3/5/2023 0 Comments Blackhead signpost road![]() One story has it that she was brought to the U.S. His father is believed to have escaped slavery when Nat was a young boy. Nat Turner was born in October 1800-incidentally, the same year of Gabriel Prosser’s planned slave rebellion and the same year Denmark Vesey won his freedom. (A very useful website, has collected and collated the available documentary record of Turner’s rebellion and its aftermath.) So, with all these caveats, I will refer to Gray’s Confessions, as well as other works, in this talk. Oates in The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion (1975), “the confessions seem an authentic and reliable document.” Oates writes that the confessions are “very close” to Turner’s statements in his October 31 court interrogation, and the details correspond to the slave trial records and contemporary newspaper accounts. Many historians cast doubt on Gray’s Confessions of Nat Turner for an obvious reason: Does one really believe that this slaveowning lawyer took down the words of Nat Turner precisely, without inventions or omissions? At the same time, “When the document is viewed in historical context,” as noted by Stephen B. Gray, a Southern lawyer and ardent defender of slavery, supposedly sat down with Nat after his capture and took down his “confession” verbatim. Gray’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, The Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, VA (1831). Many of the books and articles that address Nat’s life before the rebellion base themselves on Thomas R. As Thomas Wentworth Higginson-a radical abolitionist and the commander of the first regiment of freed slaves to fight in the Civil War-wrote in an August 1861 Atlantic article, “Nat Turner’s Insurrection”: “The biographies of slaves can hardly be individualized they belong to the class.” Speaking of Nat Turner, Higginson noted that he “did not even possess a name, beyond one abrupt monosyllable,-for even the name of Turner was the master’s property.” ![]() What little documentation exists of Nat’s life consists mainly of the record of him being bought and sold. ![]() As such, no one was going to document his life. As brilliant as he was, he was a black slave living in the South. Truth be told, while the rebellion and its aftermath are well documented, including through newspaper articles at the time, we know little about Nat Turner himself. These were blows struck in the cause of black freedom and heralded the Civil War that finally smashed the slave order and emancipated the slave. We honor Nat Turner’s rebellion, as we honor John Brown’s 1859 Harpers Ferry raid. And it was met with the reactionary terror of the slaveowners, who crushed the rebellion and drowned it in blood. It was the unmistakable justice and vengeance of revolutionary terror. Before their suppression, the rebels killed up to 60 whites in the course of a few days-the highest number to die in a slave uprising in the U.S. In August of that year, an insurrection was launched by rebel slaves led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia. In 1831, American slaveowners learned what it means to have the fear of God put into them. ![]() Central Committee member Alan Wilde to the New York Spartacus Youth Club on January 28. We print below, edited for publication, the first part of a presentation given by Spartacist League/U.S. ![]() The Nat Turner Rebellion and the Fight Against Slavery ![]()
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