Nat Turner’s Rebellion

In Southampton County, Virginia, Nat Turner and six other men launched the deadliest slave revolt in the history of the United States. The revolt began in the middle of the night, August 21–22, 1831, and by the middle of the day on August 22 the rebels had killed nearly five dozen whites, including many women and children. Whites responded in many ways. Many panicked, and some rallied to oppose the rebels. Some of these irregular white forces stumbled upon Turner and his men at James Parker’s farm, not far from Jerusalem, Southampton’s county seat. The encounter ended quickly and indecisively, but the whites had stopped the rebel advance. Following this first battle, Turner tried to rally his men, something that became increasingly hard to do as more and more whites from nearby counties in Virginia and North Carolina came to Southampton. By the morning of August 23, the rebels were defeated at a series of engagements and the organized phase of the revolt ended. Whites quickly and brutally reasserted their control over Southampton, torturing many of the accused and killing roughly three dozen black suspects without trials. Worried about the possibility of a more extensive bloodbath, white leaders in Southampton, who knew that owners were compensated for the value of their slaves who had been condemned by the state, soon clamped down on the extralegal massacre of suspected rebels. On August 31, 1831, trials of suspect rebels began. By the time that the trials were finished the following spring, thirty slaves and one free black had been condemned to death. Of these people, nineteen were executed in Southampton, and twelve had their sentences commuted to transportation from the state of Virginia. Turner himself, one of the condemned, was hanged on November 11, 1831, although not before Thomas R. Gray, a lawyer who was defense council for other slave rebels, interviewed the jailed rebel leader. Gray published this transcript as The Confessions of Nat Turner, which presented Turner’s religious motivations. Immediately after the revolt, several southern state legislatures took up laws regulating slavery; the Virginia legislature also considered and rejected a gradual emancipation scheme. Since the revolt, Nat Turner and his legacy have been contested by many, including scholars, novelists, artists, and filmmakers.

John Chavis

This essay on the life of John Chavis illustrates both the opportunities and the obstacles facing free African Americans in post-Revolutionary North Carolina. Details of his early life are uncertain. Reportedly a Revolutionary War veteran, Chavis studied at the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University, and at Liberty Hall Academy, the forerunner of Washington and Lee University. Licensed in 1801 by the Presbyterian General Assembly as a missionary to enslaved African Americans, Chavis proved more popular with white audiences. His principal income for much of his life came from a school he operated in Raleigh, where he taught black and white students and became a confidant of North Carolina senator William P. Mangum. A conservative and an old-line Federalist, Chavis bemoaned the rise of Jacksonian Democracy and opposed the immediate abolition of slavery. Yet restrictions imposed on black teachers and ministers after Nat Turner’s rebellion made his last years difficult. He died in 1838 almost certainly of natural causes, not, as is sometimes reported, of mob violence.

Nat Turner and the Work of Enthusiasm

The discourse of enthusiasm in the antebellum United States played a pivotal role in cultural debates surrounding the right of black people to participate in the “age of Revolution,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson called the era in 1837. This argument is explored through the textual archive of Nat Turner's Rebellion (1831). During this period, enthusiasm could refer to either a democratic-sublime or a fanatical-delusional passion for freedom. The term was applied to Turner pejoratively, not so much because his rebellion represented an instance of wild fanaticism to white audiences but because it represented an instance of familiar democratic revolt inadmissibly claimed by black people. Turner makes his own rhetorical claims for the meaning of enthusiasm: the word signifies an ardent zeal that inspires both direct dissent against slavery and acts of communication that transmit to readers a fervor for occluded black freedoms.