Maximus Rex
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Nat Turner, Slave Rebel and Lightning Rod, cont'd
But the killing had just begun. During the approximately 40 hours of the revolt, between 60 and 80 blacks had killed between 55 and 65 whites. In the 10 days that followed, whites killed as many as several hundred blacks, some slaves, some free, many of whom had had nothing to do with the rebellion. During this time Turner hid out near his owner’s farm, until he was captured on October 30 and jailed in Jerusalem, the town he had hoped to overthrow two months before. By then military officials had ordered the white militias to desist, and the 50 suspects who had survived the revolt and subsequent weeks were assigned lawyers and tried in court. A jury acquitted or dismissed charges against 32, exiled 14 from Virginia, and condemned 18 to death.
Turner admitted to killing only one person, a teenage girl, and pleaded not guilty (according to court records, he told his lawyer he “did not feel” guilty). One witness remembered the judge delivering the following sentence: “The judgment of the Court is, that you be taken hence to the jail from whence you came, thence to the place of execution, and on Friday next, between the hours of 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. be hung by the neck until you are dead! dead! dead! And may the Lord have mercy upon your soul.”
The official court records are more subdued, noting that on November 11, “between the hours of ten o’clock in the forenoon and four o’clock in the afternoon [Turner] is to be taken by the Sheriff to the usual place of execution and there be hanged by the neck until dead. And the Court values said slave to the sum of three hundred and seventy five dollars.”
And so, 174 years ago this morning, Nat Turner, dressed in rags, was led to a gnarled oak tree northeast of Jerusalem. By most accounts he was calm. The Norfolk Herald reported that “He betrayed no emotion, but appeared to be utterly reckless of the awful fate that awaited him, and even hurried the executioner in the performance of his duty.” A crowd had gathered, and the sheriff asked Turner if he had anything to say. He replied only, “I’m ready.” After the rope was thrown over a branch and he jerked into the air, “not a limb nor a muscle was observed to move,” the Petersburg Intelligencer reported.
Thus Nat Turner died, only to be reincarnated as a lightning rod. Over the next century and more he would be appropriated by slaveholders and abolitionists, New Dealers and supremacists, and segregationists, passive resisters, and Black Panthers, as either guiding hero or incarnation of an inferior race. Each put forth a different Nat Turner. Just as personal perspective clouded all the historical sources on him, personal perspective colored how that evidence would be interpreted. Nervous slaveholders allayed their fears by assuming he was a religious fanatic unconnected to larger conspiracy or, conversely, the puppet of Northern abolitionists. Postbellum whites remembered him as crazed and motivated by plunder or personal vengeance. To twentieth-century blacks, those characterizations downplayed the horrors of slavery, wrote off black anger as insanity, and disconnected him from the through-line of black history—the long battle for freedom.
Tensions came to a head in 1967, when the novelist William Styron published his “meditation on history,” The Confessions of Nat Turner. The white Virginian, with more than a little audacity, wrote in the first person from Turner’s perspective, inventing numerous fictional details. His book infuriated many in the civil rights community, who deplored as racist clichés his assertions that Turner was attracted to the white teenager he killed and was too panicked and weak-willed to kill anyone else. Supporters of black militance accused him of constructing a Turner with no resemblance to the real man, but in their quest for an unwavering revolutionary hero, they had done the same. Styron indeed ignored or mistook many elements of the historical record, but in elevating his protagonist to a paragon of the revolutionary spirit, Styron’s opponents robbed the rebel of fallible humanity and, by refusing to believe he could hesitate, may have done him a disservice by making his quest seem easier than it was.
In the immediate aftermath of the rebellion, a different debate raged in the Virginia House of Delegates. Governor John Floyd, a slaveholder, believed that statewide abolition was the only way to prevent future rebellions, and he wrote in his diary, “I will not rest until slavery is abolished in Virginia.” The legislature seriously considered many proposals for the gradual end of the institution, including one that would have freed blacks at age 21 for transportation to Africa. But all were defeated, and in the end the legislature responded to the rebellion by tightening control over enslaved and free blacks, barring all of them from preaching or assembling without white chaperones.
Some lawmakers were satisfied that their safety was now guaranteed, but Thomas J. Randolph, grandson of Thomas Jefferson, was not so sure. He had advanced his own plan of gradual emancipation, but he now predicted from the floor of the House of Delegates, “There is one circumstance to which we are to look as inevitable in the fullness of time; a dissolution of this Union. God grant it may not happen in our time, or that of our children; but sir, it must come, sooner or later; and when it does come, border war follows it, as certain as the night follows the day.”
—Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.
But the killing had just begun. During the approximately 40 hours of the revolt, between 60 and 80 blacks had killed between 55 and 65 whites. In the 10 days that followed, whites killed as many as several hundred blacks, some slaves, some free, many of whom had had nothing to do with the rebellion. During this time Turner hid out near his owner’s farm, until he was captured on October 30 and jailed in Jerusalem, the town he had hoped to overthrow two months before. By then military officials had ordered the white militias to desist, and the 50 suspects who had survived the revolt and subsequent weeks were assigned lawyers and tried in court. A jury acquitted or dismissed charges against 32, exiled 14 from Virginia, and condemned 18 to death.
Turner admitted to killing only one person, a teenage girl, and pleaded not guilty (according to court records, he told his lawyer he “did not feel” guilty). One witness remembered the judge delivering the following sentence: “The judgment of the Court is, that you be taken hence to the jail from whence you came, thence to the place of execution, and on Friday next, between the hours of 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. be hung by the neck until you are dead! dead! dead! And may the Lord have mercy upon your soul.”
The official court records are more subdued, noting that on November 11, “between the hours of ten o’clock in the forenoon and four o’clock in the afternoon [Turner] is to be taken by the Sheriff to the usual place of execution and there be hanged by the neck until dead. And the Court values said slave to the sum of three hundred and seventy five dollars.”
And so, 174 years ago this morning, Nat Turner, dressed in rags, was led to a gnarled oak tree northeast of Jerusalem. By most accounts he was calm. The Norfolk Herald reported that “He betrayed no emotion, but appeared to be utterly reckless of the awful fate that awaited him, and even hurried the executioner in the performance of his duty.” A crowd had gathered, and the sheriff asked Turner if he had anything to say. He replied only, “I’m ready.” After the rope was thrown over a branch and he jerked into the air, “not a limb nor a muscle was observed to move,” the Petersburg Intelligencer reported.
Thus Nat Turner died, only to be reincarnated as a lightning rod. Over the next century and more he would be appropriated by slaveholders and abolitionists, New Dealers and supremacists, and segregationists, passive resisters, and Black Panthers, as either guiding hero or incarnation of an inferior race. Each put forth a different Nat Turner. Just as personal perspective clouded all the historical sources on him, personal perspective colored how that evidence would be interpreted. Nervous slaveholders allayed their fears by assuming he was a religious fanatic unconnected to larger conspiracy or, conversely, the puppet of Northern abolitionists. Postbellum whites remembered him as crazed and motivated by plunder or personal vengeance. To twentieth-century blacks, those characterizations downplayed the horrors of slavery, wrote off black anger as insanity, and disconnected him from the through-line of black history—the long battle for freedom.
Tensions came to a head in 1967, when the novelist William Styron published his “meditation on history,” The Confessions of Nat Turner. The white Virginian, with more than a little audacity, wrote in the first person from Turner’s perspective, inventing numerous fictional details. His book infuriated many in the civil rights community, who deplored as racist clichés his assertions that Turner was attracted to the white teenager he killed and was too panicked and weak-willed to kill anyone else. Supporters of black militance accused him of constructing a Turner with no resemblance to the real man, but in their quest for an unwavering revolutionary hero, they had done the same. Styron indeed ignored or mistook many elements of the historical record, but in elevating his protagonist to a paragon of the revolutionary spirit, Styron’s opponents robbed the rebel of fallible humanity and, by refusing to believe he could hesitate, may have done him a disservice by making his quest seem easier than it was.
In the immediate aftermath of the rebellion, a different debate raged in the Virginia House of Delegates. Governor John Floyd, a slaveholder, believed that statewide abolition was the only way to prevent future rebellions, and he wrote in his diary, “I will not rest until slavery is abolished in Virginia.” The legislature seriously considered many proposals for the gradual end of the institution, including one that would have freed blacks at age 21 for transportation to Africa. But all were defeated, and in the end the legislature responded to the rebellion by tightening control over enslaved and free blacks, barring all of them from preaching or assembling without white chaperones.
Some lawmakers were satisfied that their safety was now guaranteed, but Thomas J. Randolph, grandson of Thomas Jefferson, was not so sure. He had advanced his own plan of gradual emancipation, but he now predicted from the floor of the House of Delegates, “There is one circumstance to which we are to look as inevitable in the fullness of time; a dissolution of this Union. God grant it may not happen in our time, or that of our children; but sir, it must come, sooner or later; and when it does come, border war follows it, as certain as the night follows the day.”
—Christine Gibson is a former editor at American Heritage magazine.
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