Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion Book

Benjamin and Elizabeth Turner, Nat's original owners in Southampton County, Virginia, were Methodists. Methodism had spread wildly across America in the late eighteenth century; and like many zealous divines before they become institutionalized, the missionary Methodist preachers pounding over the young republic's backcountry roads brought rather uncomfortable news to the converts who gathered to hear them'namely that God did not approve of their owning other people. That didn't play in the South, however, and rather than lose congregants, the Methodist elders promulgated tepid half measures: like, Methodist clergy couldn't own slaves; or, Methodist converts could own slaves, but couldn't trade in them; finally, they gave even that up, and contented themselves with encouraging Methodist slaveholders to Christianize their slaves and so prepare their souls for the Kingdom of Heaven, where the raw deal they were getting here on earth would be recompensed, sort of.

This Benjamin and Elizabeth Turner duly did, and their slaves, like those of many others, were fed a steady diet of the submission- and obedience-counseling passages from the Old Testament, along with the quietist, turn-the-other-cheek stuff from the New. Problem was, their slave boy Nat, son of a runaway father and pure-blood African mother, was something of a genius'Benjamin Turner even said Nat would be of no use to anyone as a slave. Nat somehow learned to read (no one ever figured out how), and got a hold of a Bible. Therein he found all the crazy shit his owners probably wouldn't have wanted him to know about, like the eschatological visions of the exiled Hebrew prophets'you know, the captive Israelites must smite down their oppressor'and the apocalyptic phantasmagoria of the book of Revelations. Nat Turner'brilliant, prideful, and increasingly bitter about being a slave, especially after being broken to field hand, and sold away from his wife and children'"grew to manhood with the words of the prophets roaring in his ears." Uh-oh!

Nat Turner among his fellow slaves was a lot like Crazy Horse among the Sioux'aloof, austere, given to bouts of broody introspection and solitary rambles during which he fasted himself into visions. He was an outsider, but all the more impressive for his abstention from group amusements like apple brandy and dancing; and the other slaves felt that because he had magically taught himself to read, and bore cranial bumps and birthmarks that in African tradition mark the warrior-prophet, he must represent a mystic potential worth respecting. So when he began to hear the Spirit talking to him in the fields, and discovered blood droplets on the corn ("as though it were dew from Heaven"), and find leaves marked with runic symbols, and see black spirits and white spirits battling in the sky, they believed him. To whites Turner was the object of at times uneasy curiosity'this "smart nigger" who even dared baptize and pronounce born again a white man, a neighborhood ne'er-do-well by the name of Etheldred P. Brantley'but generally they felt reassured by his obvious piety and abstemiousness, as well as by his mask of "Yessuh!" In hindsight, it seems incredible that they could have thought innocuous a man who preferred to spend his scant free time exhorting hellfire, or fasting and praying alone in the woods. Don't fear the drunken slave, he'll be asleep soon enough, fear the slave who believes alcohol incompatible with his holy mission.

So during the late 1820s Nat was allowed considerable freedom of movement among the county's farms, to preach at Sunday slave "praise meetings." These rambles not only allowed him to sow dissension among his fellow slaves and identify which of them seemed suited to his plan, but also to gain a tactical knowledge of the county's topography, and, ominously, to note the cruel and kind among the masters and overseers. On Saturday, August 13, 1831, there occurred some sort of atmospheric disturbance that dimmed the sun and produced a visible black spot on its surface. This event caused consternation up and down the eastern seaboard, from South Carolina to New York, and many in the religious young republic feared the end was nigh…such fears were complete nonsense everywhere but in Southampton County, where Nat Turner saw the sun spot as the "black hand of Jehovah," an unambiguous sign that it was time to launch the backwoods Judgment Day he had been preparing: "It was plain to me that the Saviour was about to lay down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and the great Day of Judgment was at band."

The next Sunday night, with the whites gorged and drowsy from a day of convivial barbeque, Nat and his followers burst from the woods. At first they eschewed firearms in the interest of stealth; with windmilling axe blows, jugular daggers and, later, musket volleys, they destroyed some 60 whites'men, women, babes in cradle, a schoolyardful of children decapitated and left in "one bloody heap." As Turner's men neared the uprising's vague objective, the town of Jerusalem, Virginia (Holy Land place-names add what is perhaps a gratuitous touch to this already Boschian tale), they acquired guns, horses, plentiful liquor, and a semblance of tactical disposition:

Nat placed his twenty most dependable fighters in front and sent them galloping down on the homesteads before anybody could escape. The rest of his troops moved helter-skelter behind the advance cavalry, some guarding Negro hostages, others drinking brandy. For some unknown reason, Nat stationed himself in the rear of his strung-out forces, riding alone again, lost in his thoughts and his prayers.

After personally claiming but a single victim'a teenage girl he chased across a field, overtook, then brained with a fence rail'Turner rode apart, probably to look for further signs and direction from the Almighty, but usually caught up his men, "sometimes got in sight in time to see the work of death completed," he later said, and "viewed the mangled bodies as they lay, in silent satisfaction, and immediately started in quest of other victims." He had the idea that his massacres were prelude to the apocalypse, but obliterating several families only served to instigate the well-armed militia company that attacked and scattered his band on its second day of marauding. Turner fled back into the woods, where he hid out for two months before his discovery, trial, and hanging. He went to the gallows unrepentant and self-commanding, confident in Christ-parallels, ready for that hereafter.

Before his execution, as he languished, "loaded with chains," in the pit of the gaol, Turner was approached by a local lawyer who wanted to secure an avowal that the killing spree was not part of a coordinated interstate uprising, the specter of which was causing many summary massacres of slaves and free blacks by cagey white mobs in Virginia and North Carolina. Turner went on record to make such an avowal, and in the process dictated his famous Confessions'autobiographical essay, delusive religious testament, and a powerful contribution to the debate, already then in progress, about the uprising's political meaning and consequences, and the future, at least in Virginia, of the South's peculiar domestic institution.

The ferocious rage, the absolutely ruthless nature and extent of Turner's murders shattered forever the Upper South slaveholders' pretentions to a benevolent, mildly paternal slavery'the whole propaganda of happy darkies strumming banjos in the sweet summer dusk, contented after a day of honest Christian toil redemptive of their ancestral heathenhood. Violence like Turner's is the resort of the desperate and the vengeful, not the contended. It was therefore imperative that the proslavery authorities, in defending the institution from Virginians who in Turner's wake pointed out its great danger, to label Turner an aberrant slave (which he was, of course, but not exclusively so'he had disciples after all, and many spontaneous joiners) and a religious fanatic…and a religious fanatic he surely is by our lights, but not by the standards of his time. Set next to the behavior of his owners, Turner's actually looks quite normal, an idea he makes plain in his unrepentant confessions; where they found biblical justification of slavery, he found biblical justification of the murder of slaveholders. As Lincoln would write in his Second Inaugural Address, Americans on both sides of the great slavery war read the same Bible, invoked the same God while spilling each other's blood.

I would place Nat Turner among the singular black men whose powers, Du Bois wrote, are seen, "throughout history," to "flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness." The tale of Turner's intellectual life is obviously one of isolation, impoverishment, and grotesque warping; nonetheless, in it we see powers equal to the attainment of literacy with a only a smuggled grammar'to the assimilation of classical rhetoric while being worked and whipped like a mule'to a revelation of the radicalism of the slaveholders' cherished Bible, and the winnowing of murderous propaganda from the text meant to pacify and humble him. In his confession he says God told him to slay his enemies "with their own weapons."


Poised against the Mayflower is the slave ship'manned by Yankees and Englishmen'bringing another race to try against the New World, that will prove its tenacity and ability to thrive by seizing upon the Christian religion…'William Carlos Williams

And about this time I had a vision'and I saw white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened'the thunder rolled in the Heavens, and blood flowed in the streams…'Nat Turner


Stephen B. Oates shows up in Ken Burns' The Civil War looking and sounding like Ned Flanders with a southern accent and fire in his belly'mustachioed, bespectacled and be-sweatered, righteously arraigning command decisions of the Gettysburg campaign ("Lee had come by Gettysburg to believe in his invincibility and that of his men, and it was his doom"). His is a smoothly integrated, Cattonesque narrative style (Catton supplies an epigraph), the authorial emphases and particulars of presentation defended in the extensive essayistic endnotes. I found it went down all too easy at times. I for one like it when historians work through interpretations before the reader, make a performance of the sifting and assembly of atrocious fragments, with lots of bewildered shrugs and rueful sighing; as an archivist'bored sentry over page-turning patrons'maybe I like to see the documentary grunt work show up in the prose. But Oates is still quite effective'even gives a nod to modernistic meta-history with an epilogic first-person account of a visit to Southampton County, to the farms still standing'and this book will make your hair stand up. There's a graphic novel based on Turner's revolt that is considered one of the most violent ever published, and all despite never straying from the historical record. Not sure why Oates didn't append Turner's Confessions, they're not that long: