Walter Johnson: Signs in the Heavens

Walter Johnson

In the long history of mass racial killing in the United States, Nat Turner’s revolt stands out as the one instance in which the perpetrators were Black and the victims white. Beginning late on the night of 21 August 1831, the rebels went from house to house in Southampton County, Virginia, murdering all the white people they could. Their numbers grew as they were joined by enslaved people they met along the way. By 23 August, when they were routed by a militia made up of several dozen of the three thousand white men who had turned out to suppress the revolt, the rebels had killed at least 55 people: men, women and children, most of them enslavers, whom they shot, stabbed or beat to death.

My father told me about Nat Turner’s revolt when I asked him, as a child, if enslaved people had ever fought back. I’m still not sure how much of the story he knew. He didn’t talk about the revolt itself, but told me what had happened to Turner after his capture. The white men, he said, had tied him by the arms and legs to four horses, which pulled him to pieces that were buried in four different counties. (In fact, Turner was hanged before being dismembered. His skull seems to have been passed between medical schools; his skin was rumoured to have been tanned and used to make purses sold as souvenirs.) Perhaps my father was simply repeating what he had been told by his own father as a white child growing up in Virginia in the 1940s. Perhaps my father’s father and my father after him thought that repeating the story – a story – of how Turner died was all there was to say about the revolt.

Anthony Kaye and Gregory Downs, like many historians before them, begin their version with The Confessions of Nat Turner, published by the Southampton County lawyer and enslaver Thomas Gray. Gray had been one of the men who’d hunted for Turner. After he was captured, Gray visited him several times in jail. From their conversations, Gray produced a first-person account of Turner’s life and the uprising, which he printed days after Turner’s execution in November 1831. Gray’s manuscript had been read out in court as evidence against Turner; when asked whether the words were his own, Turner said they were. Even so, this was a ‘confession’ made under duress, recorded by a white man for an audience that had recently been terrorised by Turner.

‘You have asked me to give a history of the motives which induced me to undertake the late insurrection, as you call it,’ The Confessions of Nat Turner begins. Turner was born into slavery in Southampton County, where his family were enslaved by a plantation owner called Benjamin Turner. As a young child, he had shown knowledge of events that occurred before his birth in 1800, which ‘greatly astonished’ his mother and others who were called to bear witness. This ‘caused them to say in my hearing I surely would be a prophet … and my father and mother strengthened me in this my first impression, saying in my presence, I was intended for some great purpose.’ Turner learned to read and write ‘with the most perfect ease’, and developed a growing sense of his own singularity and purpose. ‘Having soon discovered to be great, I must appear so, [I] therefore studiously avoided mixing in society, and wrapped myself in mystery, devoting my time to fasting and prayer.’

Turner grew up during the Second Great Awakening, a religious revival that began in the 1790s. He was used to ‘hearing the scriptures commented on at meetings’. One passage in particular struck him: ‘Seek ye the kingdom of Heaven and all things shall be added unto you,’ from the Gospel of Matthew. Turner reflected and prayed on the passage, and one day heard its words spoken back to him in the voice of the Holy Spirit. He was ‘astonished’, he told Gray, and ‘for two years prayed continually whenever my duty would permit’ until, late in 1823 or early in 1824, the Spirit spoke the same words to him again, ‘which fully confirmed me in the impression that I was ordained for some great purpose in the hands of the Almighty’. Turner ran away from his enslavers soon afterwards, but the Spirit commanded him to return, admonishing him for having ‘my wishes directed to the things of this world and not to the kingdom of Heaven’. It wasn’t long before he was again visited by the Spirit and presented with a vision of apocalyptic struggle: ‘White spirits and black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened – the thunder rolled in the heavens and blood flowed in the streams.’

Some months later, the Spirit appeared ‘and reminded me of the things it had already shown me, and that it would then reveal to me the knowledge of the elements, the revolution of the planets, the operation of the tides, and the changes of the seasons’. The moment of his destiny, Turner concluded, was drawing near,

for as the blood of Christ had been shed on this earth, and had ascended to heaven for the salvation of sinners, and was now returning to earth again in the form of dew – and as the leaves on the trees bore the impression of the figures I had seen in the heavens, it was plain to me that the Saviour was about t0 lay down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and the great day of judgment was at hand.

By ‘signs in the heavens’, the Spirit would make known to him ‘when I should commence the great work … and slay my enemies with their own weapons’.

A partial eclipse of the sun in February 1831 seemed to be the final sign Turner had been waiting for, and he made his plans known to four enslaved people ‘in whom I had the greatest confidence’. The uprising was to begin on 4 July. It was delayed, however, after the planning left Turner so unsettled that he ‘felt sick’. When the skies over Southampton turned red on 13 August, he ‘determined not to wait … longer’, and a week later the revolt began. Turner and the others agreed that ‘neither age nor sex was to be spared.’

They started at the house of Joseph Travis, Turner’s home plantation. (He had been sold twice since childhood.) According to Gray, Turner deemed Travis ‘a kind master’, who ‘placed the greatest confidence in me’. Turner climbed a ladder and entered the house through an upstairs window, then went downstairs, took possession of the guns he found and unbarred the door. ‘It was then observed that I must spill the first blood,’ and so, armed with a hatchet and accompanied by a man named Will, who was carrying an axe, Turner sneaked into the room where Travis was sleeping with his wife and small child. Turner struck Travis a glancing blow. As Travis ‘sprang from [his] bed and called his wife … Will laid him dead with a blow of his axe, and Mrs Travis shared the same fate.’ It was ‘the work of a moment’ to kill other members of the family: ‘Not one of them awoke.’ After travelling some distance down the road Turner remembered the cradle in Travis’s bedchamber. Will and a man called Henry returned to the house to kill the baby.

Through the night and into the following day the rebels carried out what Turner referred to as ‘the work of death’. They dragged Salathiel Francis out of his house and murdered him in the garden. They found Mrs Reese asleep in her house and killed her in bed, then killed her son, who ‘had only time to say who is that and he was no more’. As the sun began to rise, they arrived at the Turner place, where they smashed open the door and found Mrs Turner and Mrs Newsome standing frozen with fear. Will killed Mrs Turner with one blow of his axe. Turner took Mrs Newsome ‘by the hand’ and struck her ‘several blows over the head, but not being able to kill her as the sword was dull’, Will ‘despatched her also’. ‘I saw Will pulling Mrs Whitehead out of the house, and at the step he nearly severed her head from her body with his broad axe.’ Turner found her daughter Margaret hiding outside the house. When she ran, he chased her down ‘and after repeated blows with a sword, I killed her by a blow on the head with a fence rail.’

By the afternoon of 22 August, a posse of armed white men from the nearby town of Jerusalem (among them Thomas Gray) and militias from neighbouring counties had converged on Southampton. There were now about fifty rebels, though rumours had the number in the hundreds. The white men carried out acts of spectacular violence intended to cow the enslaved men into submission. At one point a man named Alfred, who had briefly joined the rebels and then fled, tried to surrender to a band of white men he encountered on the road. The men debated killing him but worried he might have useful information. They didn’t have time to interrogate him immediately, so they severed his Achilles tendons and left him by the side of the road. Estimates of the number of enslaved and free people of colour killed in the frenzy range from several dozen to the hundreds. In 2021 Southampton County finally renamed Blackhead Signpost Road, where, in 1831, the severed head of one of the rebels (or perhaps someone caught up in the panic) was placed on a pike.

On the morning of 23 August, a militia from nearby Greensville caught up with the rebels at the Harris plantation and routed them. Over the following weeks, the enslavers of Southampton County, aided by state militia forces and federal troops, rounded up and interrogated those believed to have been involved in the uprising. Thirty enslaved people were convicted, eighteen of whom were hanged and the rest sold to slavers outside Virginia. Turner remained at large. After fleeing the battle, he managed to make it into the woods nearby. He hid in one hole or ‘cave’ for six weeks, then had to move to another. At the end of October, his hiding place was discovered and he was taken to the jail in Jerusalem.

Not long before he was executed, Gray asked Turner: ‘Do you not find yourself mistaken now?’ ‘Was not Christ crucified?’ Turner replied. In his introduction to the Confessions, Gray wrote that Turner was ‘a gloomy fanatic … revolving in the recesses of his own dark, bewildered and overwrought mind, schemes of indiscriminate massacre to the whites’. By characterising him as a madman, Gray was reassuring his readers, and perhaps himself, that they could go on believing (or at least saying) that slavery was just, their slaves were happy and their families safe.

The fact that any attempt to understand Turner’s inner life must rely on an account produced by Gray and used in court to condemn Turner to death poses an intellectual and moral quandary. In recent years historians have begun to adopt the ‘critical fabulation’ pioneered by Saidiya Hartman to address such dilemmas, trying to give a sense of what an enslaved person might have known, thought, feared, desired in an attempt to compensate for the blindspots and elisions of traditional history. Kaye and Downs employ a method that could be called ‘biblical fabulation’. They draw on stories and images that may have been familiar to Turner in order to fill in and expand his ‘confession’. When Gray asked him what he had meant when he said ‘the Spirit’ had guided his path, Turner apparently responded that he had been referring to ‘the Spirit that spoke to the prophets in former days’. It is from this answer that Kaye and Downs brilliantly, if speculatively, unfold their ‘visionary history’. Turner’s invocation of Old Testament prophets suggests to them a practice of ‘typology’ by which he used biblical stories as a way to understand and resolve dilemmas in his own life.

The method of Nat Turner, Black Prophet is suggestive rather than definitive. At every turn, Kaye and Downs speculate about the spiritual dimensions of Turner’s actions and suggest biblical sources for his decisions. ‘If Nat in his cave looked to the history of prophets for solace,’ the authors write, ‘Elijah might have been an especially meaningful type.’ Unorthodox though this may be, it enables Kaye and Downs to give a sense of the way the world might have looked to a devout visionary who felt the immediate presence of God. They suggest that, in sending men back to the Travis house to kill the baby, Turner might have been taking inspiration from the Book of Joshua, in which the prophet repeatedly ‘smote’ his enemies, ‘both man and woman, young and old, and ox and sheep and ass, with the edge of the sword’.

Nat Turner, Black Prophet succeeds in conjuring the terrifying urgency of spiritual signs and portents. ‘Nat’s religion does not serve to communicate the real story,’ Kaye and Downs write near the end of the book. It ‘is the real story’. They are surely right to set aside readings that treat religious inspiration as a simple misrecognition of deeper social functions and motives, and to distinguish Turner’s Christian millenarianism from the wish for the ‘freedom’ of the liberal individual subject that historians have so often identified in the aspirations and actions of the enslaved. And yet it’s hard to know what to make of a book which implies that Turner had more in common with the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith than with the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture. For all the differences between the worlds they were fighting to bring into being, there were many similarities between those that Turner and Louverture were trying to end. The material histories and daily practices of slavery determined their struggles and the way they imagined the future, just as the tools of slavery – the ladder, the hatchet, the axe – determined the way they fought back. Turner’s spiritual warfare was conducted on the terrain of Southampton County, and slavery shaped his strategic and moral imagination: his reckoning of the value of his own life and that of others, his willingness to die and to kill.

Confronted with the terrible violence of the Haitian Revolution, C.L.R. James neither denied its horror nor accepted that it delegitimised the revolutionaries’ achievements. He simply observed that the enslaved fought in the way they had been taught by their owners. Perhaps Nat Turner did imagine himself as Joshua as he killed his way through Southampton County, but the terms of the conflict – the concerns that would make the Book of Joshua seem relevant to his life in Virginia in the 1830s – had been set by the slaveholders.

Send Letters To:

The Editor London Review of Books, 28 Little Russell Street London, WC1A 2HNletters@lrb.co.uk Please include name, address, and a telephone number.