Nat Turner

Nat Turner was born on October 1, 1800, on the Southampton County, Virginia, plantation of Benjamin Turner, from whom he took the surname by which history knows him ^[1]. Southampton was a rural district of small farms near the North Carolina border, where enslaved people slightly outnumbered whites and cotton and corn dominated the fields ^[2]. His mother, an African-born woman often identified as Nancy, reportedly believed from his infancy that the boy was marked for some unusual purpose ^[3].

The child showed abilities that startled the adults around him. He learned to read at an early age, an accomplishment rare and often forbidden among the enslaved, and neighbors later recalled that he seemed to know things no one had taught him ^[3]. According to the account he gave after his capture, other enslaved people remarked on birthmarks and on his quick intelligence, and said he would never be of service to anyone as a slave ^[4].

Religion shaped him from the beginning. Turner absorbed the intense evangelical culture of early nineteenth-century Virginia, attending services, studying the Bible closely, and spending long stretches in prayer and fasting ^[1]. By young adulthood he was preaching to fellow enslaved people at plantation gatherings and Baptist meetings, and many in the county came to call him the Prophet ^[3].

As a young man Turner began to experience what he understood as direct communication from God. In the confession recorded before his trial, he described hearing a voice while at the plow and receiving visions of white and black spirits locked in battle, of blood on the corn, and of signs written on leaves in the woods ^[4]. He interpreted these experiences as commands to prepare for a great work.

One episode from the early 1820s reveals how completely faith governed his conduct. After running away from an overseer, Turner stayed in the woods for about thirty days, then returned voluntarily, telling astonished fellow slaves that the Spirit had ordered him back to his earthly master ^[4]. Ownership of Turner passed through several hands during these years: from Benjamin Turner to his son Samuel, then to Thomas Moore, and finally into the household of Joseph Travis, who married Moore's widow ^[1]. By 1831 Turner legally belonged to the child Putnam Moore, with Travis acting as master.

A solar eclipse in February 1831 struck Turner as the sign he had awaited. He confided his plans to a small circle of trusted men, including Henry Porter, Hark Travis, Nelson Williams, and Sam Francis ^[4]. They first fixed on July 4 as the date, but Turner fell ill and the plan was postponed. When an unusual atmospheric event in August made the sun appear bluish green over the Eastern Seaboard, Turner read it as a final summons to act ^[2].

In the early hours of August 22, 1831, Turner and roughly half a dozen followers entered the Travis farmhouse and killed the family sleeping inside, sparing no one so that no alarm could be raised ^[2]. The band then moved from farm to farm through the county, gathering horses, weapons, and recruits. At its height the force numbered somewhere between fifty and seventy men, most enslaved and a few free Black residents ^[1].

Over roughly forty-eight hours the rebels killed about fifty-five white men, women, and children, the highest death toll of any slave uprising in the history of the United States ^[1]. Turner later said his object was to strike terror and to seize the county seat of Jerusalem, where arms and ammunition were stored ^[4]. The column never reached the town. On August 23 local militia intercepted the rebels near James Parker's farm, scattering them in a brief fight, and hundreds of militiamen along with federal troops from Fortress Monroe poured into the county ^[2].

The reprisals that followed were savage and indiscriminate. Militia companies and vigilantes killed dozens of Black people in Southampton and neighboring counties, many of whom had taken no part in the revolt; some estimates of those slain without trial run to one hundred or more ^[5]. Virginia courts tried surviving rebels through the autumn, convicting and executing at least eighteen while transporting others out of the state ^[5].

Turner himself vanished. While his lieutenants were hunted down within days, he hid in dugout shelters near the Travis farm, surviving on stolen food and moving only at night ^[2]. Rumors placed him everywhere from the Dismal Swamp to Ohio, and newspapers across the country followed the manhunt. On October 30, 1831, a farmer named Benjamin Phipps discovered him in a shallow hiding hole under a fallen tree and took him at gunpoint ^[1].

Lodged in the county jail at Jerusalem, Turner gave a long statement over three days to Thomas R. Gray, a local attorney. Gray published the document within weeks as The Confessions of Nat Turner, and it remains the principal source for Turner's life, though historians continue to debate how much of its language belongs to Turner and how much to Gray ^[6]. In it Turner recounted his visions, named his confederates, and declined to express remorse, saying he did not feel guilty ^[4].

His trial on November 5, 1831, lasted a single day. Turner pleaded not guilty, telling the court he did not feel that he was, and the judge sentenced him to death ^[4]. On November 11 he was hanged in Jerusalem, the town now called Courtland, Virginia ^[1]. Contemporary accounts and later traditions hold that his body was dissected and mistreated after death, a fate common for executed rebels of the era ^[5].

The private life of Nat Turner is thinly documented, a consequence of slavery's erasure of ordinary records. He is generally believed to have married an enslaved woman named Cherry, who lived on a neighboring farm after the estate that held them both was divided, and the couple may have had children ^[3]. Because husband and wife belonged to different owners, they could not live together, an arrangement slavery imposed on countless families.

Turner's father escaped from bondage when Nat was still young, an act the son remembered and that some scholars believe shaped his own sense that slavery could be resisted ^[3]. His grandmother, to whom he was close, reinforced the religious devotion that defined him. Those who knew Turner described a man of austere habits: he avoided liquor, did not steal, never learned conjuring tricks, and held himself apart from the amusements of his peers ^[4].

Physically he was described in the 1831 fugitive notices as of middling height with broad shoulders and distinctive scars, details recorded because the state of Virginia offered a reward for his capture ^[2]. No authenticated portrait of him exists; every familiar image of Turner is a later artistic invention ^[7].

The immediate legacy of the rebellion was repression. Virginia's legislature debated gradual emancipation during the winter of 1831 to 1832 and rejected it, then joined other Southern states in tightening slave codes: banning enslaved and free Black people from preaching, restricting their movement, and criminalizing teaching them to read ^[5]. At the same time, the revolt gave new urgency to the abolitionist movement in the North, where William Lloyd Garrison's newly founded newspaper The Liberator pointed to Southampton as proof that slavery invited catastrophe ^[5].

Memory of Turner has never settled. To many white Southerners of the nineteenth century he was a fanatic and murderer; to generations of African Americans he became a symbol of resistance who chose rebellion over submission ^[8]. Writers and artists have returned to him repeatedly. William Styron's 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner won the Pulitzer Prize and provoked a famous rebuttal from Black critics, and Nate Parker's 2016 film The Birth of a Nation retold the uprising for a new audience ^[8].

Historians such as Stephen B. Oates, Kenneth S. Greenberg, and Patrick H. Breen have reconstructed the revolt and its aftermath in detail, while artifacts associated with Turner, including a Bible said to have been his, are held by the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture ^[7]. For anyone asking who was Nat Turner, the answer resists simple summary: he was a preacher, a husband, a man enslaved from birth, and the leader of an insurrection that forced the United States to confront the violence at the heart of its slave system. That is why Nat Turner facts, and the fuller Nat Turner biography behind them, still command attention nearly two centuries after his death ^[1].