Reviews for Silent Trumpets of Justice: Integration's Failure in Prince Edward County

The average rating for Silent Trumpets of Justice: Integration's Failure in Prince Edward County based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-09-29 00:00:00 Jay Vendubois In 1831 Nat Turner led the largest slave uprising in American history, murdering 60 white men, women and children with a mob of slaves in Virginia. Some dude went and interviewed him in prison, and this claims to be his first-person account of his life and revolt. The motives of the dude - a white slaveowner named Thomas Ruffin Gray - have been questioned quite a bit, as has the authenticity of the whole thing. There were a bunch of witnesses to the confession, but of course none who were sympathetic to Nat Turner's mission to murder all their babies. I like this piece about the Confessions. (Like any discussion of this primary source, it gets a bit wrapped up in Styron's Pulitzer-winning 1967 The Confessions of Nat Turner.) We're unlikely to get a definitive answer about this, but the tendency has been to more or less take it at its word. It feels to me like Gray has written down what Turner told him. (Along with a few "Holy shit!"-style asides.) Turner, who taught himself to read at a young age and comes off as highly intelligent, claims that God communicates with him and ordered him to fight; what he describes matches pretty well with schizophrenia. On the other hand, it also matches pretty well with God. "Go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child," He tells Samuel in 15:3-4. When asked, "Do you not find yourself mistaken now?" Turner answers, "Was not Christ crucified. And by signs in the heavens that it would make known to me when I should commence the great work." It's a weird sentence structure, but you get the idea: only God knows the difference between a prophet and a schizophrenic. Most of Turner's confession is a step-by-step, almost laconic description of the revolt itself. "Twas my object to carry terror and devastation wherever we went," he helpfully explains. As he goes he picks up a crowd of slaves, sometimes drunk, who (according to him) carried out most of the bloody work: "I sometimes got in sight in time to see the work of death completed, viewed the mangled bodies as they lay, in silent satisfaction, and immediately started in quest of other victims." It's disturbing stuff. Worth reading? Sure, yeah; it's certainly not boring, and it's very short. As a (probable) primary source about the effects and events of slavery, it's interesting. These actions are of course terrible, but then so is the institution of slavery that inspired them; they were technically a response in kind, so if you believe in an eye for an eye, you should have no problem with Nat Turner. It seems to me like we have to judge slavery first, and Turner's response to it second. History has decided that Turner's rebellion was a bad idea: it led directly to the retributive murder of 200 slaves and the passage of new, even more restrictive laws prohibiting education and assembly, among other things. John Brown's rebellion in 1860, on the other hand, is given credit as a spark for the Civil War. And I don't know, maybe Brown's timing was more fortuitous and it's nice that he didn't murder any babies, but in general I'd say that both events were inevitable reactions to slavery. Turner pleaded not guilty to his charges, "saying to his counsel, that he did not feel so." Fair enough.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-09-03 00:00:00 Gerarde Nicholas While reading this short pamphlet what occurred to me frequently was the question of its authenticity. Not that I wondered whether Nat Turner led a slave uprising in Virgina that resulted in several whites being slaughtered and many slaves, both those involved and those not involved in the uprising itself, being killed in retaliation by gangs of frightened slaveholders. But, rather, whether these "confessions" of Nat Turner, supposedly written down accurately by a white lawyer while Turner was in prison awaiting execution, are really Turner's words or not. Since this pamphlet contains the only information we'll likely ever have about Turner (primary evidence, that is), an answer to this question is unlikely. I just find it interesting that Turner supposedly suffered from "religious mania" and attributes his uprising to this source: he heard the voice of God or an angel tell him to do this (he was insane, in other words). Isn't it more likely that the inhumanity of the system caused a slave uprising (which is perfectly understandable) and that the white establishment, afraid of encouraging a similarly successful repetition (not to mention fueling the fires of Northern abolitionists by showing that slaves were actually NOT happy and singing people loving their masters) then manufactured some cock and bull story of one insane slave who led a revolt? Part of my ambivalent acceptance of this theory derives, in part, from the text of the "confessions," during which it appears that Turner "led" very little in terms of actual killing or action: during many (perhaps most of the killings) in the text, Turner was absent or not involved. I don't know. A historical curiosity, perhaps, but little of substantive value here.