The Abridgment of Hope
After Nat Turner
Although traditionally Nat Turner’s insurrection in 1831 has been viewed as a momentous event for white Virginians, it was equally traumatic and certainly more transformative for the black community in the slaveholding South. Laws set in place to curtail servile insurrections did not stop the enslaved from continuing to attempt to free themselves. And Nat Turner’s rebellion, in his attempt to do what insurrectionists had done elsewhere, was such a moment. In response, whites living in the South, which had become much more militarized than in the colonial era, allowed unchecked retaliation to ensue. The vigilante violence experienced by the black community, enslaved and free, was meant to send a message. The message was that any future attempts to dismantle a system of labor that white southerners had grown to depend on would be suppressed with an overwhelming use of force. Indeed, the large numbers of volunteers, militia men, artillery companies, assistance from neighboring states, troops provided by the federal government, as well as the two warships ready to engage at a moment’s notice, signified that Virginia was ready for all-out war.1
Nat Turner’s insurrection was the moment that whites always feared, and they did what they warned they would do in response. Indeed, the heightened threats of racial extermination and interminable retaliation after Turner’s attempted revolution forced a re-visioning of the black community’s strategies of resistance, strategies that were culturally specific to Africans in North America. The enslaved had experienced brutal and torturous reprisals before, but the retribution that they remembered after Turner’s insurrection was far broader and more widespread. This created traumatic and transhistorical memories for black communities throughout the South that shaped future strategies of resistance and abolition. Turner’s insurrection made plain how a war between the races would play out for both sides, not only for innocent African American men, women, and children, enslaved and free, but also for whites in the South and the North.
About seventy miles from Richmond, a man named Nat Turner attended a barbeque during which he arranged with six other men—Henry Porter, Hark (or Hercules) Travis, Sam and Will Francis, Nelson Williams, and Jack Reese—to take back what they knew belonged to them in the first place: their freedom.2 On August 21, 1831, these seven men put into action what they had been planning for months and what Nat Turner had been dreaming about for years. In the beginning, all went according to plan. Between sixty and eighty blacks joined Nat’s army as it passed from one house to the next, beginning in the Cross Keys region of Southampton, Virginia. They gathered ammunition, guns, and money as they went along. At each house they enlarged the army of slaves, who, now masterless but not leaderless, readily followed orders to divide themselves into groups so that they could quickly achieve their purported goal of “killing all the white people.”3 They managed to remain united for over forty-eight hours, killing sixty-one whites before the insurrection was suppressed.4
Nat Turner’s insurrection caused a frenzy of fear and excitement among the citizens of Virginia. Every white person, male and female, was concerned with where Nat’s army planned to strike next. They wanted to know whether Nat had communicated with other slave and free communities outside of Southampton and how many insurgents (as whites called them) there actually were.5 Ex-slave Ella Williams, who lived in Saint Petersburg, Virginia, reported that her mistress “come drivin’ up in de carriage jus’ screamin’ to beat de ban’. ‘De niggers is riz,’ she yelled. ‘De niggers is resurrected, an’ dey’s killen all de white folks.’ Marsa Charlie come runnin’ out wid his gun an’ he say, ‘where is dey?’ Den she say, ‘Down in Southampton County.’ An he say, ‘Aw I thought dey was in dis county,’ and he took his gun back in de house cause Southampton County musta been hundreds miles fum us.”6
There were rumors that large numbers of slaves were planning to participate in Turner’s rebellion. Some reports stated that there might be as many as 150 slaves riding on horseback, while other reports speculated that the number was 800, with two or three white men as leaders. U.S. troops and the militia from Norfolk, Nansemond, and Princess Anne Counties were all told to search the entire Dismal Swamp region. It was believed that between two and three thousand fugitive slaves were there amongst the colonies of Maroons, who were accustomed to waging the kind of guerrilla warfare that Nat intended and who were organizing in preparation to join him in his revolution.7
White residents of North Carolina, whose border was less than fifteen miles from the Cross Keys region, were particularly concerned that the “banditti” were heading for their state to join those enslaved already organized to insurrect.8 Soon, a story circulated throughout the nation that two thousand slaves had killed all of the white residents and overtaken Raleigh. That sequence of events did not happen, but there was supposedly an insurrection plot that included the counties of Duplin, Sampson, Wayne, New Hanover, and Lenoir. The twenty-four men who were in the process of organizing it were discovered only because a free black man told the authorities of their plan. In South Carolina and Georgia, similar types of rumors generated similar hysterical responses.9
Nat Turner’s organized insurrection in 1831 had serious ramifications for both enslaved and free African Americans. His war against the institution of slavery was much like other insurrectionary attempts in that the simple objective was freedom from enslavement. Yet no other servile insurrection on American soil generated as much fear and retaliatory violence as did Turner’s. The reason, simply put, was that he successfully implemented his battle plan of waging unlimited warfare against a significant number of slave-owning men and their families, half of whom were women and children. Turner challenged white manhood and white supremacy at their core. Yet the number of black people who lost their lives due to the white rage that ensued curiously remains unknown.
Nat Turner’s insurrection, like Denmark Vesey’s insurrection and earlier insurrections in the West Indies, was motivated by visions of liberation. Turner waged war against what he believed was an ungodly institution and against those who believed in the rightness of his oppression. As Turner, a “Baptist preacher and exhorter on the plantation,” purportedly confessed, he knew “by the signs in the heavens . . . I should arise and prepare myself and slay my enemies with their own weapons.”10 The abuse and suffering that marked chattel bondage motivated those who were enslaved to believe that they were right to attempt to fight for their freedom. Former slave J. H. Banks argued that if a slaveholder “takes my liberty, he endangers his own. This is the law of consequences ordained by God, and firmly incorporated into his moral system.”11 Indeed, according to family lore, Turner was “driven to desperation by the repeated whipping of his aged father, who was growing too weak to do the hard work expected of him on the plantation, and by the repeated insults to Nat Turner’s aged and high spirited mother.”12 Reputed to be of “royal African blood,” Turner’s mother, known as “Nancy of the Nile,” was abducted by slave traders in northern Africa and was sold to Benjamin Turner in 1799. She was often whipped, as she would not submit to enslavement, or what she termed “the dark days of slavery.”13 Nancy recounted to Turner and his children her remembered experiences of Africa, “of the happiness of the family in Africa, before they were captured . . . of the comfortable home along the beautiful river, of the flocks and herds, the fruits, the crops, the circle of loyal and contented friends.” Thus Nancy, an “olive-complexioned” and “queenly-looking black” woman, may have laid the foundation for Nat Turner’s discontent and rejection of the institution, as well as “his noble character” and “love of his people.”14
Since slavery, as ex-slave William Thompson put it, was “cousin to hell,” the boundaries protecting women and children, much as they had been in Denmark Vesey’s insurrection, were intentionally erased as a strategy of war.15 The nephew of Hark Travis related that Nat believed he had received a message from God, telling “him to start the fust war with forty men.” To a man as deeply spiritual as Turner, this revelation meant that none of the enemy, even children, should remain alive, especially the child who was legally his owner: “When he [Turner] got to his mistress’ house he commence to grab him missus’ baby and he took hit up, slung hit back and fo’h three times. Said hit was so hard fer him to kill dis baby ’cause hit had bin so playful setting on his knee and dat chile sho did love him. So third sling he went quick ’bout hit—killing [the] baby at dis rap.”16 For Turner and his men, slaying all the whites in their path regardless of age or gender was a tactic of war that would serve a particular objective. According to the Richmond Enquirer, when Turner was examined by the magistrates after his capture, “he said that indiscriminate massacre was not their intention after they obtained foothold, and was resorted to in the first instance to strike terror and alarm. Women and children would afterwards have been spared, and men too who ceased to resist.”17
Turner was not the only one with designs to free those enslaved. Not that Turner’s leadership was in doubt: former Virginian slave James L. Smith identified Nat Turner as the “captain” in a war “to free his race.” Yet Smith distinguished Turner as “one of the slaves who had quite a large army,” indicating that perhaps there were others who shared Turner’s aspirations.18 And Turner’s goal, according to a slave owned by plantation owner William Brodnax, was to reach the free states, where they would galvanize other blacks to return to the South to liberate the rest of “their brethren.”19
It must have seemed to those enslaved in 1831 that Turner’s strategy was their only hope. Insurrection must have seemed the only way to liberate the entire black community from a callous socioeconomic structure that sustained the economic interests of the elite few and the social interests of the masses. Enslaved Hardy Edwards, who initially thought that the British had massacred white Americans, said that it “ought to have been done long ago—that the negroes had been punished long enough.”20 As convicted slave Ben indicated, Nat Turner’s insurrection was an attempt to destroy an institution, to destabilize it, in the hopes of creating something new. After hearing that the “negroes” were “killing the white people,” Ben said to another slave, named Sam, “Did not I tell you there would be war?”21
Although the insurrection appears to have only involved slaves from Southampton, the court proceeded to call witnesses from other nearby counties to ascertain if any slaves outside the province seemed to know about Nat’s plan. The court found credible the testimony of a sixteen-year-old girl who stated that she had heard the plans for insurrection discussed among her master’s slaves and those of a nearby neighbor almost eighteen months before the massacre occurred. The court convicted as many as nine people on her unsupported testimony.22 Nat Turner, however, remained at large.
By August 28 the U.S. troops and militia from various counties had arrived and restored order, whereupon a North Carolinian newspaper reporter stated, “The white people commenced the destruction of the negroes.”23 The Richmond Enquirer had already predicted that “these wretches will rue the day on which they broke loose upon the neighboring population, is most certain. A terrible retribution will fall upon their heads—Dearly will they pay for their madness and their misdeeds.”24 Susan Selden of Norfolk described the state of affairs in Virginia this way: “Nothing to be heard but the firing of arms . . . and nothing to be seen but uniforms & warlike looking men.”25 On September 27 John Hampton Pleasant, the senior editor of the Constitutional Whig, noted: “The people are naturally enough, wound up to a high pitch of rage. . . . [I]t is to be feared that a spirit of vindictive ferocity has been excited, which may be productive of farther outrage, and prove discreditable to the country. Since Monday, the insurgent negroes have committed no aggression, but have been dodging about the local swamps, in parties of three and four. They are hunted by the local militia with great implacability, and must all eventually be slain or made captive.”26 The commanding officer, F. M. Boykin, felt it necessary to publish a letter assuring the residents that it was safe for them to come home, and he lamented the sorrow that they felt. Included in this letter, however, is a reprimand: “It is with the most painful sensation, that the Commanding Officer has to [illegible] upon the conduct of any citizen . . . that any necessity should be supposed to have existed, to justify a single act of atrocity. . . . But he feels himself bound to declare, hereby announces to the troops and the citizens, that no excuse will be allowed for any similar acts of violence.”27
But the violence against black people did not cease. The unrestrained bloodshed that the southern black community experienced after Turner’s insurrection exemplifies what a race war would inevitably evolve into, proving that the verbalized threats of extermination were neither abstractions nor mere bluster. Moreover, the slaughter and terrorizing of blacks shows how destructive racialized ideas of self-defense and retaliatory violence can be when the power to define them as such lies with the state. Militia member Robert S. Parker observed, while traveling with the Murfreesboro Company, the Governor Guards, and other vigilante forces, that the “negroes are taken in . . . and executed everyday.”28 Ex-slave Allen Crawford related that when the U.S. soldiers met at the Cross Keys they built “log fires . . . and every one that was Nat’s man was taken bodily by two men who catch you and hol yer bare feet to dis blazing fire ’til you tole all you know’d ’bout dis killing,” even if you “don’t know nothing.”29 On September 24 southerner S. B. Ebbons wrote that he met a man on a stagecoach who had witnessed blacks who were taken prisoner being tortured and generally treated in a “barbarious manner. Their noses and ears cut off, the flesh of their cheeks cut out, their jaws broken asunder and then set up as a mark to shoot at!!! If a black was found out of doors, after dark, without a pass, he would be immediately shot down.”30 Three weeks prior, the Constitutional Whig reported that it also had evidence that there had been a “slaughter of many blacks, without misconduct, and under circumstances of great barbarity.” The newspaper had apparently interviewed one man who admitted killing between ten and fifteen people in retaliation for the massacre of whites. The Whig felt “compelled to offer an apology for the people of Southampton, while we deeply deplore that human nature urged them to such extremities. Let the fact not be doubted by those whom it most concerns, that another such insurrection will be the signal for the extermination of the whole black population in the quarter of the state where it occurs.” In its final analysis of the Southampton insurrection, the Whig noted that the lessons from this event should not be forgotten. Whites needed to be ever vigilant and secure in their position of power, and blacks needed to understand that “20 armed men would put to route [sic] the whole negro population, and we repeat our persuasion, that another insurrection will be followed by putting the whole race to the sword.”31
These words were no idle threat, as white former resident Mr. Robinson confirmed that “there [was] not a Virginian . . . whose mind would revolt at any cruelty, however atrocious, of which the blacks might be the object.” According to Robinson, a country doctor stated that he “assumed that the blacks were not men, and that they ought all to be exterminated. ‘They had declared war first,’ he said, ‘let them be hunted like wild beasts.’”32 Moreover, the idea that all slave owners valued the lives of their slaves is perhaps troubled by one woman, “a pious Methodist,” who said “she would willingly cast her own slaves into the street, there to be shot, provided others, who had slaves, would agree to do the same.”33 Ultimately, even though Robinson helped put down the insurrection in Southampton, he was run out of town after being severely whipped for merely stating that “blacks, as men, were entitled to their freedom, and ought to be emancipated.34
Northerners and their newspapers also expressed their concerns over the plight of black people after Turner’s efforts to destroy the institution. The Liberator reprinted countless articles that affirmed that the violence experienced by blacks in the aftermath of Turner’s rebellion was “of a more savage and blood-thirsty character, than any which have occurred in this country since its early conflicts with the savages, with the single exception of Gen. Jackson’s barborous massacre of the Indians, after he had gotten them into his power, at the Horse Shoe Bend.”35 Northern ideas about black people being at serious risk fostered the belief that southerners were poised to “give over a whole race of two million of human beings to butchery and destruction.36 It was therefore, as former Virginian Robinson believed, “necessary for the people of the non-slaveholding states to interfere and save our country from the disgrace of adding to the horrors of slavery the crime of destroying hundreds upon thousands of those who are only guilty of conspiring, as did the founders of our republic, to obtain their freedom.”37
We have yet to come to terms with the legacy of Nat Turner.38 Was he a rogue killer, a revolutionary, a mass murderer, or a martyr for his people? Slave owners had the freedom to identify the terms of engagement—that Turner was waging a servile war—but we should not allow slave-owner interpretations to continue to have a monopoly on the emotional, cognitive, and spiritual meaning that such a conflict engendered. White people knew that they had the upper hand politically, socially, and economically, and the law of the land was on their side.39 One-sided violence is “deeply terrifying,” especially when experience and rumor have taught that “you do not count.”40 The “active fear” of the slave, who believed that nothing stood in the way of his or her annihilation, cannot be fully understood unless we bring to light how white threats of racial extermination after Turner’s insurrection figured into the thoughts of the enslaved.41 Black people knew what they were up against: Nat Turner’s insurrection put everyone, men, women, and children, at risk, and the cost to the entire black community was untenable.
The aftermath of Turner’s insurrection had serious ramifications for many African Americans. The old ex-slave Charity Bowery testified that during the time of the “old Prophet Nat,” black people could not even express religious sentiment out loud for fear that “low whites would fall upon any slaves they heard praying, or singing a hymn . . . kill[ing] them before their masters or mistresses could get to them.” Religious expression apparently reminded white southerners of Turner’s divine visions of freedom. In her interview with abolitionist Lydia Maria Childs, Charity lamented, “The brightest and the best was killed in Nat’s time. The whites always suspect such ones.”42
This harassment of the black community extended well beyond the region of Southampton County and Virginia. Former slave Harriet Jacobs stated that the Turner insurrection threw her town of Edenton, North Carolina, into utter chaos. According to Jacobs, poor whites in the community took advantage of the situation to inflict unrestrained violence against the community of color:
Those who never witnessed such scenes can hardly believe what I know was inflicted at this time on innocent men, women, and children, against whom there was not the slightest ground for suspicion. Colored people and slaves who lived in remote parts of the town suffered in an especial manner. In some cases the searchers scattered powder and shot among their clothes, and then sent other parties to find them, and bring them forward as proof that they were plotting insurrection. Every where men, women, and children were whipped till the blood stood in puddles at their feet.43
Affirming Charity’s experiences, Jacobs, as did other former slaves, remembered that it was the slaveholding class that ultimately served as protector for many blacks, as they became concerned that they were losing too much of their slave population to the violence inflicted by poor whites against blacks.44 Mrs. Colman Freeman, a free black woman also from North Carolina, remembered, “The white people that had no slaves would have killed the colored, but their masters put them in jail to protect them from the white people” and as a way, whites believed, to protect “themselves of being killed.”45 In Norfolk, Virginia, ex-slave George Teamoh noted that a white woman helped to protect the people of color in his community. Still, he recalled the trauma he experienced: “The persecutions of 1832, when colored people of this State were slaughtered as sheep for the shambles, had brought me into serious doubt as to the existance of an omnipresent, as well as an all creating Being, still with a lingering hope mingled with despair, and a mind, floating as it were into empty space, I hoped on, in the midst of hopelessness.”46 Trauma, as defined by literary scholar Michelle Balaev, “refers to a person’s emotional response to an overwhelming event that disrupts previous ideas of an individual’s sense of self and the standards by which one evaluates society.”47 In their written acts of remembering, Bowery, Jacobs, and Teamoh attempted to place in the public sphere the emotional and psychological terror they experienced during the violence that ensued.
To be sure, Nat Turner’s insurrection attempt was weighted with significance and held serious meaning for black people everywhere. Even as far away as Philadelphia “the intense interest depicted in the face of my mother and her colored neighbors; the guarded whisperings, the denunciation of slavery” led to intense disappointment, black abolitionist Mifflin Gibbs recalled, and “the hope defeated of a successful revolution affected my juvenile mind and stamped my soul with hatred to slavery.”48 Yet the intentional exclusion of any account of Nat Turner’s rebellion also seems clear in some of the slave narratives written during the antebellum era. One marker of trauma that surrounds the aftermath of Turner’s insurrection is the “conspiracy of silence,” where, anthropologist Aaron Denham argues, an “explicit or unstated taboo forbids the asking about or discussion of trauma.”49
For example, Rev. Noah Davis was born into slavery in Madison County, Virginia, and served as a house servant in Fredericksburg. In his detailed account of the months preceding, during, and after the Turner rebellion, Davis never once mentions the chaos that plagued the black and white community in Fredericksburg at the time. His frequent references to reading and carrying the New Testament versus the Bible seem deliberate, suggesting an attempt to disassociate himself perhaps from any knowledge of Old Testament theology or wars for liberation.50 Davis’s reference to the date of September 19, 1831, a time when violence against the black community was most virulent, as the point in which he became “baptized, in company with some twenty others,” seems important for what it potentially says about his state of mind. Perhaps the fact that Davis made no mention of Turner, the insurrection, or the intense retribution that blacks, as well as the black church, faced indicates that despite Davis’s attempts to obfuscate his anxiety about what happened, it had serious meaning for him even many years later.51
This explanation seems plausible, as the timing of Davis’s religious conversion experience in 1831 was similar to that of Henry Box Brown’s in Richmond. Brown stated that he did not know why whites suddenly began to whip, hang, and “cut down with swords” any slaves in the streets after dark. His master explained that the sudden intensity in violence was because some “slaves had plotted to kill their owners.” Brown recalled, “About this time, I began to grow alarmed respecting my future welfare. . . . I thought perhaps the day of judgment was not far distant and I must prepare for that dreaded event.” After “praying for about three months,” Brown asked his master if he could join the Baptist Church, which he got permission to do.52 Unlike Davis, Brown does relate how horrible the post-Turner retribution was for the black community, but even he limits the traumatic experience to only a few pages of his narrative.
Bethany Veney’s narrative is another example of how the memory of Nat Turner is conspicuously absent from the memoir of a slave growing up in Virginia. Veney would have been a young adult at the time of Nat Turner’s rebellion, and yet she makes no mention of it.53 It is possible that in the western part of Virginia where she was enslaved there was not as much anxiety and violence directed toward the black community at the time. Yet Veney’s silence seems odd. The evidence indicates that whites in the west were just as vested in asserting control and as full of fear of their black population as those slaveholders living in the tidewater and eastern regions. Indeed, the governor of Virginia, John Floyd, claimed that he got requests for arms from everywhere, as “the alarm of the country is great in the counties between this and the Blue Ridge Mountains.”54
Veney, however, did reveal what it was like for free blacks living in Virginia. She observed when she was hired as a cook for blacks working on “the pike” that was under construction in the 1830s that “the [free] negroes were a rude set, as might be expected; for at that time they were the one class despised by everybody. They were despised by the master-class, because they could not subject them to their will quite in the same way as if they were slaves, and despised by the slave-class, because envied as possessing a nominal freedom, which they were denied.”55 Slaveholders particularly targeted free blacks after Turner’s rebellion because they believed that blacks not in bondage unsettled those still enslaved, making white mastery insecure. Moreover, much of the discourse among elected officials after Turner’s insurrection centered on how to get rid of free blacks or terrorize them into leaving Virginia. Although Veney does not mention the Turner insurrection, she does give evidence of the climate of heightened animosity that existed at the time.
The majority of slave narratives from Virginia and throughout the South that were collected during the mid-1930s as part of the New Deal Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Writers’ Project also do not mention Nat Turner at all or claim to never have heard of him or any insurrection attempts. In many of the WPA narratives of Virginia slaves and those from other southern states, the interviewers’ list of questions apparently included whether the ex-slave had ever heard of Nat Turner.56 Too often, the answer was that the exslave did not “remember anything about the Nat Turner Rebellion, and never heard anything about it.”57 Some ex-slaves deliberately deflected the question by stating something like, “I don’t know nobody in that rebellion” or “we never had any slave up-risings in our neighborhood.’58 One woman claimed that she “never knowed about uprisings till the Ku Klux sprung up.”59 Out of all the published extant copies of Virginia WPA narratives only four interviewees mention Nat Turner by name, and all of these accounts were given to interviewers of color.60 It is probable that some black people in the South may not have known about Nat Turner’s plans or that an insurrection took place on August 21, 1831. It is highly doubtful, however, that they did not know about or experience, in some form or other, the retaliation fed by white paranoia that occurred afterward.
Nevertheless, there was not complete silence during the antebellum era about the retribution experienced after Nat Turner’s rebellion. Although Harriet Jacobs, Box Brown, and Charity Bowery stand out as exceptions to this claim, there were a few others. In a letter to Jacobs, Lydia Maria Childs told her to add more detail to her chapter on Nat Turner.61 Jacobs, who was born a slave in Edenton, North Carolina, around 1813, complied by detailing how violent the aftermath of Nat Turner’s rebellion was for her and the rest of the enslaved and free black community. She noted that in town “towards evening the turbulence increased. The soldiers, stimulated by drink, committed still greater cruelties. Shrieks and shouts continually rent the air.” And although “the wrath of the slaveholders was somewhat appeased by the capture of Nat Turner,” for two months black folks, particularly those who “lived out of the city . . . [suffered] the most shocking outrages . . . committed with perfect impunity. Every day for a fortnight, if I looked out, I saw horsemen with some poor panting negro tied to their saddles, and compelled by the lash to keep up with their speed.” Jacobs also noted that during this time, black women were victims of rape by roving bands of white men who at night “went wherever they chose among the colored people, acting out their brutal will. Many women hid themselves in woods and swamps, to keep out of their way. If any of the husbands or fathers told of these outrages, they were tied up to the public whipping post, and cruelly scourged for telling lies about white men.” Everyone was alarmed and lived in fear of the violence inflicted upon the black community Jacobs recounts, “the consternation was universal.”62
Moses Grandy would have been forty-eight years old during what he called “the time, called the time of the Insurrection . . . when the whites said the colored people were going to rise, and shot, hanged, and otherwise destroyed many of them” in Norfolk, Virginia. Grandy stated that although he did not suffer personally he clearly was traumatized: “The soldiers were seizing all the blacks they could find. . . . I could see the jail, full of colored people, and even the whipping post, at which they were constantly enduring the lash.”63 This slave narrative also depicts how dangerous religious expression was, and Grandy, who never says Nat Turner’s name, stated that
after the insurrection which I spoke of before, they were forbidden to meet even for worship. Often they are flogged if they are found singing or praying at home. They may go to the places of worship used by whites; but they like their own meetings better. My wife’s brother Issac was a colored preacher. A number of slaves went privately into a wood to hold meetings; when they were found out, they were flogged, and each was forced to tell who was there. Three were shot, two of whom were killed and the other was badly wounded. For preaching to them, Isaac was flogged, and his back pickled; when it was nearly well, he was flogged and pickled again, and so on for some months; then his back was suffered to get well and he was sold.64
Grandy goes on to say how slaves lived in constant fear, and, affirming Bethany Veney’s assessment, he noted that “free negroes are liable to great cruelties. They have their dwellings entered, their bedding and furniture destroyed, and themselves, their wives and children beaten. . . . There is nothing which a white man may not do against a black one, if he only takes care that no other white man can give evidence against him.”65
The facts of traumatic experiences, psychologist Pumla Gododo Madikizela argues, are often filtered through considerable concern by others over their accuracy, but in these narratives the “facts of the traumatic experience are written on the victim’s body and heart and remain an indelible image of what the victim suffered.” Memories of internecine violence and fears of extermination became “embedded in the emotional scars” that millions of victims of enslavement carried with them not only in the South but across the African diaspora. The black community dealt with the aftermath of Nat’s insurrection as best they could, but African Americans were not able to talk or write about what happened from their perspective, to name those who were guilty of causing the trauma in their lives, which would have helped in the healing process.66
As a free person of color, Mrs. Colman Freeman made the decision to leave North Carolina after Nat Turner’s insurrection because of the violence directed against her and her family. Freeman stated that when “they came into my mother’s, and threatened us—they searched for guns and ammunition; that was the first time I was ever silenced by a white man. One of them put his pistol to my breast, and said, ‘If you open your head, I’ll kill you in a minute!’ I had told my mother to hush, as she was inquiring what their conduct meant. We were as ignorant of the rebellion as they had been. Then I made up my mind not to remain in that country. We had to stay a while to sell our crops: but I would not go to church there any more.”67
While enslaved in a small community in eastern Virginia, Fields Cook wrote that he “was a boy about the time of nat Turners insurrection who had better never been born than to have left such a curse upon his nation I say that he had better never been born.”68 By intertwining the extreme, yet divinely ordained, suffering of Job from the Bible with the aftermath of Turner’s insurrection, Cook, a preacher, medical practitioner, and eventual candidate for Congress in 1869, places that ordeal within the larger context of the struggle between good and evil—between slaves and slaveholders. In the biblical story of Job, slavery is wrong, and in the end, God promises those who are faithful that he has the capacity to humble those with great physical power when he decides to.69
Cook marked the Turner rebellion as transformative for the black community, as the curse that black people experienced after Turner’s open battle for liberation. To be sure, for Cook, the curse upon “his nation” was the curse of white persecution and chattel slavery, not a curse upon blacks as a people or a condemnation of what Turner did as sinful. And although Turner might have regretted the destruction of people of color that ensued after the insurrection, Cook suggests that Turner’s divinely ordained mission dictated that the suffering of the African American community would serve a higher purpose.70
In Cook’s account, African Americans continuously faced life-and-death struggles after Turner’s insurrection. As a teenager, when Cook was put into the fields for the first time, he stated, “I had to comply with the old saying work little pig or die.” Cook also described how frightened many Afro-Virginians were: “[They] could not sleep at nights for the guns and swords being stuck in our windows and doors to know who was here and what their business was and if they had a pass port and so forth and at that time a colored person was not to be seen with a book in his hand. . . . [M]any a poor fellow burned his books for fear.”71 Cook believed that “we poor colored people” did not deserve the persecution and subsequent white violence.
The enslaved community most traumatized during the aftermath of Turner’s insurrection, however, was Nat Turner’s family. According to Gilbert Turner, Nat Turner’s son, because Turner “had fought for and demanded his freedom . . . as befitted one made in the image of God,” his wife, children, and “everyone with a drop of Nat Turner’s blood must be shackled and sold into the far South.” Gilbert, approximately nine years old at the time, witnessed that “the fury of the master class was let loose on the helpless Negro men, women, and children alike.” Particularly traumatic to Gilbert was that he saw his “black-haired and dark faced” mother, whom he called Fannie, get whipped, but “Gilbert knew that he must not cry out, and he hoped and prayed that Melissa [his two-year-old sister] would not sob, as he knew that the usual custom of slave auctioneers with colored babies, when they began to cry and become troublesome and thus interfere with the progress of the sale, was to grasp them by both heels, and to dash their brains against the lintel of a door.”72
Gilbert’s account of slave life and his description of the killing of slave babies by white slave owners are supported by and remained indelible in the minds of other people enslaved across the South. One ex-slave recounted that his uncle from Virginia told him how “they used to take a child out and sling it up against a tree and sling its brains out.”73 An anonymous slave from Culleoka, Tennessee, rebuked similar behavior of one slave master she knew by saying: “I never saw as many dead babies in my life as I did on his farm. . . . I actually saw old man F. walk through the field and, seeing a baby crying, take his stick and knock its brains out and call for the foreman to come and haul off the nasty, black rat. . . . This is one reason I believe in a hell.”74 Another slave from Mississippi said that “slavery is one of the greatest curses that ever was. . . . [K]illing babies—I have seen one with its brains dashed out against a red oak tree. Tired of carrying it, its mother being in the gang, and troubled with it, as any man would be, they put it out of the way.”75 The pervasiveness of the violence directed toward enslaved babies is in the account of ex-slave Angie Boyce from Indiana. When Angie was a baby, she and her mother were put in jail as runaways, even though they were free. An Irish woman “threatened to bash its [Angie’s] brains out against the wall if it did not stop crying.” Angie’s mother, Margaret, stayed up all night to keep the woman from carrying out her threat to kill Angie.76
Other enslaved people also remembered American slave traders killing slave babies.77 Ex-slave Parthena Rollins recalled that a young mother of a baby was up for sale, but because the trader did not want the child, he would not buy the woman. So the owner “took her away, took the baby from her, and beat it to death right before the mother’s eyes, then brought the girl back for sale without the baby, and she was bought immediately.”78 Fannie Berry of Virginia recalled that when women with young babies were sold off, “as soon as dey got on de train dis ol’ new master had train stopped an made dem poor gal mothers take babies off and laid dem precious things on de groun’ and left dem behind to live or die.”79 Former slave L. M. Mills recounts that he knew of a woman in Glasgow, Missouri, who along with her two-month-old baby was sold away from her husband. When she was unable to keep herself from crying about being separated from her husband, Mills said the slave driver “snatched her little baby from her and threw it into a pen full of hogs. That sounds like a strange story, but I saw it.”80 Indeed, infants were often disposable to white slave owners because they were “worthless” as “productive laborers.”81 Much like what had happened to Native American children, enslaved people knew that black babies were subjected to brutal and barbaric treatment by whites well into the nineteenth century.
Gilbert’s little sister was sold to slave traders out of the state of Virginia, then to a slaveholder in Alabama, and then to one in Texas, ultimately ending up returning to the area of Northampton, North Carolina, as the property of Marcus W. Smallwood. Her name had changed to Mary Eliza, and she lived in fear throughout her life, hiding her true identity as the daughter of Nat Turner out of “fear of reprisal.” Yet she did tell her story to her son, formerly enslaved Dr. John Jefferson Smallwood, who would commit his entire career to combatting racism and encouraging uplift “in spite of all the atrocities that the Negro had been subjected to.”82
Clearly, many of the enslaved did know about Turner’s actions, and many no doubt revered him for what he attempted to do. Fortunately, there is evidence that Turner’s legacy remained part of and was sustained by oral tradition—that Turner was indeed a folk hero. George H. Burks, a lawyer in Indiana, wrote a lecture in 1890 proclaiming that Turner was a martyr who was “hanged and murdered because he dared to speak in behalf of liberty and for no other cause was he murdered.” In his speech, Burks argued in support of Fields Cook’s analysis, that Turner laid the groundwork for John Brown, the Civil War, and the efforts of Abraham Lincoln, and because of this, “Nat Turner’s object was successful.” Finally, Burks concluded, “Nat Turner is not dead. He lives in the hearts of those who love freedom and liberty.”83
Lucy Mae Turner learned the story of her grandfather Nat Turner, a “tall, poetic, masterful, ambitious reddish-black young slave,” from her father, Gilbert Turner, who was only able to reclaim his surname after relocating to Ohio after the Civil War. “His voice still echoes in my ears, telling the story of slavery,” Lucy Mae remembered, and she learned that as a young man Gilbert “thought many times of the struggles and sacrifices of his father.” Gilbert knew that his father was “a leader among his people” who taught “them that slavery was intolerable, and was an institution doomed for destruction.” Most importantly, Gilbert relayed to Lucy that “Nat Turner was a slave who stood for supreme, great brotherhood. Where men did not each other buy.” And it was not just her father who thought this way. In her home, Lucy remembered that “exslaves would sit by the open fireplace of evenings and go through the story of slavery from Nat Turner’s insurrection to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.”84
The memorializing of Turner as a hero is also evident in the testimony of ex-slave Daniel Goddard, who indicated that “the Nat Turner insurrection in Virginia and the Vesey uprising in Charleston was discussed often, in my presence, by my parents and friends.” Goddard, who was an infant during the Civil War, recalled that most former slaves knew about Nat Turner and other acts of resistance across the black Atlantic: “I learned that revolts of slaves in Martinique, Antigua, Santiago, Caracas, and Tortuga, was known all over the South. Slaves were about as well aware of what was going on, as their masters were. However the masters made it harder for their slaves for a while.”85
Harriet Jacobs was also inspired by the memory of Nat Turner. When Jacobs determined that she had to make her escape from slavery and the sexual advances of her young mistress’s obsessed father, Dr. James Norcom, she went to the grave site of her parents: “As I passed the wreck of the old meeting house, where before Nat Turner’s time, the slaves had been allowed to meet for worship, I seemed to hear my father’s voice come from it, bidding me not to tarry till I reached freedom or the grave. I rushed on with renovated hopes.”86 It seems significant that for Jacobs, her father’s instructions came from a godly place whose memory was tied to the revolutionary Turner.
Although only a few former slaves in the Virginia WPA narratives were willing to admit any knowledge of Turner’s insurrection, some ex-slaves living outside of Virginia did recall being told about Nat Turner. Indeed, the WPA narratives of ex-slave Anna Washington from Clarendon, Arkansas, and slaves from other communities illuminate how the oral tradition of storytelling may have helped to sustain Turner’s memory across the South. Washington, whose mother and father were slaves in Virginia, claimed, “I heard my pa talk about Nat Turner. He got up a rebellion of black folk back in Virginia. I heard my pa sit and tell about him.” Emma Turner, from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, whose mother was born in Virginia, says she “heard her talk of the Nat Turner Rebellion but I never did see him.” Rev. Frank T. Boone, a free black born in Nansemond County, Virginia, who was also living in Arkansas at the time of his interview, stated that “I have heard the ‘Nat Turner Rebellion’ spoken of. . . . I think the old people called it the ‘Nat Turner War.’”87
Due to Virginia’s robust participation in the internal slave trade, stories about Nat Turner and his rebellion traveled across the Deep South. And these memories, carried by those enslaved, were passed on to future generations as examples of how black people had indeed contested their condition of servitude and oppression. Cornelia Carney remembered that Turner became part of the slave vernacular—a particular way of being that African Americans clearly valued and named as culturally relevant to their own formulations of resistance and similar to the trickster, Brer Rabbit, in Uncle Remus’ Tales: “Niggers was too smart fo’ white folks to git ketched. White folks was sharp too, but not sharp enough to git by ole Nat. Nat? I don’t know who he was. Ole folks used to say it all de time. De meanin’ I git is dat de niggers could always out-smart de white folks. What you git fum it?”88
These transmissions of black history might have additionally served as lessons to the black community. Stories about rebellions like Nat Turner’s would remind those enslaved of the scope of white retaliation when blacks waged wars of liberation against their oppressors: they were cautionary tales of the potential ramifications of black-white conflict in America and rationales for supporting certain strategies of uplift over others. An examination of the number of attempted insurrections throughout the South from 1832 up to the Civil War shows that the number of those enslaved who were convicted or even accused is extremely small compared to the nearly four million African Americans living in America by 18 60.89 In fact, of the twenty-five insurrections or conspiracies listed in historian Herbert Aptheker’s careful study of slave rebellions between 1835 and 1860, only nine of the attempted revolts could be defined as large in scale, involving at least forty to several hundred slaves.90 Several of the reported insurrections or conspiracies were not attempts to engage in warfare at all. In six events, all in the 1850s, the enslaved were attempting to run away en masse to some place where they could be free. Of the twenty-five attempts by blacks to rebel in the twenty-five years after Turner, only one incident was recorded in which arms were found among the enslaved.91 Therefore, the vast majority of slaves did not attempt to insurrect after 1832, and the reason they did not can be found in the testimonies of those who understood slavery firsthand.
Former slave Lunsford Lane lets us know that in Virginia, he and his fellow slaves were “aware of our utter powerlessness” in stopping the “wrongs endured by themselves or friends.” They also understood that “any attempt at resistance would bring certain and immediate destruction.” Affirming that the memories of the aftermath of Nat Turner’s rebellion remained indelible, Lane recalled that “we had seen the attempt fail, and we were not anxious to put our necks in the halter.” Lane noted that for whites, ideas of commoditization aligned with the “calamity” of racial annihilation, and the discernment of what had happened after Nat Turner seemed to figure prominently within this former slave’s psyche.92 Slave owners made it clear that black people were mere chattel that could be worked to death, and if an insurrection was attempted, all blacks, whether they were guilty or innocent, would be killed.
Black men and women, enslaved and free, did not need any more examples of white retaliation to let them know that, ultimately, they did not matter. As one female ex-slave put it: “You know white folks would just as soon kill you as not, and you had to do what they said” if you wanted to stay alive.93 Mom Ryer Emmanuel was given a similar accounting of slavery by her mother: “I say, ‘Ma, if dey been try to beat me, I would a jump up en bite dem.’ She say, ‘You would get double portion den.’ Just on account of dat, ain’ many of dem slavery people knockin bout here now neither, I tell you. Dat first hide dey had, white folks just took it off dem. I would rather been dead, I say . . . ‘Ma, yunnah couldn’ do nothing?’ She say, ‘No, white people had us in slavery time.’”94
Indeed, reliving the memory of “cruelties occasioned by this [Nat Turner’s] insurrection,” former Virginia slave Henry Box Brown confirmed that slaves made a calculated choice not to insurrect after 1832:
It is strange that more insurrections do not take place among the slaves; but their masters have impressed upon their minds so forcibly the fact, that the United States Government is pledged to put them down, in case they should attempt any such movement, that they have no heart to contend against such fearful odds; and yet the slaveholder lives in constant dread of such an event . . . the fierce yells of an infuriated slave population, rushing to vengeance.
There is no doubt but this would be the case, if it were not for the Northern people, who are ready, as I have been often told, to shoot us down, if we attempt to rise and obtain our freedom. I believe that if the slaves could do as they wish, they would throw off their heavy yoke immediately, by rising against their masters, but ten millions of Northern people stand with their feet on their necks, and how can they arise?95
Nat Turner’s insurrection exposed for both sides how antebellum ideas of a race war and extermination would perhaps play out not only in the southern mind but also among those living in the North.96
We do not know the number of black people who lost their lives in the aftermath of Nat Turner’s insurrection. Although the Auditor’s Office lists only nineteen slaves executed and twenty-one slaves deported from August 21 through December 31, 1831, for the entire state of Virginia, this number cannot be an accurate accounting of the total loss of life.97 Estimates of over one hundred have been suggested, and, based on observations of blacks who lived during the 1830s, in “one day 120 Negroes were killed.”98 These numbers only take into account the region of Southampton. The total number, which would include blacks from all the southern states, was undoubtedly much higher.
After Turner’s insurrection, blacks in the North came under siege as well. Antiblack sentiment expressed in race riots predated the Nat Turner rebellion, but the number of incidents increased exponentially, from 20 incidents between 1820 and 1829 to over 115 incidents between 1830 and 1839.99 In Providence, Rhode Island, a riot broke out in September 1831 when a mob of between seven and eight hundred whites, most of them sailors, destroyed nearly all the homes of the black community in response to rumors that blacks had insurrected in North Carolina and had taken over the city of Wilmington.100 Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass noted that in Saint Michaels, Maryland, a mob threatened him and other blacks for establishing a Sabbath school in 1833, and “one of this pious crew told me, that as for my part, I wanted to be another Nat Turner: and if I did not look out, I should get as many balls into me, as Nat Turner did in to him.” These sorts of threats appear commonplace, as Douglass also claimed that “the feeling was very bitter toward all colored people in Baltimore, about this time, (1836,) and they—free and slave—suffered all manner of insult and wrong.” He recalled that when he was working on the docks in Baltimore as a ship’s carpenter, the white carpenters began to “talk contemptuously and maliciously of ‘the niggers;’ saying, that ‘they would take the country,’ that ‘they ought to be killed.’”101
In Philadelphia some white men determined that the black population within that city was dangerous and that northern free blacks must have collaborated with Turner in planning his insurrection. A proposal was put forth seeking to have the state government expel not only any newly arriving black settlers but also the existing free black population. Abolitionist James Forten and other leaders of the black community tried to defend themselves against the accusations that they had aided Turner in his rebellion, but the tide of emotion was such that no words could appease those white Philadelphians who were focused on getting rid of a people they viewed as dangerous. When the Julius Pringle, a ship hired by the American Colonization Society (ACS) to transport newly freed blacks from North Carolina to Liberia, stopped in Philadelphia for some repairs in 1832, an armed mob quickly gathered to repel any attempts made by the black passengers to disembark, as it was rumored that they were part of Nat’s army. The ship was forced to quickly leave port and make its repairs farther down the coast at Chester.102
In 1833 and 1834 antiblack riots broke out in New York City, Philadelphia, and New Haven, Connecticut, affirming that some whites in the northern white community were just as opposed to the idea of black freedom as whites in the South. Black people in the North and South experienced an escalation in racial violence, making Nat Turner’s war against slavery a pivotal moment for the black community and the nation long after the dust had settled in Southampton, Virginia.
Nat Turner’s insurrection represented an organized attempt to dismantle a system that had become even more oppressive over time, one in which violence and the possibility of death remained fundamental tools for sustaining white mastery. In the aftermath of the insurrection, black people experienced the trauma of unspeakable persecution, which for many remained either too painful or too dangerous to fully articulate for posterity. And yet the abridgment of hope articulated above, and the curtailment in the belief in a Haitian model of liberation working in America did not mean that black Americans lost their need to be free. It suggests, rather, that the slave and free community came to see that a Haitian-style revolution was unachievable, that as a strategy, it would never result in freedom. Whites clearly sent a message that black people understood: whites would win any war of liberation that blacks might wage, even if it meant death to the entire black community. These ideas were grounded in historical precedence. Indeed, they were rearticulated in didactic fashion by the Virginia legislative body in 1832 in its attempt to assure the public that no other incident like Nat Turner’s war of liberation would ever occur again.