One early recruit explained why he joined them: “his life was worth no more than others, and his liberty as dear to him.” Nat Turner was as clear-eyed about the odds as the other recruits, but he had an additional reason to undertake what appeared to be a suicidal mission: He believed God wanted him to launch the revolt. The rebels understood that the revolt would likely fail, but they were ready to die fighting for their freedom. Their solution was to launch a surprise attack so bloody and stunning that news of the revolt would rouse Virginia’s enslaved population to rally to the rebel’s banner. Instead, they sought an answer to what seemed an insoluble problem: overcoming the whites’ advantages in numbers, organization, communication, and supplies. it always leaked out.” So when Nat Turner approached his first four recruits with the idea of a slave revolt, they decided they would neither tell other slaves nor stockpile arms. As one of them explained, “the negroes had frequently attempted, similar things, and confided their purpose to several, and that.
It is unknown how much the Southampton rebels knew about any of these earlier revolts or conspiracies, but they knew enough to intuit one thing. (credit: “On to Orleans: The Negro Insurrection” from The New York Public Library, ) This 1888 sketch depicts the German Coast of Louisiana Uprising of 1811 led by Charles Deslondes, whose force grew to more than one hundred rebellious slaves. Thirty-five enslaved persons were hanged and another thirty-one were transported out of South Carolina.
NAT TUNER SLAVE REBELLION PRIMARY SOURCES EXCERPT FREE
In 1822, whites uncovered evidence that Denmark Vesey, a free black man in Charleston, South Carolina, was at the heart of a plan for scores of enslaved persons to revolt and perhaps flee to Haiti. Two whites were killed before this revolt was brutally put down, resulting in the deaths of nearly ninety-five African Americans whether or not they were involved in the plot. history had occurred in Louisiana in 1811, when hundreds of slaves took up arms and headed for New Orleans. Another slave told his master about this conspiracy, allowing whites to quash it before it began. Also inspired by revolutionary ideology, Gabriel, an enslaved blacksmith outside Richmond, Virginia, had organized a conspiracy in 1800 that planned to capture Richmond’s armory and, if possible, Virginia’s governor, James Monroe.
Slave rebels had used the ideology of American and French revolutionaries in creating a second republic in the new world, Haiti. Independence Day passed without any noticeable unrest among the slaves.ĭespite the surface appearance of calm, however, slavery was becoming an increasingly intractable problem in an age of revolution. Over the next few months, the conspirators planned to launch the revolt on the Fourth of July, a date that implicitly invoked Thomas Jefferson’s claim that “all men are created equal.” As the day approached, however, Nat Turner fell ill. When they got there, Turner told them the time had come to launch a slave revolt. In February 1831, four slaves in Southampton County, Virginia, went to a clandestine meeting called by an enslaved preacher named Nat Turner.
This Narrative explores the idea of slavery and abolitionism and can be used along with the William Lloyd Garrison’s War against Slavery and Frederick Douglass’s Path to Freedom Narratives, as well as the David Walker, “An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World,” 1829 and Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 1845 Primary Sources.
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