Nat Turner

Nat Turner was born into slavery in Southampton County, Virginia, on the second of October 1800, the property of Benjamin Turner. He was extraordinarily literate from early childhood — by his own subsequent account in The Confessions of Nat Turner, he could read by four — and was widely regarded among the local enslaved community as a religious visionary. He preached at Sunday gatherings of enslaved people across the county through his late twenties.

He had experienced, by his account, prophetic visions of armed insurrection from the early 1820s. He took the eclipse of the sun on the twelfth of February 1831 as the divine sign he had been awaiting and selected the date of the uprising for the night of the twenty-first of August 1831.

The Southampton Insurrection began that night with the killing of Turner's owner Joseph Travis. Over the following thirty-six hours, Turner's band — initially six men, growing to approximately seventy at its peak — moved from plantation to plantation across the eastern half of the county. The rebels killed approximately sixty white men, women, and children. They were stopped on the morning of the twenty-third of August by Virginia militia and U.S. Marines at the Belmont plantation.

Turner himself evaded capture for two months, hiding in fields and woodland caves. He was apprehended on the thirtieth of October 1831 and was tried in Jerusalem (the county seat, now Courtland), convicted, and hanged on the eleventh of November 1831. His body was flayed, beheaded, and quartered; the skull was held by various Virginia collectors for over a hundred and seventy years before being repatriated to the Turner family in 2002.

The retaliatory killings of approximately one hundred to two hundred enslaved Black Virginians by white militias in the weeks after the uprising — including dozens who had not participated — were not prosecuted.

The Virginia General Assembly debated the abolition of slavery in the immediate aftermath of the Southampton Insurrection. The motion failed. The Commonwealth instead passed sweeping restrictions on enslaved literacy, religious assembly, and movement. The Southampton Insurrection accelerated the political polarization that produced the Civil War twenty-nine years later.

He is honored here as the preacher whose insurrection forced the slave-republic to debate its own abolition.