Nat Turner
American slave who leads a slave rebellion
1800 CE to 1831 CE
Nathaniel "Nat" Turner (October 2, 1800 – November 11, 1831) is an American slave who leads a slave rebellion in Virginia on August 21, 1831 that results in 60 white deaths and at least 100 black deaths.
He gathers supporters in Southampton County, Virginia.
Turner is convicted, sentenced to death, and hanged.
In the aftermath, the state executes 56 blacks accused of being part of Turner's slave rebellion.
Two hundred blacks are also beaten and killed by white militias and mobs reacting with violence.
Across Virginia and other southern states, state legislators pass new laws prohibiting education of slaves and free blacks, restricting rights of assembly and other civil rights for free blacks, and requiring white ministers to be present at black worship services.
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Nat Turner's slave rebellion, the bloodiest in United States history, breaks out in Southampton County, Virginia.
Born in 1800 to an African native who transmitted a passionate hatred of slavery to her son, Turner had been the property of a prosperous small-plantation owner in remote Southampton County, Virginia.
He had learned to read from one of his master's sons, and he had eagerly absorbed intensive religious training.
Sold in the early 1820s to a neighboring farmer of small means, his religious ardor tended to approach fanaticism during the following decade.
Seeing himself as chosen by God to lead his people out of bondage, Turner has begun to exert a powerful influence on many of the nearby slaves, who call him “the Prophet.”
In 1831, shortly after he had been sold again—this time to a craftsman named Joseph Travis—a sign in the form of an eclipse of the Sun had caused Turner to believe that the hour to strike was near.
He plans to capture the armory at the county seat, Jerusalem, and, having gathered many recruits, to press on to the Dismal Swamp, thirty miles (forty-eight kilometers) to the east, where capture would be difficult.
On the night of August 21, together with seven trusted fellow slaves, he launches a campaign of total annihilation, murdering Travis and his family in their sleep and then setting forth on a bloody march toward Jerusalem.
Fifty-seven white people have been ruthlessly slain in two days and nights.
Turner's insurrection is crippled by lack of discipline among his followers and by the fact that only seventy-five blacks rally to his cause.
Armed resistance from the local whites and the arrival of the state militia—a total force of three thousand men—provides the final crushing blow.
On August 24, only a few miles from the county seat the militia disperses the insurgents, killing at least forty, and probably twice that.
Many innocent slaves are massacred by vengeful slave owners in the hysteria that follows Turner's rebellion, which puts an end to the self-delusional white Southern myth that slaves are either contented with their lot or too servile to mount an armed revolt.
Any significant southern sympathy for abolitionism now evaporates.
Turner had eluded his pursuers for six weeks but had finally been captured in early October.
He is tried and hanged on November 11, 1831; sixteen of his followers are executed also. (In Southampton County, black people will come to measure time from “Nat's Fray,” or “Old Nat's War.” For many years in black churches throughout the country, the name Jerusalem will refer not only to the Bible but also covertly to the place where the rebel slave had met his death.)