Nat Turner's Slave Revolt

The actions and goals of the rebellion were tied to Turner's indicative vision of the end of slavery. Beyond this, the intentions of the rebellion do not appear to have been sharply formulated, if Turner's confession to Thomas R. gray-haired is to be taken as the truth. The absence of a well-organized strategy on the part of Turner and his pursuit did not retard speculation that they were highly organized and had formulated a dilate plan. Pleasants (14) cites--and repudiates--rumors that the slaves involved in the revolt numbered up to 1,200 and that Turner and his followers intended to seize a ship at Norfolk and engraft sail for Africa and freedom (16). A letter from Petersburg, Virginia, printed in the in the raw York Morning Courier and Enquirer declared that plunder was the objective of the rebellion ("Extract" 23) and that the conspiracy had been planned at a mass Negro baptism at the river. It turned out that plunder, pillage, and transgress were specifically not part of the rebellion (Pleasants 15), and the number of conspirators was control to six; additional rebels were accumulated along the mop up path. As Gray (29) puts it: "His object was freedom and indiscriminate carnage his discussion . . . and seemed to be his ultimatum; for farther, he gave no clue to his design."

Slave insurrections were similarly rumored to have broken out in northeastern Carolina, southeastern Carolina, Louisiana, Delaware, and Maryland ("Insurrectionary" 78; Garrison 83). In fact, the " southeasterlyampton Tragedy," as n

Whites were puzzled about the motives of Turner. By Turner's own account, Turner's master, Joseph Travis, was "to me a kind master and placed the greatest confidence in me; in fact, I had no make believe to complain of his treatment to me" (Turner 126). Further, Turner had been reared in and had absorbed oft biblical scripture. Turner's confession cites his preoccupation with the spiritual content of Christian narrative: "I . . . studiously avoided mixing in society, and confined myself in mystery, devoting my time to fasting and prayer" (Turner 124).

How the supposed unselfishness of Turner's master and Turner's own preoccupation with Christianity could be reconciled with the murder spree seems inexplicable, until the shape of Turner's ghostly get under one's skin emerges. Spiritual experience and imagination appear to have fostered in Turner the bearing of a prophet and the conviction that he had been "ordained for some great purpose in the hands of the Almighty" (Turner 124). Whites believed that Turner's religious orientation was phony and that Turner was simply "one of those passionate scoundrels, that pretended to be divinely inspired" (Extract 22).

"Fredericksburg Arena, Cited in Alexandria Phenix Gazette, family 9, 1831." Nat Turner. Ed. Eric Foner. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971. 79.

---. Richmond Whig, September 3, 1831, southampton Affair." Nat Turner. Ed. Eric Foner. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971. 17-22.

ewspapers in both the North and South called the revolt, appears to have been highly localized in the rural woodlet country of southeastern Virginia, near the North Carolina border. The objectives of the rebels remained mysterious beyond the view that they were "stimulated exclusively by fanatical revenge, and possibly misled by some hallucination of [Turner's] imagined spirit of prophecy" (Pleasants 16).

Newspapers of the South appear to have been heartened by papers in the North that expressed "generous sympathy"
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