty paces from the house, shots rang back, and the rebels scattered, one killed and one injured. Blunt’s slaves, some attested, “nobly and gallantly” stood by their aged master and pursued the rebels with “shouts and execrations.” One writer paid “tribute to our slaves … which they richly deserve … . There was not an instance of disaffection, in any section of our country; save on the plantations which Capt. Nat visited, and to their credit, the recruits were few.” The remark said to have been uttered by the loyal slaves no doubt made the slave owners grin: “If they had to choose a master; it would never be a black one.”6
In presenting Turner not as a liberator but as a false messiah, writers offered an answer to the question being asked across the country: “Who is this Nat Turner? Where is he from?” Accounts portrayed him as unremarkable-looking. A letter to the governor described Turner as “between 30 & 35 years old—5 feet six or eight inches high—weighs between 150 & 160 rather bright complexion but not a mulatto—broad-shouldered—large flat nose—large eyes—broad flat feet rather knock kneed—walk brisk and active—hair on the top of the head very thin—no beard except on the upper lip and tip of the chin.” However average he might be in appearance, his religious fanaticism distinguished him. In 1828, he had dipped into cool, dark water with a white man and emerged a baptized, self-anointed preacher. Writers called him “cunning” and “fanatical,” a scoundrel who claimed to be a divinely inspired Baptist preacher. Turner’s “preaching excursions” in Jerusalem and Petersburg allowed him, under the “cloak of religion,” to concoct his insurrection scheme. He played off the “superstitious hopes and fear of others,” using the eclipse to win adherents. “We are inclined to think,” claimed one commentator, “that the solar phenomenon exercised considerable influence in promoting the insurrection.”
His literacy also served as a means of persuasion, a way to “deceive, delude, and overawe” the minds of the enslaved. That Turner could preach and “read and write with ease” should serve as a warning: “no black man ought to be permitted to turn a Preacher through the country.” The writer did not specify why, but he did not have to. The religion of the slaveholders tried to contain the impact of biblical stories of salvation and liberation, but itinerant preachers along the frontier spread the word that man was a free moral agent and that redemption was available to those who sought it. Some writers said Turner was drunk and some said he sought only to plunder. But one Southerner understood that Turner acted on an “impulse of revenge against the whites, as the enslavers of himself and his race.”7
The insurrection was over, and by the start of September the first of many executions had begun, but Turner remained at large and all were “at a loss to know where he has dropped to.” Some said he had fled to another state; others declared that he remained hidden in the area. Most thought Turner vanished in the Great Dismal Swamp, an enormous bog, thirty by ten miles long, between Virginia and North Carolina, a place “beyond the power of human conception” where “runaway Slaves of the South have been known to secrete themselves for weeks, months and years, subsisting on frogs, terrapins, and even snakes.” Time and again newspapers erroneously reported his capture. The Norfolk Herald told of a well-armed Turner being taken in a reed swamp. A writer to the Richmond Enquirer claimed that he spotted Turner some 180 miles away, on the road from Fincastle to Sweet Spring, headed for Ohio. One rumor had it that Turner drowned trying to cross New River. On another occasion, the body of a dead man thought to be Turner did not, on closer inspection, fit the description.8
It turned out that Turner had never left the vicinity of the insurrection, and on Sunday, October 30, around noon, he was captured. Turner had been hiding in the ground, in what some called a “cave” or a “den.” He had covered himself with branches and pine brush from a fallen tree. Benjamin Phipps, a local farmer, was walking past when he saw the earth move and a figure emerge. He pointed his gun at the spot.
“Who are you?” he shouted.
“I am Nat Turner; don’t shoot and I will give up.”
The accounts all made Turner out to be a coward who surrendered and threw his sword to the ground. Phipps and others transported Turner to Jerusalem. As word spread, the citizens of Southampton County gathered. The Norfolk Herald said that given the feelings of the people “on beholding the blood-stained monster … it was with difficulty that he could be conveyed alive.” The Petersburg Intelligencer, by contrast, claimed “not the least personal violence was offered to Nat.” All the reports sought to diminish the rebel’s stature. Writers labeled him a “poor wretch,” “dejected, emaciated, and ragged,” a “wild fanatic or gross imposter” whose only honorable act was admitting the charges against him.9
On November 5, the state of Virginia tried, convicted, and sentenced Nat Turner. In the days prior to his trial, Thomas R. Gray, a lawyer and slave owner who had served as court-appointed counsel for several slaves tried in September, interviewed the prisoner in his cell. Gray spoke with Turner on November 1, 2, and 3; he also attended the examination of Turner by two justices on October 31. In an unsigned letter sent to the Richmond Enquirer, Gray called Turner a “gloomy fanatic” who gave “a history of the operations of his mind for many years past.” Gray expressed dismay that “I could not get him to explain in a manner at all satisfactory” how the rebel conceived the idea of emancipating the slaves. The letter-writer teased that he intended to provide a “detailed statement of his confessions, but I understand a gentleman is engaged in taking them down verbatim from his lips.”
Gray was himself that gentleman, and whatever other interests he had in Turner’s story—civic duty, public curiosity, historical documentation—financial concerns topped the list. His holdings in land and slaves had been slashed over the preceding two years, and Gray seized the opportunity to produce a pamphlet guaranteed to sell. He obtained a copyri
ght on November 10, and two weeks later he published The Confessions of Nat Turner. Gray had accurately gauged interest in Turner; the pamphlet sold tens of thousands of copies. It provided the fullest account of what had taken place and offered Turner’s story through the prism of his interviewer’s point of view.10
As a literary genre, last words and dying confessions dated back to the seventeenth century in America and served as part of the ritualistic requirements of execution day. In these texts, the condemned provided the details of the crime, pleaded for forgiveness, offered a warning to others, and displayed signs of true repentance. The actual beliefs and feelings of the criminal played little part in the production, which sought only to serve as a sign of the restoration of civil and religious order. The Confessions of Nat Turner stands apart from the dozens of other works in this genre. The interviewer is a presence in the text; both Gray and Turner have stories to tell; the prisoner does not warn others against following in his steps, nor does he seek forgiveness. Indeed, he pled not guilty, “saying to his counsel that he did not feel so.”
The Confessions begins and closes with Gray’s effort to establish authenticity. The opening page includes the clerk’s seal of the full title as submitted for copyright: “The Confessions of Nat Turner, the leader of the late insurrection in Southampton, Virginia, as fully and voluntarily made to Thomas R. Gray, in the prison where he was confined, and acknowledged by him to be such when read before the Court of Southampton.” The closing page includes a court document claiming that the justices used the confessions at trial to convict Turner and that when asked if he had anything to say Turner responded, “I have made a full confession to Mr. Gray, and I have nothing more to say.” The trial record suggests otherwise. Neither Gray nor any confessions were mentioned, and Turner said only that he had nothing more to say than what “he had before said,” more likely a reference to his interview with the justices than with Gray. But Gray wanted to identify himself as a central figure in the proceedings and to persuade the public not only to trust the stories told in the Confessions, but also to buy the pamphlet.
Gray offered Southerners what they needed to hear and wanted to believe. He opened the work with a signed address to the public, stating that the Confessions would at last provide an antidote to a “thousand idle, exaggerated and mischievous reports.” Here at last, in the words of Turner himself, the motives of the rebels would be revealed. The insurrection, Gray declared, was “entirely local,” the “offspring of gloomy fanaticism.” Its origins lurked in Nat Turner’s history, in “the operations of a mind like his, endeavoring to grapple with things beyond its reach.” Turner’s revolt, Gray suggested, was a terrible aberration, “the first instance in our history of an open rebellion of the slaves,” and it should not alter the public’s view of the enslaved as submissive and docile. When confronted, the rebels “resisted so feebly, when met by the whites in arms,” and Turner himself, the “great Bandit,” was captured by “a single individual … without attempting to make the slightest resistance.” The lesson for the community was to “strictly and rigidly” enforce the laws that governed the enslaved. Gray did not have to specify that he meant especially those laws against teaching slaves how to read and permitting them to preach.
A perceptive reader might have found the brief opening more unsettling than comforting, for Gray hit upon an unresolvable tension at the core of American culture: whatever appearance might suggest, reality would prove otherwise. “It will thus appear,” Gray lamented, “that whilst every thing upon the surface of society wore a calm and peaceful aspect; whilst not one note of preparation was heard to warn the devoted inhabitants of woe and death, a gloomy fanatic was resolving in the recesses of his own dark, bewildered, and overwrought mind, schemes of indiscriminate massacre to the whites.” Who was to say that some other Nat Turner was not at this moment planning to strike? What made it worse was that Turner’s actions were “not instigated by motives of revenge or sudden anger, but the results of long deliberation, and a settled purpose of mind.” Unlike any other event, Turner’s revolt punctured the fragile worldview of the slaveholding class. As long as slavery remained, Southerners would wonder and worry about the behavior of their chattels, and they would always have to watch their backs.
Turner also spoke of appearances—the appearance necessary to sustain the belief that he was destined for some special purpose: “Having soon discovered to be great, I must appear so, and therefore studiously avoided mixing in society, and wrapped myself in mystery, devoting my time to fasting and prayer.” Turner’s story is a narrative of religious awakening. To explain the insurrection, “I must go back to the days of my infancy, and even before I was born.” As a child, Turner identified events that happened before 1800, the year of his birth. The slave community proclaimed that he would be a prophet; his parents interpreted marks on his body as indicating that he was meant “for some great purpose.” Turner, deeply attached to his grandmother, “who was very religious,” felt emboldened by his spiritual and intellectual gifts. He had a “restless, inquisitive and observant” mind and was self taught in reading and writing. (Even Gray spoke of Turner’s “natural intelligence and quickness of apprehension.”) Turner heard the Spirit speak to him, and he believed that he was ordained for some special purpose. Twice Turner stated that he overheard others remark that “I had too much sense to be raised, and if I was, I would never be of any use to any one as a slave.”
But in his first attempt at prophecy, he seemed to defend rather than attack slavery. In his early twenties, Turner ran away from an overseer and remained in the woods for thirty days, but he returned upon hearing the Spirit command him to follow “the service of my earthly master.” The message of obedience that he brought back did not sit well with the other slaves. “The negroes found fault, and murmured against me, saying that if they had my sense they would not serve any master in the world.” The story should have deepened the despair of Gray and his readers. Turner’s decision to rebel against slavery came less from God than from fellow slaves. Immediately after being spurned, Turner had his first vision of darkened sun, rolling heavens, and red-flowing streams.
In every way, Turner’s narrative resisted the interpretation Gray strove to provide. When Turner had told his interviewer of a revelation in 1828 that “the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first,” Gray asked, “Do you not find yourself mistaken now?” Turner responded with his own question: “Was not Christ crucified?” Asked whether the conspiracy spread beyond Southampton County, Turner inquired, “Can you not think the same ideas, and strange appearances about this time in the heavens might prompt others, as well as myself, to this undertaking.” Neither the kindness of the individual master nor the impracticability of the scheme mattered. Turner chose to “carry terror and devastation” wherever he went, and he narrated the massacre of entire families with a dispassionate, almost scientific tone. Gray ended the Confessions by recounting the stories of individuals who by luck and grace survived, but Turner’s “calm, deliberate composure” unsettled the interviewer: “I looked on him and my blood curdled in my veins.”11
By the time the Confessions appeared, Turner had been hanged and dissected. Some said he sold his body for ginger cakes, but his body was not his to sell. Folk legends had it that he was skinned, his flesh fried into grease, and his bones ground into souvenirs. Whatever happened to his body, his voice remained, captured in the text published by Gray. One reader, at least, declined to believe that Turner spoke the words attributed to him. “The language,” he claimed, “is far superior to what Nat Turner could have employed—Portions of it are even eloquently and classically expressed.” The reader refused to accept the authenticity of Turner’s words because to do so would violate his assumptions about the intellectual capacities of slaves. But such reservations helped make the case that the words transcribed from speech to print were indeed uttered by Nat Turner. Gray did not put the Confessions into a dialect m
eant to imitate the supposed everyday speech of slaves; the very literacy that would seem to belie the authenticity of the text helps confirm it. Furthermore, Gray repeatedly praised Turner for his qualities of mind. Preacher and prophet, Turner early in life discovered the power of language, and he used it to win adherents: “On the sign appearing in the heavens, the seal was removed from my lips, and I communicated the great work laid out for me to do.”12
THE LIBERATOR
The work of liberation and retribution begun by Turner in Virginia opened a national debate that fueled sectional rivalries between North and South and triggered a wide-ranging discussion over what to do about slavery in Virginia. In assessing the multiple causes of the rebellion, Southern writers placed Northern interference high on their list. Even in praising Northerners for their sympathy, Southern editors displayed acute sensitivity to sectional tensions. One writer expressed relief that in most Northern newspapers “we have seen no taunts, no cant, no complacent dwelling upon the superior advantages of the non—slave holding states … . We have no doubt, that should it ever be necessary, the citizens of the Northern states would promptly fly to the assistance of their Southern brethren.” The Alexandria Gazette quoted New York papers that expressed support and offered “arms, money, men … for the defense of our Southern brethren.” “The spirit of the times,” opined the New York Telegraph, “rebukes discord, disorder, and disunion.”13
The problem, thought most Southerners and Northerners, was a small but influential group of reformist demagogues and religious fanatics who nurtured disaffection and fomented servile insurrection. “Ranting cant about equality,” a Southerner argued, heated the imagination of the enslaved and could create the only force that might lead to a general insurrection across the South—“the march of intellect.” One writer cautioned “all missionaries, who are bettering the condition of the world, and all philanthropists, who have our interest so much at stake, not to plague themselves about our slaves but leave them exclusively to our management.” Particularly obnoxious—and dangerous, from the Southern perspective—was the circulation of Northern abolitionist newspapers which “have tended, in some degree, to promote that rebellious spirit which of late has manifested itself in different parts” of the South. Refusing to believe slaves capable of plotting an insurrection on their own, and disavowing any precedents or provocations for rebellion among the enslaved, Southerners blamed the timing and ferocity of Turner’s revolt not on the darkening of the heavens but on the actions of outside agitators. And of all the missionaries, philanthropists, politicians, and abolitionists who challenged slavery, one alone seemed culpable for the events at Southampton: William Lloyd Garrison and his newspaper The Liberator.14
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