Nat Turner's Rebellion

Based on Wikipedia: Nat Turner's Rebellion

The Preacher Who Read the Sky

On February 12, 1831, an enslaved preacher in Southampton County, Virginia looked up at the sun and saw a sign from God. An annular solar eclipse—where the moon passes directly in front of the sun but doesn't quite cover it, leaving a ring of fire visible around the edges—crossed the southeastern United States that day. Nat Turner saw something else entirely: a Black man's hand reaching over the sun.

Six months later, Turner would lead the deadliest slave rebellion in American history. Between 55 and 65 white people would die over 48 hours. In retaliation, white militias and mobs would kill as many as 120 Black people, most of whom had nothing to do with the uprising. And the reverberations would reshape American slavery itself, tightening its grip even as it accelerated the forces that would eventually destroy it.

Lonnie Bunch, the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, has called Nat Turner's rebellion "probably the most significant uprising in American history." To understand why requires understanding not just what happened in those August days, but what it meant—to the enslaved, to the enslavers, and to the nation hurtling toward civil war.

A Man Who Could Read

Turner was unusual among the enslaved. He was literate. He was a preacher. And he possessed a fervent belief that God had chosen him for a divine mission.

In the early nineteenth century, the ability to read was itself an act of resistance for an enslaved person. Slaveholders understood that literacy could be dangerous—it allowed access to abolitionist writings, enabled secret communication, and undermined the ideology that Black people were intellectually inferior and naturally suited for bondage. Turner's education marked him as exceptional in his community and gave him tools that would prove essential to his planning.

For years, Turner had been "digesting" a plan for revolt, according to his wife Cherry. She knew his most secret plans and papers. The couple's trust was absolute, and that trust would later be brutally tested when captors beat and tortured Cherry trying to extract information about her husband's whereabouts.

Turner communicated his intentions to a small circle of trusted fellow slaves: Henry, Hark, Nelson, and Sam. All his initial recruits came from his own neighborhood, and they faced the challenge of coordinating without revealing their plot. Some historians believe they used particular songs to summon conspirators to meetings in the woods—a practice of encoded communication that would echo through Black American history, from the spirituals that guided escaping slaves to the double meanings embedded in blues and jazz.

Reading Signs in the Heavens

Turner watched the sky for signals. After the February eclipse, he planned to launch his rebellion on Independence Day, July 4, 1831. The date was no accident—the bitter irony of enslaved people striking for their freedom on the day America celebrated its own liberty would have been unmistakable. But illness forced Turner to postpone.

Then, on August 13, something strange happened. The Virginia sun turned bluish-green.

Modern scientists believe this atmospheric disturbance resulted from a volcanic eruption thousands of miles away. Ferdinandea Island, a volcanic island off the coast of Sicily, had erupted, sending a plume of ash and gas into the atmosphere that filtered sunlight across the Atlantic. Turner knew nothing of Sicilian volcanoes. What he saw was a divine signal.

One week later, on August 21, the rebellion began.

Forty-Eight Hours

The rebels started with knives, hatchets, and blunt instruments. Firearms would have drawn too much attention during the planning stages. They began at Turner's slaveholder's home, killing the family, then moved systematically from house to house—freeing slaves, recruiting supporters, and killing every white person they encountered.

Turner was explicit about the strategy: "kill all the white people." But this wasn't mindless violence. It was calculated terror designed to achieve specific goals. Turner later explained that "indiscriminate slaughter was not their intention after they attained a foothold, and was resorted to in the first instance to strike terror and alarm." Once the rebellion had established itself, Turner planned to spare women and children, and even men who stopped resisting.

The rebels also showed selective mercy from the start. They bypassed some poor white homes because, as Turner put it, those inhabitants "thought no better of themselves than they did of negroes." And they carefully avoided the Giles Reese plantation, likely because Turner's wife and children lived there. Even in the midst of violent revolution, Turner was trying to protect his family.

The force grew rapidly. What began with a handful of trusted conspirators expanded to over 70 enslaved and free Black people, some on horseback. As they traveled, they collected weapons from the homes they attacked and recruited new members. The rebellion was snowballing.

Turner himself killed only one person directly: Margaret Whitehead, whom he struck with a fence post. The confession he later gave to attorney Thomas Gray focused on this single killing, though Turner clearly bore responsibility for orchestrating all of the violence.

Suppression and Slaughter

The state militia crushed the rebellion on the morning of August 23, at a place called Belmont Plantation. The militia had twice the rebels' manpower and three companies of artillery. Within two days, additional forces arrived—detachments from Navy ships in Norfolk, militias from neighboring Virginia counties, militias from North Carolina. The rebellion was over.

But the killing had just begun.

What followed was a frenzy of white terror that far exceeded the rebellion's death toll. Militiamen beheaded Black people suspected of involvement and mounted their severed heads on poles at crossroads as warnings. A local road became known as "Blackhead Signpost Road." The editor of the Richmond Whig described "the slaughter of many blacks without trial and under circumstances of great barbarity."

Rumors spiraled wildly. Reports reached North Carolina of slave "armies" marching on highways, burning towns, massacring white inhabitants, advancing on the state capital. None of it was true. But the panic was real, and it fueled violence against Black people on the flimsiest pretenses.

A militia company from Hertford County, North Carolina reportedly killed forty Black people in a single day. They also took $23 and a gold watch from the dead—an act their own commander condemned, not because of the killing, but because stealing from dead slaves was "tantamount to theft from the White owners."

The retaliatory killing continued for two weeks before military commanders ordered it stopped. A general named Eppes issued orders expressing "deepest sorrow" that anyone thought such atrocities necessary, and warning that no further violence would be permitted. By then, historians estimate militias and mobs had killed as many as 120 Black people, the vast majority of whom had no connection to the rebellion.

The Hunt for Turner

Nat Turner escaped.

For approximately ten weeks, he evaded capture while remaining in Southampton County. His survival was remarkable. For the first six weeks, he hid in a depression in the earth beneath a fallen tree, leaving only "in the dead of night" to find water. For two more weeks, he crept out at night to eavesdrop on the neighborhood, gathering intelligence about the search for him, returning to his hiding place before dawn. The final two weeks, he was "pursued almost incessantly" after being discovered by a dog.

Meanwhile, authorities tortured his wife Cherry, beating her in attempts to learn Turner's location. They seized papers she had kept after his escape—possibly journal entries Turner had written.

On October 30, a farmer named Benjamin Phipps discovered Turner hiding in that depression beneath the fallen tree. The next day, around one in the afternoon, Turner arrived at the prison in Jerusalem, Virginia—a town name that must have resonated bitterly for a man who believed he was on a divine mission.

Trial and Execution

While awaiting trial, Turner confessed to attorney Thomas Gray. Gray was a slavery apologist who would later publish Turner's confessions as a pamphlet, but his role as Turner's interviewer has made his account the primary historical document about the rebellion—however unreliable.

Turner was tried on November 5, 1831, for "conspiring to rebel and making insurrection." He was convicted and sentenced to death. Six days later, he was hanged in Jerusalem, Virginia.

What happened to his body reveals something about the terror Turner had inspired. According to some accounts, he was beheaded after death to deter further rebellion. His body was dissected and flayed. His skin was made into souvenir purses. Sixty-six years later, in 1897, Virginia newspapers reported that a doctor in Toano, Virginia was still using Turner's skeleton as a medical specimen.

The trials of Turner's alleged co-conspirators produced varied results. Thirty enslaved people were convicted: eighteen were hanged, twelve were sold out of state. Fifteen were acquitted. Of five free Black people tried, four were acquitted and one was hanged.

The Tightening Grip

The rebellion's aftermath transformed slavery in America.

Because Turner was educated and a preacher, Southern legislatures drew a direct line between literacy, religion, and insurrection. New laws swept across slave states. Teaching enslaved people to read and write became criminal in every slave state except Maryland, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Free Black people lost rights of assembly and other civil liberties. All worship services for Black people now required a licensed white minister to be present.

The logic was clear and brutal: if an educated, religious enslaved person could organize a rebellion, then education and independent religious practice must be suppressed. Knowledge itself was dangerous.

Virginia's General Assembly debated the future of slavery in the spring following the rebellion. Some delegates urged gradual emancipation, arguing that slavery itself was the source of such violence. They lost. Thomas Roderick Dew, president of the College of William and Mary and Virginia's leading intellectual, published a pamphlet defending "the wisdom and benevolence of slavery, and the folly of its abolition."

This response—doubling down rather than reconsidering—characterized the South's trajectory in the decades before the Civil War. Turner's rebellion didn't weaken slavery; it hardened it. Southern states criminalized possession of abolitionist publications. Some Virginians wanted to remove all Black people from entire regions of the state or deport them entirely.

The War of Interpretation

Thomas Gray's pamphlet, "The Confessions of Nat Turner," sold between 40,000 and 50,000 copies—an enormous number for 1831. It became the primary source about the rebellion, but it was immediately controversial.

The Richmond Enquirer published a review noting a suspicious problem: the language attributed to Turner was "far superior to what Nat Turner could have employed." Parts were "eloquently and classically expressed." This, the reviewer complained, "is calculated to cast some shade of doubt over the authenticity of the narrative, and to give the Bandit a character for intelligence which he does not deserve."

The reviewer's concern is revealing. He wasn't worried that Gray had fabricated Turner's words—he was worried that the pamphlet made Turner sound too intelligent. The ideology of slavery required Black people to be intellectually inferior. An eloquent, thoughtful rebel undermined the entire system's justification.

Modern historians, particularly David F. Allmendinger Jr., have questioned how much of Gray's account actually represents Turner's voice and how much reflects Gray's own interpretations, biases, and literary embellishments. We may never know exactly what Turner believed or said. His story reaches us filtered through the pen of a man who defended the system Turner died fighting.

Two Legacies

White Southerners remembered Turner as, in the words of one historian, "a symbol of terrorism and violent retribution." Images circulated showing armed Black men attacking white women and children. These images "haunted White southerners and showed slave owners how vulnerable they were."

The fear was productive for slavery's defenders. It generated the ideology of slavery as "a positive good"—not a necessary evil, not an economic expedient, but a moral institution that civilized Black people and maintained social order. Southern writers promoted a paternalistic ideal of improved Christian treatment of slaves, arguing that kind masters would prevent rebellions. These arguments were collected in "The Pro-Slavery Argument, As Maintained by the Most Distinguished Writers of the Southern States," published in 1853.

This wasn't just defensive rationalization. It was a hardening of ideology that made compromise increasingly impossible and civil war increasingly inevitable.

African Americans remembered Turner differently.

James H. Harris, a historian of the Black church, argues that Turner's rebellion "marked the turning point in the black struggle for liberation." Turner believed, in Harris's interpretation, that "only a cataclysmic act could convince the architects of a violent social order that violence begets violence."

In 1843, twelve years after the rebellion, a former slave and abolitionist named Henry Highland Garnet addressed the National Negro Convention. He called Nat Turner "patriotic" and predicted that "future generations will remember him among the noble." Garnet was speaking to an audience of free Black Americans in the North, many of whom had themselves escaped slavery or had family members still enslaved. For them, Turner was not a terrorist but a resistance hero who had avenged the suffering of Africans and African Americans.

The Ripples Spread

The rebellion's effects reached far beyond Virginia.

Two weeks after the uprising, William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper The Liberator published "The Insurrection," analyzing the rebellion. A week later, the paper printed excerpts from a letter warning that many Southerners believed The Liberator had inspired the revolt. If Garrison ever traveled South, the letter said, "he would not be permitted to live long... he would be taken away, and no one is the wiser for it."

The threat was credible. Southerners were searching for explanations, and outside agitators made a convenient target. Never mind that Turner's planning predated The Liberator's founding, or that Turner's motivations were religious rather than political, or that an enslaved preacher in rural Virginia was unlikely to have access to a Boston newspaper. The South needed someone to blame besides the institution of slavery itself.

Even in the North, the rebellion sparked backlash. A proposal to establish a college for African Americans in New Haven, Connecticut was overwhelmingly rejected in what became known as the New Haven Excitement. The fear of educated Black people—the same fear that drove Southern literacy bans—reached into supposedly free states.

The Questions That Remain

What should we make of Nat Turner today?

The rebellion raises questions that remain uncomfortable almost two centuries later. Turner and his followers killed children. They killed women. They killed people whose only crime was being white in a slave society. The violence was deliberate, strategic, and—Turner believed—divinely commanded.

But Turner lived in a society that had enslaved him from birth, that claimed ownership of his body, that could sell his wife and children at any moment, that denied him the basic humanity that the Declaration of Independence claimed was self-evident. He lived in a society that maintained itself through systematic violence far exceeding anything he inflicted in two days. The institution of slavery killed millions of people over centuries, through overwork, disease, punishment, family separation, and despair.

Turner's rebellion killed 55 to 65 people. The retaliation killed 120. The institution they were all fighting over would kill hundreds of thousands more in the Civil War that ended it.

The rebellion also revealed something slavery's defenders didn't want to see: that enslaved people were not content with their condition, were not naturally suited for bondage, would not remain passive forever. Turner proved that an educated, religious enslaved person could organize sophisticated resistance. The South's response—banning education, restricting religion, tightening control—acknowledged the threat even as it denied the humanity that made resistance meaningful.

Turner read the sky for signs. He believed God had chosen him. He waited years for the right moment. When he saw the sun turn green, he acted. Whether we call him patriot or terrorist, prophet or murderer, depends largely on where we stand in relation to the system he fought.

What's harder to deny is that Nat Turner's rebellion mattered. It shaped how Americans thought about slavery, freedom, violence, and race. It haunted the South until the Civil War and echoed through the civil rights movement a century later. It remains, as Lonnie Bunch said, probably the most significant uprising in American history.

The preacher who read the sky is still asking us to look up.