Discovery of Nat Turner. Illustration from the Encyclopedia of Virginia, by William Henry Shelton (1840-1932) • WIKIPEDIA COMMONS Slavery in the American South paints the picture of a brutal and inhumane system, where the plantation masters seemed to maintain control of the situation and bring relative stability. In reality, black slaves never completely resigned themselves to their fate and engaged in all kinds of sometimes violent acts of resistance. Before the Civil War (1861-1865), several undertook to rebel, such as Gabriel Prosser in 1800 or Denmark Vesey in 1822. But the greatest servile revolt was that led in 1831 by Nathaniel, known as “Nat”, Turner, a 31-year-old slave from Southampton County, Virginia. The "confessions" collected by lawyer Thomas R. Gray before Nat Turner was tried and executed for his actions constitute a valuable source of information on this episode, despite the lack of impartiality shown in the preface to this pamphlet. twenty pages:"While everything in society seemed calm and peaceful on the surface, […] a dark fanatic [Nat Turner] returned to the depths of his sinister, confused and delirious mind, plans to massacre white people in large number. In his final statement, however, the convicted person acknowledged the facts presented by the lawyer. The divine visions of a precocious child Nat Turner was born on October 2, 1800, on Benjamin Turner's plantation in Southampton County, Virginia, to an African slave mother named Nancy. From an early age, she instilled in him a taste for freedom, after nearly killing him at birth to spare him a sad life of servitude. It was her that he heard for the first time evoke the destiny of prophet to which he was promised. This belief was strengthened in him from the age of 3 or 4, when he began to recount events prior to his birth:"The Lord had shown me things that had happened before I came into the world", he would declare. Nat learned to read and write without any difficulty. To the great surprise of his family, one day he began to spell the names of objects represented on the pages of a book that were shown to him to soothe his tears. Driven by his taste for reading and by a fervor that he displayed at a very young age, he began to preach on the plantation. At the age of 21, between compulsive reading of the Bible and fasting intended to harden his spirit, his first visions led him to think that God was speaking to him and sending him signs to announce his imminent emancipation, such as he had done it with the prophets of the Bible. Nat Turner was convinced of his calling as a prophet. He interpreted his last revelation, which came on February 11, 1831, as a call from God to fulfill his mission. In the span of his short life, Nat Turner became the property of different masters. In 1809 it passed into the hands of Benjamin Turner's son, Samuel; the latter's widow, Elisabeth, recovered it in 1822, to transfer it a year later to her new husband, Thomas Moore. When he decided to rebel, Nat Turner was the slave of Joseph Travis, with whom the second wife of Thomas Moore had married after his death. We have only one testimony on the relationship that the slave maintained with his masters, according to which he had been beaten “for having affirmed that the Blacks should be free and would be one day or another” . Nat Turner, whose enlightenment was growing, felt filled with the Holy Spirit and witnessed several miracles in the form of “light flashes in the sky.” After fervent prayers, “while [working] in the fields, [he discovered] drops of blood on the corn, like dew falling from the sky […] and, in the woods, [found] on the leaves of hieroglyphic characters, numbers, human figures in different positions, drawn in blood”. These figures represented the black and white spirits he had seen fighting in a previous vision. His final revelation came on February 11, 1831, in the form of an eclipse of the sun, which he interpreted as God's compelling call to fulfill his mission. A bloody uprising On the night of August 21-22, 1831, Nat Turner and his gang launched the bloodiest revolt in the slave South of the United States, although they were doomed in advance by their lack of discipline and means. After hacking to death the members of the Travis family in their sleep, Nat and his 14 men set out to run from plantation to plantation through Southampton County, looting 16 homes, killing all whites and freeing all slaves. whom they met on their way in order to constitute an army of rebels. When the militia crushed the uprising, there were about fifty insurgents and about sixty white victims, men, women and children alike. These two days sowed a wind of panic among the white population, whose repression was not long in coming:nearly 200 blacks were killed during retaliatory actions. Hiding for nine weeks in the woods, Nat Turner was found in a cave and captured on October 30 by a farmer named Benjamin Phipps. Accused of having fomented the rebellion and participated in the insurrection, the fugitive was tried and condemned on November 5 to be hanged. Before his execution, he was asked if he regretted the atrocities he had committed. By way of answer, he expressed for the last time his conviction of being an envoy of God:“Has not Christ been crucified? » Macabre memories On November 11, the leader of the rebellion was hanged along with 16 other slaves. His corpse, however, received a different fate from that reserved for his acolytes:his head was decapitated to be exhibited as a curiosity and his body flayed to make bags and purses. The parts of its trunk and the extremities that were not torn off for fat were cut into pieces and kept as gruesome souvenirs. The meager remains of his remains were buried with as much solemnity as the carcass of an animal. By inflicting this exemplary punishment on him, the South publicly hinted at the treatment it would reserve for any rebellious slave. From the outset, the truth about Nat Turner's identity and true motives seems sketchy, as does his corpse. The Confessions of Nat Turner testify indeed to a clear ideological bias:by painting the slave as a "big bandit" and as the "leader [of a] ferocious gang" who begs for his life without putting up any resistance to his arrest, Gray denies the existence of any link between this revolt and other movements and figures engaged in the resistance against the slavery system. North American historiography has also presented this rebellion as the isolated and exceptional act of a lunatic, a melodramatic struggle led by an odious character whose fight is thereby deprived of all political significance. African Americans, on the other hand, honored the memory of Nat Turner, whom they nicknamed Ol’ Prophet Nat (the “good old prophet Nat”). Some of their historians restored their dignity to the insurgents, thus helping to cast a new light on the history of the United States and to reconstruct the broken identity of these black “Spartacus”. Find out more Confessions of Nat Turner, by Thomas Gray, Allia, 2017.
