![]() ![]() Rejecting the older view that slaves were docile and content, Aptheker presents slaves as dissatisfied with slavery and willing to fight for a better world. New York: International Publishers, 1974.Īptheker’s chapter on Nat Turner is at the heart of a seminal revisionist work on slavery. American Negro Slave Revolts: Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Gabriel and Others. ![]() An important reference for scholars working in the field, but sometimes overconfident in what can be known based upon the sources.Īptheker, Herbert. Although this account spends relatively little time on the revolt itself, it includes important interventions on potential familial motivations for the revolt, including the possibility that Turner decided to launch the revolt after hearing about the use of his son as collateral on a loan. The most thoroughly researched scholarly account of Southampton before and during the revolt. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County. As a part of a series on slave resistance published as the United States was headed into Civil War, Higginson 1861 provides an account of the revolt from the point of view of a New England abolitionist, while Nell 1855 and Brown 1863 are both brief early histories of the Southampton Revolt and Nat Turner written by black authors.Īllmendinger, David F., Jr. Drewry 1900 adopts an unmistakably racist point of view but contains valuable resources unavailable anywhere else. Important older accounts of the Nat Turner Revolt include Oates 1990 and Aptheker 1974. Most generally accessible short scholarly accounts of the revolt are Breen 2019 and Greenberg 2017. Allmendinger 2014 provides the most deeply researched account of the revolt, with a strong focus on documentary evidence from Southampton County produced before the revolt began. The most reliable book-length account of the revolt itself is Breen 2015. Since the revolt, Nat Turner and his legacy have been contested by many, including scholars, novelists, artists, and filmmakers. ![]() Immediately after the revolt, several southern state legislatures took up laws regulating slavery the Virginia legislature also considered and rejected a gradual emancipation scheme. Gray published this transcript as The Confessions of Nat Turner, which presented Turner’s religious motivations. Gray, a lawyer who was defense council for other slave rebels, interviewed the jailed rebel leader. Turner himself, one of the condemned, was hanged on November 11, 1831, although not before Thomas R. Of these people, nineteen were executed in Southampton, and twelve had their sentences commuted to transportation from the state of Virginia. By the time that the trials were finished the following spring, thirty slaves and one free black had been condemned to death. On August 31, 1831, trials of suspect rebels began. ![]() Worried about the possibility of a more extensive bloodbath, white leaders in Southampton, who knew that owners were compensated for the value of their slaves who had been condemned by the state, soon clamped down on the extralegal massacre of suspected rebels. Whites quickly and brutally reasserted their control over Southampton, torturing many of the accused and killing roughly three dozen black suspects without trials. By the morning of August 23, the rebels were defeated at a series of engagements and the organized phase of the revolt ended. Following this first battle, Turner tried to rally his men, something that became increasingly hard to do as more and more whites from nearby counties in Virginia and North Carolina came to Southampton. The encounter ended quickly and indecisively, but the whites had stopped the rebel advance. Some of these irregular white forces stumbled upon Turner and his men at James Parker’s farm, not far from Jerusalem, Southampton’s county seat. Many panicked, and some rallied to oppose the rebels. The revolt began in the middle of the night, August 21–22, 1831, and by the middle of the day on August 22 the rebels had killed nearly five dozen whites, including many women and children. In Southampton County, Virginia, Nat Turner and six other men launched the deadliest slave revolt in the history of the United States. ![]()
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