In the Matter of Nat Turner

A Speculative History

Christopher Tomlins

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691204185, 9780691198668
• eBook ISBN: 9780691199870
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

A bold new interpretation of Nat Turner and the slave rebellion that stunned the American South

In 1831 Virginia, Nat Turner led a band of Southampton County slaves in a rebellion that killed fifty-five whites, mostly women and children. After more than two months in hiding, Turner was captured, and quickly convicted and executed. In the Matter of Nat Turner penetrates the historical caricature of Turner as befuddled mystic and self-styled Baptist preacher to recover the haunting persona of this legendary American slave rebel, telling of his self-discovery and the dawning of his Christian faith, of an impossible task given to him by God, and of redemptive violence and profane retribution.

Much about Turner remains unknown. His extraordinary account of his life and rebellion, given in chains as he awaited trial in jail, was written down by an opportunistic white attorney and sold as a pamphlet to cash in on Turner's notoriety. But the enigmatic rebel leader had an immediate and broad impact on the American South, and his rebellion remains one of the most momentous episodes in American history. Christopher Tomlins provides a luminous account of Turner's intellectual development, religious cosmology, and motivations, and offers an original and incisive analysis of the Turner Rebellion itself and its impact on Virginia politics. Tomlins also undertakes a deeply critical examination of William Styron's 1967 novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, which restored Turner to the American consciousness in the era of civil rights, black power, and urban riots.

A speculative history that recovers Turner from the few shards of evidence we have about his life, In the Matter of Nat Turner is also a unique speculation about the meaning and uses of history itself.

PART I

Perpetually Thirsting

I

am a stranger

lurking alone

In my own vicious wilderness

while the meat in my chest

squeezes and teases a hulking hunger

groping in motion

balance is

but a shimmering notion

and lurching compelled

my soul in its

special hell

of wet mortal limits

perpetually thirsting …

—VIC CHESNUTT, “GLOSSOLALIA” (2007)

1

Confessions: Of Text and Paratext

Whosoever shall confess me before men, him shall the Son of man also confess before the angels of God.

—LUKE 12:8

This Speaking Man … there is need of him yet! The Speaking Function, this of Truth coming to us with a living voice, nay in a living shape, and as a concrete practical exemplar.

—THOMAS CARLYLE (1843)

Some facts are not in dispute. Over the course of twelve hours beginning around 1:00 a.m. on Monday, August 22, Nat Turner led a group of fellow blacks—mostly slaves¹—in an armed attack on some fifteen white slaveholding households in St. Luke’s Parish, Southampton County, Virginia, resulting in the deaths of fifty-five women, children, and men. During the following twenty-four hours, members of Turner’s band engaged in a series of confrontations with white militia and armed inhabitants, at the end of which Turner was the only active participant in the massacre who had managed to avoid death or capture. Remaining in his old neighborhood, in hiding, Turner continued to avoid apprehension for more than two months, until he was finally discovered on Sunday, October 30. On Monday, October 31, he was taken to Jerusalem, the county seat, where he was examined before two county magistrates, James W. Parker and James Trezvant. Parker and Trezvant found sufficient evidence to warrant committing Turner to the county jail to await trial by the Southampton County Court, sitting as a court of Oyer and Terminer, on charges of conspiring to rebel and making insurrection. Turner’s trial took place five days later, on the morning of Saturday, November 5, before a bench of ten magistrates. He was convicted, and sentenced to death. He was hanged on Friday, November 11.²

FIGURE 1.1. Title page of Thomas Ruffin Gray’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, 1st ed. (1831). Photograph by Special Collections, Swem Library, College of William & Mary.

More detail was forthcoming, and as a result questions, because on the evening of October 31, following Turner’s examination and committal, a local attorney named Thomas Ruffin Gray gained access to him in jail by permission of the jailor and ascertained “that he was willing to make a full and free confession of the origin, progress and consummation of the insurrectory movements of the slaves of which he was the contriver and head.” Gray “determined for the gratification of public curiosity to commit his statements to writing and publish them.” By agreement with Turner (and the jailor) Gray returned the next day, Tuesday November 1, to hear Turner’s account of what had happened. Turner’s narrative continued the following Wednesday and Thursday. Then, “having the advantage of his statement before me in writing,” on Thursday evening Gray “began a cross examination.” He found Turner’s statement corroborated, to his satisfaction, “by every circumstance coming within my own knowledge or the confessions of others … whom he had not seen nor had any knowledge since 22d of August.”³

Following Turner’s trial on November 5, Gray left Jerusalem for Richmond, 70 miles to the north, where on November 7 (a Monday) he attempted to arrange the printing of his manuscript. Unsuccessful in Richmond, he rode on to Washington, DC, a further 110 miles to the north, where on November 10 he obtained copyright for his pamphlet. The pamphlet itself was printed in Baltimore, another 40 miles northeast of Washington, by the firm of Lucas and Deaver. It was published on November 22 and advertised for sale, priced twenty-five cents. A second edition, newly typeset and with minor typographical corrections, was printed by the firm of T. W. White and published in Richmond the following year. All told, rather more than fifty thousand copies may have circulated.⁴

Gray’s pamphlet is entitled, in full, The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va. As fully and voluntarily made to Thomas R. Gray, In the prison where he was confined, and acknowledged by him to be such when read before the Court of Southampton; with the certificate, under seal of the Court convened at Jerusalem, Nov. 5, 1831, for his trial. Also, An Authentic Account of the Whole Insurrection, With Lists of the Whites who were Murdered, And of the Negroes Brought before the Court of Southampton, and there Sentenced, &c. It “immediately became the standard account” of the event that became known as the Turner Rebellion.⁵ The event has spawned many commentaries, both historical and literary. Without exception all grant considerable prominence to Gray’s pamphlet.⁶ But like all documents generated in the course of master-class investigations of slave revolts, alleged or actual, The Confessions of Nat Turner raises obvious evidentiary quandaries: credibility, reliability, authenticity. Precisely what kind of historical source is this document? How should it be interrogated? What can it tell us?

These questions are not posed idly. In 2001, the historian Michael Johnson aimed devastating criticism at three new histories of the Denmark Vesey slave conspiracy, thought to have occurred in 1822 in Charleston, South Carolina, because in Johnson’s view their authors—and by extension every other historian of the Vesey Conspiracy—had relied far too credulously on the Official Report of the inquiry into the alleged plot undertaken by the Charleston Court of Magistrates and Freeholders.⁷ Invited to review the authors’ books, but moved by their facile (to Johnson) celebrations of Vesey as “a bold insurrectionist determined to free his people or die trying,” as well as by his own mounting doubts about the evidentiary basis on which he had himself once taken much the same position, Johnson had undertaken a thorough examination of the manuscript sources from which the Official Report had been constructed. He discovered that, “far from being an impartial account of court proceedings, the Official Report is a document of advocacy, a public, retrospective statement of the prosecution’s case against Denmark Vesey and the many other defendants. It must be read and interpreted with the suspicion warranted by special pleading.” Unfortunately, in their reliance on this dubious document, historians of the Vesey Conspiracy had “failed to exercise due caution in reading the testimony of witnesses recorded by the conspiracy court.” They had depended uncritically on the very sources used to convict those accused for information about who they were, what they did, and what they hoped to do, and so had become “unwitting co-conspirators with the court” in perpetuating the court’s claim that there was indeed something called “the Vesey Conspiracy.” They had trusted law to produce empirical—though not political—truth, but in fact the court had “colluded with a handful of intimidated witnesses” to create an insurrection plot out of nothing more than suspicion and rumor. The Vesey Conspiracy was a juridical witch hunt, prosecuted by the court in defense of its reputation after its initial peremptory accusations and hasty executions were criticized within Charleston’s white community. “Vesey and the other condemned black men were victims of an insurrection conspiracy conjured into being in 1822 by the court, its cooperative black witnesses, and its numerous white supporters.” The empty conspiracy claim had been “kept alive ever since by historians eager to accept the court’s judgments while rejecting its morality.” Historians seeking heroes in rumors of revolt were better advised “to pay attention to the ‘not guilty’ pleas of almost all the men who went to the gallows, to their near silence in the court records, to their refusal to name names in order to save themselves. These men were heroes not because they were about to launch an insurrection but because they risked and accepted death rather than collaborate with the conspiratorial court.” Johnson’s conclusion challenged all historians of American slavery to cease their moral and ideological posturing and to use their sources—particularly their legal sources—more critically. “Surely it is time to read the court’s Official Report and the witnesses’ testimony with the skepticism they richly deserve and to respect the integrity of a past that sometimes confounds the reassuring expectations generated by our present-day convictions about the evil of slavery and the legitimacy of blacks’ claims to freedom and justice. Surely it is time to bring the court’s conspiracy against Denmark Vesey and other black Charlestonians to an end.”⁸

There are, of course, important differences between The Confessions of Nat Turner and The Official Report. First and most obvious, the event that would become known as the Turner Rebellion actually took place. We are dealing with something that happened, rather than a plot to cause something to happen, alleged or actual. Second, The Confessions of Nat Turner does not purport to be an official report of an investigation undertaken by a public body and prepared at its request by its presiding officers. Still, the pamphlet does represent itself (like the Official Report) as a faithful record of Turner’s verbal account of his actions and motivations, an account given voluntarily, without the prompting of his white interlocutor, while under detention awaiting trial on capital charges, and though not commissioned, certified as accurate after the fact by the Southampton County Court. Hence, Johnson’s admonitions are as relevant to those who would rely on The Confessions as the ur-text of the Turner Rebellion as they are to those who would write of the Vesey Conspiracy using the materials generated by the Charleston Court of Magistrates and Freeholders. Narrowly, what trust can one have in the substance of Gray’s pamphlet as truthful description and explanation of the event, and as guide to its leader’s mentalité and motivation, given that it was compiled hastily and in camera by an opportunistic and impoverished local white attorney, hoping to cash in on the notoriety of the Southampton County insurrection, while its subject was under legal duress?⁹ More broadly, accepting Johnson’s case for skepticism in the historian’s encounter with historical evidence, but also accepting that the document itself (like the Official Report) remains a valuable historical resource, how can it be used? Gray’s pamphlet is undoubtedly evidentiary, but evidence of what?

The narrow question—of trust—can be answered in different ways. First, one can examine the content of the pamphlet. In substance it appears as a firsthand narrative account of the motivation for, and events of, Turner’s rebellion. Gray acknowledges his own intellectual presence in, and influence on, Turner’s statement. He reports that he forbore from frequent questioning while listening to Turner’s narrative, but that once Turner had finished “I … had much conversation with and asked him many questions.”¹⁰ He does not represent the published statement as verbatim Turner but rather as one “with little or no variation, from his own words.”¹¹ Alternatively, one can ask whether the narrative account that appears in the pamphlet is plausible in light of other evidence. Noting that the text “is riddled with difficult problems of authenticity and intentionality,” Eric Sundquist, for example,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Preface
• Prologue. What’s Past?
• Part I: Perpetually Thirsting
• Part II: A Sword in the Sunlight
• Part III: Glossolalia
• Epilogue. Demonic Ambiguities
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index