![]() That “great purpose” began to reveal itself, Turner says, in whisperings from “the spirit” as he worked at his plow. This precocious act of divination, along with his obvious intelligence and “certain marks” on his head and chest, set Turner apart in the eyes of his fellow-slaves, in the service of “some great purpose.” He tells Gray, “Having soon discovered to be great, I must appear so, and therefore studiously avoided mixing in society, and wrapped myself in mystery, devoting my time to fasting and prayer.” ![]() Turner’s mother, overhearing him, was astonished: the story was true, and it told of a time before Nat’s birth. He starts by relating how one day, at the age of three or four, while playing with other slave children, he had begun to tell a story. One wonders what was altered or abridged, but Turner’s voice-straightforward and calm, stoic and unrepentant-is too strange to have been wholly invented. “I determined for the gratification of public curiosity to commit his statements to writing, and publish them, with little or no variation, from his own words,” he wrote. Gray published the story of an encounter he had with Turner in the jail in Jerusalem. How many of their own slaves were hatching similar plans? Why had Turner carried out so awful an operation? And what could the community do to forestall a reoccurrence?Īmid this atmosphere of panic, a Virginia attorney named Thomas R. ![]() But the county’s slaveholding citizens were still afraid. His corpse was likely dismembered or sold for dissection. Nat Turner, the last to feel the rope, was hanged on November 11th. Eighteen were publicly executed for their crimes more than a hundred other slaves were killed in reprisal. The rebels were captured and tried in Jerusalem, a few miles from where the rebellion was put down. In the summer of 1831, Nat Turner’s slave insurrection ripped through Southampton County, Virginia, leaving scores of white men, women, and children dead. “The Birth of a Nation” arrives amid a resurgence in movies about slavery.
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