The Fires of Jubilee

Stephen B. Oates

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061970009
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

"A penetrating reconstruction of the most disturbing and crucial slave uprising in America's history." — New York Times

The definitive account of the most infamous slave rebellion in history and the aftermath that brought America one step closer to civil war—newly reissued to include the text of the original 1831 court document "The Confessions of Nat Turner"

The fierce slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831 and the savage reprisals that followed shattered beyond repair the myth of the contented slave and the benign master, and intensified the forces of change that would plunge America into the bloodbath of the Civil War. Stephen B. Oates, the celebrated biographer of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., presents a gripping and insightful narrative of the rebellion—the complex, gifted, and driven man who led it, the social conditions that produced it, and the legacy it left.

A classic, here is the dramatic re-creation of the turbulent period that marked a crucial turning point in America's history.

Part One

THIS INFERNAL SPIRIT OF SLAVERY

Southampton County early in the 1800s . . .

He was living in the innocent season of his life, in those carefree years before the working age of twelve when a slave boy could romp and run about the plantation with uninhibited glee. Clad only in a “tow” shirt which hung about his knees, Nat and the other children—white and black alike—played together like prattling sparrows, oblivious to that future time when white adults would permanently separate them, sending the white children to schools or tutors and the blacks to the fields, dividing them for the rest of their lives into free and chattel—into the blessed and the wretched of their Christian world. But for now, in these innocent years, the children frolicked and fraternized in democratic abandon.

Nat was especially close to John Clark Turner, who was one of the Master’s three sons and about his age. Sometimes little Nathaniel Francis came over from a neighboring plantation, and the three boys raided melon patches, collected little-boy treasures, and explored the thick forests about the Turner place, with their macabre shadows and cawing birds. They swam and fished in ponds there and set out traps for coon and possum. They might also visit the carpenter’s shed, where skilled slaves fashioned cabinets and chairs for the Big House, or play mumblety-peg near the brandy still, where other blacks transformed fermented apple juice into brandy for the Master’s table. Nat and John Clark also received the same religious instruction, since the Turners—Benjamin and Elizabeth—were Methodists who sought to instill Christian beliefs and righteousness in their thirty-odd slaves.

So Nat in his young years cavorted about the home place as slave children did generally in Virginia. He took his meals in the Negro cabins—meals of corn mush and bacon fat which he ate out of wooden bowls with a slave-carved spoon. His daytime supervisor was his grandmother, Old Bridget, an aged and wrinkled woman—too old to work any more—who regaled the boy with slave tales and stories from the Bible. Nat had become very attached to his grandmother, for she praised him and helped teach him the same prayers the Master and Mistress had taught to her.¹

A word about the Turners. Benjamin, getting along in years now, owned a modest plantation—a large farm really—of several hundred acres on Rosa Swamp, in a remote neighborhood “down county” from Jerusalem. Benjamin belonged to the third generation of a large Turner family, who had migrated to southeastern Virginia back in the eighteenth century, and he had acquired his holdings through inheritance, marriage, and additional purchases. But his land was so heavily forested that only about one hundred acres were under cultivation. He raised a little tobacco, and more corn and apples than cotton. His two-story house was large enough to accommodate overnight guests, and in his cellar and sheds were enough barrels to hold 1,500 gallons of apple brandy. No doubt his brandy supply was one of the main reasons why horseback Methodist preachers, traveling the Jerusalem-Murfreesboro road, liked to come over to Turner’s place and stay the night with a fellow Methodist.²

The Turners had become Methodists back in the late 1780s or early 1790s when the church was in its infancy. In 1784, a year after the Revolution, the Methodists had broken away from the Anglican Church, or Church of England, and had established the Methodist Episcopal Church of America, with Francis Asbury as its first bishop and most indefatigable circuit rider. Traditionally the Turner family had been Anglicans, but after the Revolution Benjamin and Elizabeth wanted to escape the British stigma and switched to Methodism. Like scores of other striving, acquisitive Americans, the Turners were very much attracted to Methodist doctrine, with its emphasis on free will and individual salvation, and to the church’s irrepressible missionary zeal. The Turners became prominent church folk in their community and did all they could to spread the faith, holding Methodist services in the neighborhood chapel and traveling for miles to hear one of Asbury’s pulpit-banging preachers. For these were the years when Methodist evangelists, out to save America from Satan and to build a mighty church for themselves, rode across Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky, presenting Methodism in a smoking, earthy language few people could resist. By 1801 frenzied camp meetings lit up the Southern backwoods, as Methodists, Baptists, and maverick Presbyterians all joined in the evangelical crusade against godlessness.

In those early years of the Republic, Methodist revivalists also inveighed against the evil of slaveowning, though they were hardly the first sect to do so. On the contrary, the redoubtable Quakers had been foes of slavery since the colonial period, especially in Virginia and North Carolina. After the Revolution, North Carolina Quakers were so outspoken against the institution that a grand jury accused them of planting “dangerous” notions in the slaves that might incite them to violence. The Quakers replied that it was not their pronouncements but the slave system itself that caused Negro unrest. That, of course, only got them branded as “agitators” in North Carolina, but they went right on denouncing slavery nonetheless.

In the 1780s the Methodists also attacked the institution, contending in conference and church alike that human bondage was “contrary to the laws of God and hurtful to society.” So antislavery were the early Methodists that Francis Asbury visited the South on several occasions, both to convert sinners and to speak against slaveholding. After a Methodist meeting in one Virginia county, Asbury talked with “some select friends about slavekeeping, but they could not bear it; this I know, God will plead the cause of the oppressed, though it gives offense to say so here. O Lord, banish the infernal spirit of slavery from thy dear Zion.”

The Methodists, Quakers, and antislavery Baptists made some whites feel guilty enough to liberate their slaves, especially in backwater Southampton County where a number of “free coloreds” began to appear. But most Southern whites were not about to emancipate their Negroes, because slave ownership was not only a tremendous status symbol in the Old South, but was the most tried and tested means of racial control in their white supremacist society. Southern whites might pray that God forgive their lesser sins (profligacy and drunkenness) and might even succumb to the “holy jerks” and howl like dogs at some fire-and-brimstone revival. But no church could ever scare them into wholesale emancipation, into unleashing all the hundreds of thousands of slaves in Dixie, because in Southern white minds that would bring about social chaos and racial catastrophe. By 1800, Asbury and his Methodist colleagues, confronted with growing hostility and intransigence on the part of Southern whites of all classes, had surrendered to the doctrine of necessity and accommodated the church to slavery where it legally existed. After all, if the Methodists were going to make theirs a potent church in the United States, they could not afford to alienate the South, where Methodism drew so much of its strength. Still regarding bondage as an evil, the church did restrict slaveholding among its ministry and did prohibit members from buying and selling slaves (but not from owning them). Subsequently the Methodists softened even the injunction against trading in slaves; most Southern members ignored it anyway. By 1804 the church as a whole had given up on complete emancipation—for that was impossible in the South—and had settled for saving the souls of “the poor Africans” by converting them to Christianity. A Methodist ordinance of that year even advised that preachers “admonish and exhort all slaves to render due respect and obedience” to the commands of their masters. . . .³

Perhaps Benjamin Turner felt a pang of remorse about owning Negroes—but not enough to manumit them as some of his neighbors had done. No doubt he and Elizabeth both rested more easily when their church stopped trying to eradicate the peculiar institution and set about Christianizing the slaves for a better time ahead. So that their own Negroes might be saved, the Turners held prayer services on their farm and took the blacks to Sunday chapel.

Among such slaves were Nat’s grandmother and his mother, Nancy. According to black and white tradition, Nancy was a large, spirited, olive-skinned young African, one of 400,000 native Africans imported to North America before 1808, to toil as bondsmen on farms and plantations there. While most of these people came from the agrarian tribes of West Africa, Nancy’s home was supposed to have been in the North’s Nile River country. If folk chroniclers are correct, then slave raiders or warlike natives abducted Nancy when she was in her late teens and marched her hundreds of miles to the coast. Eventually she fell into the hands of European traders, who branded the girl and herded her aboard a crowded slave ship bound for the New World. She too endured the horrors of the “middle passage,” crammed into a small hold with a hundred other chained and manacled Africans, many of them convinced that the white skins planned to boil and eat them. Why else were they here? Why else were they in chains? Driven to madness in the rancid, claustrophobic bowels of the slave ships, many Africans maimed themselves, committed suicide. Others starved to death or died of some white man’s disease. If the Africans somehow survived the Atlantic passage, the slave ships disgorged them into some fly-infested slave pen in the New World—on Cuba or Santo Domingo, in the British West Indies, Brazil, Mexico, or the new Republic of the United States.

Storytellers claim that Nancy landed at Norfolk in 1795, when a terrible insurrection was raging down on the French island of Santo Domingo in the Caribbean. White traders then drove her inland on a slave coffle, exhibiting her on various auction blocks along the way. Sometime in 1799 Benjamin Turner bought her at a slave sale, took her home, and christened her Nancy. To the Turners, of course, she seemed a wild heathen (they knew nothing about African manners, religion, language), though smart enough to make a good slave if she could be tamed and Christianized. Soon after her arrival at the Turner place she married one of Old Bridget’s sons, whose name is not known. On October 2, 1800, Nancy gave birth to Nat, or Nathaniel, which in Hebrew meant “the gift of God.” Tradition has it that Nancy tried to kill the baby rather than see him raised a slave and that she had to be tied up for a while. In time she submitted to slavery—there was little else she could do—and learned to speak English. It is possible that she went on to become a house servant and so one of the slave elite.⁴

By the time Nat was four or five years old, Nancy was extremely proud of him. Bright-eyed and quick to learn, he was a fine one. He stood out among the other children. Once Nancy overheard him telling his playmates about some event that had happened before he was born. How could he know about that? Nancy asked. Had somebody told him? No, the boy replied, somehow he just knew. Entranced, Nancy fetched other slaves to hear. Yes, they agreed, he described the episode just as it happened; he certainly did. They were “greatly astonished,” Nat recalled later, and remarked that only the Almighty could have given him such powers of recollection.

After that, his mother and father both praised him for his brilliance and extraordinary imagination. Both made him thrill with self-esteem. They showed the other slaves how Nat had congenital bumps and scars on his head and chest. African tradition held that a male with markings like these was destined to become a leader. Did they need any more proof? Could there be any doubt about the boy’s future? And Nat’s parents, his grandmother, and the other Turner slaves all agreed that he was “intended for some great purpose,” that Nat would surely become a prophet.

One day the precocious boy astonished them even more. To stop him from crying, one of the slaves gave him a book from the Big House to play with. Nat proceeded to spell out the names of objects in the volume. How could he do these things? Did he not possess amazing supernatural powers? It is doubtful that his parents could read or write, as some chroniclers have claimed, so who taught Nat his letters remains a mystery. All he remembered was that he started reading and writing with remarkable ease—a gift that made him “a source of wonder” around the Turner neighborhood. After all, a literate slave was not all that common in the Old South, even in Virginia. Another black observed that a slave who could read a book and write his name was “a very important fellow” in any slave quarters.

Nat was certainly an important fellow among his playmates, who wanted to apply some of his brilliance to their pranks. With a genius like Nat to lead them, think of the successes they would enjoy! Think of the cakes they could steal, the brandy they could filch, the traps they could sabotage in the forests! Well, Nat agreed to plan their roguery—frankly he was flattered—but he now refused to steal anything himself. Pilfering, after all, did not become a future prophet. He never touched liquor either. And he never swore, never played practical jokes, and never cared a thing for white people’s money. All of which made him more mysterious than ever in the eyes of children and adults alike.

Nat’s superior intelligence did not escape Master Benjamin’s notice. Being a Methodist, the old Master not only approved of Nat’s literacy but encouraged him to study the Bible. He began taking the boy to prayer meetings, where he sat at the back of the chapel with the other slaves. Proud of his bright slave boy, Benjamin showed him off to his guests—especially those tired and thirsty itinerate preachers who came to share his table and his brandy. Well, the preachers were infatuated with this little darky who could read books and recite his prayers. And they and everybody else in the boy’s world—his parents, grandmother, and Master Benjamin—all remarked that he had too much sense to be raised in bondage, that he “would never be of any service to anyone as a slave.”⁵

The seasons of Nat’s life changed in a succession of unexpected shocks, as confused and bewildering as windswept leaves. The first shock came when his father ran away from the Turner place and escaped to the North. Nobody knows why he left beyond an innate and unquenchable longing to break out of slavery, even at the cost of losing his wife and son. So Nat’s father was gone, never to be seen again in Southampton County. Yet Nat never forgot him.⁶

Another jolt came in 1809, when the boy was nine years old. In that year, Samuel Turner—the Master’s oldest son—bought some 360 acres from his father for a nominal sum. Located just two miles south of the home place, Samuel’s land used to be the old Kindred plantation. Of course, Samuel needed slaves to work his cotton patches, so Benjamin loaned him eight of his own—Nat and his mother among them. And so the boy left the plantation of his birth and went to stay with Master Samuel, a young bachelor.

In October, 1810, Master Benjamin died in the wake of a typhoid epidemic that swept through the neighborhood. Not long after old Benjamin had been buried in the family graveyard, Elizabeth also took ill and died. In his will, Benjamin broke up the home estate, dividing his land and slaves among the children. Now Nat, Nancy, and Old Bridget all became the legal property of Master Samuel.

Samuel was then in his mid-twenties, a man of immense piety and rectitude. Shortly before his father had died, the old man had donated an acre of land on which to raise a Methodist church, a backwoods cathedral to be called Turner’s Meeting House. Young Samuel not only helped build and organize the church but became an elder. He seldom missed a Sunday service unless he was too sick to walk. And he took his slaves along so that they might learn something about Christian obedience.

From all appearances, Samuel was a harder taskmaster than his father had been, and like many another slaveowner in the Old South, he understood that Christianity could be used not merely to save heathen souls, but to keep the slaves from striking back or running off as Nat’s father had done. So at prayer meetings Samuel Turner and his fellow churchmen rehearsed for the blacks a number of carefully selected Bible lessons which God intended them to follow: If they did not obey their masters and perform their allotted tasks, God would burn them in the flames of an eternal Hell. The Bible said that God wanted Negroes to be the white man’s slaves, that this was their proper station in life. One must not question the wisdom of the Almighty. And He would become furious if they were impudent, sassy, or sullen, and would punish them terribly at Judgment Day. And the slaves must beware of Satan—that cunning, wicked master of Hell—for it was Satan who created their desires for freedom and tempted them to run away. To be good children of the Lord, the slaves must accept their lot, be meek and faithful, patient and submissive, even if their masters were cruel. They must never resist even the most vicious master. Leave it to the Lord to punish him. Only the Lord knows what is best. “You either deserve correction, or you do not deserve it,” white preachers warned the slaves. “But whether you deserve it or not...