Nathaniel, known as Nat Turner, born October 2, 1800, and hanged November 11, 1831, is an African-American slave. In 1831, he led an uprising in Southampton County, Virginia. This bloody slave uprising led to even more bloody repression, both legal and illegal, and to the emergence of new laws in the southern states that were even more restrictive for slaves.

Childhood

Nat Turner was born in Southampton County where he’ll stay for the rest of his life. It’s named after its owner, Benjamin Turner. He knows little about his father, who escaped from the plantation when Nat was a child, but he has a close relationship with his paternal grandmother, a Kormantin, who was abducted from Africa (in present-day Ghana) and deported to America at the age of 13.

Turner is a precocious child; he learns to read at a very early age and develops a deep religiosity. He reads the Bible fervently and is convinced that he has a great destiny to fulfill in the name of God.

The Rebellion of 1831

On February 11, 1831, seeing in an annular eclipse of the sun the divine sign he was waiting for, he decided to take action against the slave owners. Initially planned for July 4, a national holiday, the revolt was postponed for organizational reasons. A second stellar event took place on August 13, 1831, when the sun turned a greenish shade, probably due to the aftermath of a giant volcanic eruption of Mount Saint Helens : Turner saw this as a sign of things to come, and the revolt broke out a week later, on August 21, 1831.

This revolt lasted two days, during which his gang, which included up to 70 men, massacred about sixty white men, women and children. A militia twice as powerful as the faction of rebellious slaves finally put an end to his actions. However, Nat Turner was not captured until October 30. He was tried on November 5 in the city of Jerusalem, Virginia, and hanged on November 11 with eighteen of his companions, his body then mutilated. Prior to his execution, lawman Thomas Ruffin Gray questioned him and collected his words in a book later published as Confessions of Nat Turner, which is an essential historical document for a better understanding of Turner’s character.

Consequences

Fears of a slave revolt like the one in Santo Domingo are growing among the slaveholding elites of the South and race relations are hardening. Southern authorities became increasingly reluctant to accept the more liberal Northern doctrines of slavery, a major stumbling block in the events leading up to the Secession War a few decades later.