Nat Turner was an enslaved, literate, and deeply religious man in Southampton County, Virginia, who came to believe that God had chosen him to strike against slavery. On the night of 21–22 August 1831 he led a revolt that killed about fifty-five white men, women, and children before militia crushed it. The white reprisals that followed, his execution, and the laws Virginia and other states passed in response made the rising a turning point in the politics of slavery — and most of what is known of Turner’s own thinking comes through a single, contested source written by the white lawyer who interviewed him in jail.
At a Glance
- Born
- 2 October 1800, Southampton County, Virginia
- Died
- 11 November 1831, Jerusalem (now Courtland), Virginia
- Known for
- Southampton County revolt (21–23 August 1831); The Confessions of Nat Turner, as recorded by Thomas R. Gray (1831)
- Fields
- Abolition · Religion
- Era
- 19th Century
Early Life
Turner was born enslaved on 2 October 1800 on the Southampton County plantation of Benjamin Turner. His mother is described in the principal account of his life as African-born, and his father escaped from slavery when Turner was a child. He learned to read as a boy, owned a Bible, and was regarded in the neighborhood as unusually intelligent and devout. As he grew older he fasted, prayed, and kept himself apart, and he became a preacher among the enslaved people of the county. According to Gray’s account, his family and neighbors told him from childhood that marks on his body and his knowledge of events before his birth showed he was intended for some great purpose.
He was passed among several owners as the Turner property was divided, including the household of Thomas Moore; by 1830 he was living on the farm of Joseph Travis, who had married Moore’s widow. He had a wife, enslaved on a neighboring farm, and at least one child. In the early 1820s he ran away for about a month, then returned, saying the Spirit had directed him to. By his reported account he experienced a series of visions, and on 12 May 1828 he heard a voice telling him that the time was approaching when “the first should be last and the last should be first.”
Life and Work
Turner read the solar eclipse of 12 February 1831 as a sign to begin, and he confided his plan to a small group of trusted men. An atmospheric disturbance on 13 August 1831, when the sun appeared a strange color across much of the East Coast, confirmed his decision. On the night of Sunday, 21 August, he and a handful of followers began at the Travis farm, killing everyone in the household, including an infant.
Over roughly a day and a half the rebels moved from farm to farm toward Jerusalem, the county seat, gathering recruits and weapons; at its peak the force numbered perhaps forty to fifty enslaved and free Black men. They killed about fifty-five white people, a toll concentrated at a few farms, including the Whitehead plantation and the Waller farm. On 22 August a militia company dispersed the main body at James Parker’s farm, and by midday on 23 August the revolt was over. Turner escaped.
The white response was ferocious. Militia and vigilantes killed at least thirty-six Black people without trial in Southampton County alone, and many more suspects were beaten or tortured, until a commanding officer ordered a halt on 28 August. Courts of oyer and terminer, sitting without juries, convicted thirty enslaved men and one free Black man; Governor John Floyd commuted about a dozen sentences to sale out of Virginia, and the rest were hanged between September 1831 and May 1832.
Turner hid near the Travis farm for about ten weeks. On 30 October 1831 a local farmer, Benjamin Phipps, found him hiding in a small hole he had dug out with his sword and took him to the county jail. Between 1 and 3 November, Thomas R. Gray, a Southampton lawyer, interviewed him there. Turner was tried on 5 November, pleaded not guilty, and was convicted of conspiring to rebel and making insurrection. He was hanged in Jerusalem on 11 November 1831.
“Was not Christ crucified.”
Legacy
Gray registered a copyright on 10 November, the day before the execution, and later that month published The Confessions of Nat Turner in Baltimore. It presents Turner’s account in the first person, framed by Gray’s own commentary, and it is the only substantial record of Turner’s motives. Historians treat it with care. Gray had legal and financial reasons to produce a sensational text, the voice is filtered through his prose, and even in 1831 the Richmond Enquirer questioned whether the eloquence was Turner’s. Some scholars read the document as a genuine collaboration in which Turner’s religious vision survives; others see it chiefly as an instrument of the slaveholders’ response. Claims resting on it alone are best attributed to Gray’s report.
The revolt forced the Virginia General Assembly to debate slavery openly in 1831–1832, after roughly two thousand citizens petitioned on the question. Reformers lost, and the legislature instead restricted Black preaching and assembly and curtailed the rights of free Black Virginians; other Southern states tightened their slave codes. It was the last time Virginia’s legislature seriously considered ending slavery before the Civil War.
Turner’s memory has remained a battleground. To white Southerners he became a byword for the danger of Black literacy and religion; to many Black Americans he became a martyr for freedom. William Styron’s 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner, which won a Pulitzer Prize, drew a sharp rebuttal in the 1968 collection William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. Modern studies by Patrick H. Breen and David F. Allmendinger Jr. have reconstructed the revolt from trial records and local sources beyond Gray’s pamphlet.
Nearly everything we know about Nat Turner’s motives passed through the pen of a white lawyer, so understanding the 1831 revolt means weighing a powerful but compromised source against the record of what the revolt changed. Open the classroom lesson →
Key Dates
- 2 October 1800 Born enslaved in Southampton County, Virginia.
- Early 1820s Runs away for about a month, then returns.
- 12 May 1828 Reports a vision that the first shall be last and the last first.
- 12 February 1831 Takes a solar eclipse as a sign to begin preparing a revolt.
- 21–22 August 1831 Launches the revolt at the Travis farm.
- 23 August 1831 Revolt is suppressed; reprisals against Black Virginians follow.
- 30 October 1831 Captured by Benjamin Phipps near the Travis farm.
- 1–3 November 1831 Interviewed in jail by the lawyer Thomas R. Gray.
- 11 November 1831 Hanged in Jerusalem, Virginia.
- 1831–1832 Virginia General Assembly debates slavery and rejects gradual emancipation.
Sources and Further Reading
- Thomas R. Gray, The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va. (Baltimore: Lucas & Deaver, 1831). Link
- Encyclopedia Virginia, “Nat Turner’s Revolt (1831).” Link
- Encyclopedia Virginia, “The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831).” Link
- Kenneth S. Greenberg, ed., The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996).
- Patrick H. Breen, The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
- David F. Allmendinger Jr., Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).
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