Nat Turner's Rebellion, historically known as the Southampton Insurrection, was a rebellion of enslaved Virginians that took place in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831.[1] Led by Nat Turner, the rebels killed between 55 and 65 White people, making it the deadliest slave revolt for white people in U.S. history.[2][3] The rebellion was effectively suppressed within a few days, at Belmont Plantation on the morning of August 23, but Turner survived in hiding for more than 30 days afterward.[4]
There was widespread fear amongst the White population in the aftermath of the rebellion. Militia and mobs killed as many as 120 enslaved people and free African Americans in retaliation.[5][6] After trials, the Commonwealth of Virginia executed 56 enslaved people accused of participating in the rebellion, including Turner himself; many Black people who had not participated were also persecuted in the frenzy. Because Turner was educated and was a preacher, Southern state legislatures subsequently passed new laws prohibiting the education of enslaved people and free Black people, restricting rights of assembly and other civil liberties for free Black people, and requiring White ministers to be present at all worship services.[7]
Turner began communicating his plans to a small circle of trusted fellow slaves. "All his initial recruits were other slaves from his neighborhood".[9] These scattered men had to find ways to communicate their intentions without revealing the plot. Songs may have tipped the neighborhood members to movements: "It is believed that one of the ways Turner summoned fellow conspirators to the woods was through the use of particular songs."[10] According to author Terry Bisson, Turner entrusted his wife with "his most secret plans and papers".[11] In a report by James Trezvant immediately following the uprising, Cherry was mentioned as having said that Nat was "digesting" a plan for the revolt "for years".[12]
Turner eagerly anticipated God's signal to "slay my enemies with their own weapons".[13] He began preparations for an uprising against the slaveholders in Southampton County. Turner said, "I communicated the great work laid out to do, to four in whom I had the greatest confidence," fellow slaves Henry, Hark, Nelson, and Sam.[13]
Rebellion
Beginning in February 1831, Turner saw certain atmospheric conditions as a sign to begin preparations for a rebellion of slaves against their enslavers. On February 12, 1831, an annular solar eclipse was visible in Virginia and much of the southeastern United States. He believed the eclipse to be a sign that it was time to revolt. Turner envisioned this as a Black man's hand reaching over the sun.[14]
Turner originally planned to begin the rebellion on Independence Day, July 4, 1831, but he had fallen ill and used the delay for additional planning with his co-conspirators.[15] On August 13, an atmospheric disturbance made the Virginia sun appear bluish-green, possibly the result of a volcanic plume produced by the eruption of Ferdinandea Island off the coast of Sicily.[16] Turner took this, like the eclipse months earlier, as a divine signal, and he began his rebellion a week later, on August 21.
Starting with several trusted fellow slaves, he ultimately enlisted more than seventy enslaved and free Black people, some of whom were on horseback.[17][18] The rebels first killed Turner's slaveowner and his family, then traveled from house to house, freeing enslaved people and killing many of the White people whom they encountered.[19]
Muskets and other firearms were too difficult to collect and would gather unwanted attention, so the rebels used knives, hatchets, and blunt instruments.[19] The rebellion did not discriminate by age or sex and the rebels killed White men, women, and children.[20][21] Nat Turner confessed to killing only one person, Margaret Whitehead, whom he killed with a blow from a fence post.[19]
Historian Stephen B. Oates states that Turner called on his group to "kill all the white people".[22] A newspaper noted, "Turner declared that 'indiscriminate slaughter was not their intention after they attained a foothold, and was resorted to in the first instance to strike terror and alarm.'"[23] The group spared a few homes "because Turner believed the poor White inhabitants 'thought no better of themselves than they did of negroes.'"[22] The rebels also avoided the Giles Reese plantation, even though it was in route, likely because Turner wanted to keep his wife and children safe.[24] The Black rebels killed approximately sixty people before they were defeated by the state militia.[22] The infantry defeated the insurrection with twice the manpower of the rebels, reinforced by three companies of artillery.[25]
Turner thought that revolutionary violence would awaken the attitudes of Whites to the reality of the inherent brutality in slave-holding. Turner said he wanted to spread "terror and alarm" among Whites.[26]
Within a day of the suppression of the rebellion, the local militia and three companies of artillery were joined by detachments of men from the USSNatchez and USSWarren in Norfolk and militias from other counties in Virginia and North Carolina that bordered Southampton County.[25]
In Southampton County, Black people suspected of participating in the rebellion were beheaded by the militia, and "their severed heads were mounted on poles at crossroads as a grisly form of intimidation".[27] A local road (now Virginia State Route 658) was called "Blackhead Signpost Road" after it became the site of one such display.[28][29]
Rumors quickly spread that the slave revolt was not limited to Southampton County and had spread as far south as Alabama. Fears led to reports in North Carolina that "armies" of enslaved people were seen on highways, and that they had burned and massacred the White inhabitants of Wilmington, North Carolina, and were marching on the state capital.[22]
Such fear and alarm led to Whites attacking Black people throughout the South with flimsy cause. The editor of the Richmond Whig described the scene as "the slaughter of many blacks without trial and under circumstances of great barbarity".[30] White violence against Black people continued for two weeks after the rebellion had been suppressed. General Eppes ordered troops and White citizens to stop the killing:
He will not specify all the instances that he is bound to believe have occurred but pass in silence what has happened, with the expression of his deepest sorrow, that any necessity should be supposed to have existed, to justify a single act of atrocity. But he feels himself bound to declare, and hereby announces to the troops and citizens, that no excuse will be allowed for any similar acts of violence, after the promulgation of this order.[31]
Reverend G. W. Powell wrote a letter to the New York Evening Post stating that "many negroes are killed every day. The exact number will never be known."[32] A company of militia from Hertford County, North Carolina, reportedly killed forty Black people in one day and took $23 and a gold watch from the dead.[27] Captain Solon Borland led a contingent from Murfreesboro, North Carolina, and he condemned the acts "because it was tantamount to theft from the White owners of the slaves".[27]
Modern historians concur that the militias and mobs killed as many as 120 Black people, most of whom were not involved with the rebellion.[33][34][5][6]
Capture
Turner eluded capture for six weeks but remained in Southampton County. In their search for Turner, the authorities turned to his wife, Cherry. Author Terry Bisson writes, "After his slave rebellion, she was beaten and tortured in an attempt to get her to reveal his plans and whereabouts."[11] On September 26, 1831, the Richmond Constitutional Whig published a story after the raiding of Reese plantation stating that, "some papers [were] given up by his wife, under the lash."[35]The Authentic and Impartial Narrative, also published in 1831, noted that journal entries belonging to Turner were "in her possession after Nat's escape."[36]
On October 30, 1831, a farmer named Benjamin Phipps discovered Turner hiding in Southampton County in a depression in the earth, created by a large, fallen tree covered with fence rails.[37] Around 1 p.m. on October 31, Turner arrived at the prison in Jerusalem.[35] While awaiting trial, Turner confessed his knowledge of the rebellion to an attorney Thomas R. Gray, who was a slavery apologist.[38]
Trials and executions
In the aftermath of the rebellion, dozens of suspected rebels were tried in courts called specifically to hear the cases against the enslaved people. Turner was tried on November 5, 1831, for "conspiring to rebel and making insurrection", and was convicted and sentenced to death.[39][40] Turner was hanged on November 11, 1831, in the county seat of Jerusalem, Virginia (now Courtland). [41] According to some sources, he was beheaded as an example to frighten other would-be rebels.[42][43]
Most of the trials of Turner's alleged conspirators took place in Southampton County, but some were held in neighboring Sussex County or other nearby counties. During their trial, most enslaved people were found guilty; only fifteen were acquitted.[37] Of the thirty convicted, eighteen were hanged, while twelve were sold out of state.[37] Of the five free Black people tried for participation in the insurrection, one was hanged while the others were acquitted.[44][45]
After his execution, Turner's body was dissected and flayed, with his skin being used to make souvenir purses.[46][47]:218 In October 1897, Virginia newspapers ran a story about Nat Turner's skeleton being used as a medical specimen by Dr. H. U. Stephenson of Toana, Virginia.[48]
During the rebellion, Virginia legislators targeted free Black people with a colonization bill, which allocated new funding to remove them to Africa, and a police bill that denied free Black people trials by jury and made any free Black people convicted of a crime subject to sale into slavery and relocation.[49]
At least seven enslavers sent legislative petitions to Virginia's General Assembly for compensation for the loss of their enslaved people without trials during or immediately after the insurrection. They were all rejected.[50]
The Virginia General Assembly debated the future of slavery the following spring. Some urged gradual emancipation, but the pro-slavery side prevailed after Virginia's leading intellectual, Thomas R. Dew, president of the College of William and Mary, published "a pamphlet defending the wisdom and benevolence of slavery, and the folly of its abolition".[51] The General Assembly passed legislation making it unlawful to teach reading and writing to either enslaved or free Black people and restricting all Black people from holding religious meetings without the presence of a licensed White minister.[52]
Other slave-holding states in the South enacted similar laws restricting activities of both enslaved and free Black people.[53] Across Virginia and other Southern states, legislators made it against the law for either Whites or Black people to possess abolitionist publications.[54] South Carolina built a series of arsenals to ensure weapons would be available in the event of another slave rebellion.[citation needed]
Aftermath
On September 3, 1831, William Lloyd Garrison published an article called "The Insurrection" in the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator.[55] On September 10, 1831, The Liberator published excerpts from a letter to the editor saying that many people in the South believed the newspaper had a link to the revolt and that if Garrison were to go to the South, he "would not be permitted to live long... he would be taken away, and no one is the wiser for it... if Mr. Garrison were to go to the South, he would be dispatched immediately... [an] opinion expressed by persons at the South, repeatedly."[56]
In November 1831, Thomas R. Gray published The Confessions of Nat Turner. His work was derived partly from research Gray did while Turner was in hiding and partly from jailhouse conversations with Turner before trial. Gray's pamphlet sold 40,000 to 50,000 copies, making it a noted source about the rebellion at the time.[57] However, a November 25, 1831, review of the publication by The Richmond Enquirer says:
The pamphlet has one defect – we mean its style. The confession of the culprit is given, as it were, from his lips – (and when read to him, he admitted its statements to be correct) – but the language is far superior to what Nat Turner could have employed – Portions of it are even eloquently and classically expressed. – This is calculated to cast some shade of doubt over the authenticity of the narrative, and to give the Bandit a character for intelligence which he does not deserve, and ought not to have received. – In all other respects, the confession appears to be faithful and true.[58]
Gray's work is the primary historical document regarding Nat Turner but some modern historians, specifically David F. Allmendinger Jr., have also questioned the validity of his portrayal of Turner.[59][60]
In the aftermath of the revolt, whites did not try to interpret Turner's motives and ideas.[26] Antebellum enslavers were shocked by the murders and had their fears of rebellions heightened; among them, Turner's name became "a symbol of terrorism and violent retribution."[22] Northern states shared many of the fears shown by Southerners; a proposal to create a college for African Americans in New Haven, Connecticut was overwhelmingly rejected in what is now referred to as the New Haven Excitement.
The fear caused by Nat Turner's rebellion and the concerns raised in the emancipation debates that followed resulted in politicians and writers responding by defining slavery as a "positive good".[61] Such authors included Thomas Roderick Dew, mentioned above.[62] Other Southern writers began to promote a paternalistic ideal of improved Christian treatment of slaves, in part to avoid such rebellions. Dew and others believed that they were civilizing Black people (who were then still mostly American-born) through slavery. The writings were collected in The pro-slavery argument, as maintained by the most distinguished writers of the southern states (1853).
Other perspectives
African Americans have generally regarded Turner as a hero of the resistance, who made enslavers pay for the hardships they had caused so many Africans and African Americans.[22] James H. Harris, who has written extensively about the history of the Black church, says that the revolt "marked the turning point in the black struggle for liberation." According to Harris, Turner believed that "only a cataclysmic act could convince the architects of a violent social order that violence begets violence."[63]
In an 1843 speech at the National Negro Convention, Henry Highland Garnet, a formerly enslaved man and active abolitionist, described Nat Turner as "patriotic", saying that "future generations will remember him among the noble and brave."[64] In 1861, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a white Northern writer, praised Turner in a seminal article published in the Atlantic Monthly. He described Turner as a man "who knew no book but the Bible, and that by heart who devoted himself soul and body to the cause of his race."[65]
In 1988, Turner was selected for inclusion in the Black Americans of Achievement biography series for children, with the book Nat Turner: Slave Revolt Leader by Terry Bisson.[66] The book's introduction was written by Coretta Scott King.[66]
Legacy
The sword believed to have been used by Turner in the rebellion is kept in the Southampton County Courthouse, where there is a small display.[67] In 1991, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources dedicated the "Nat Turner Insurrection" historic marker on Virginia Route 30, near Courtland, Virginia.[68] In December 2021, the Virginia Department of Cultural Resources dedicated the "Blackhead Signpost Road" historic marker.[28]
In popular culture
Film
The Birth of a Nation, the 2016 film starring, produced, and directed by Nate Parker, co-written with Jean McGianni Celestin, is about Turner's 1831 rebellion.[69]
In response to Styron's novel, ten African-American writers published a collection of essays, William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (1968).[29]
Chance The Rapper's song "How Great" refers to Turner's rebellion, along with the 1805 slave revolt at Chatham Manor, in the line, "Hosanna Santa invoked and woke up enslaved people from Southampton to Chatham Manor."[71]
In the early 1990s, hip hop artist Tupac Shakur spoke in interviews about Nat Turner and his admiration for his spirit against oppression. Shakur also honored Turner with a cross tattoo on his back "EXODUS 1831", referring to the year Turner led the rebellion.[72]
A slave rebellion is an armed uprising by slaves, as a way of fighting for their freedom. Rebellions of slaves have occurred in nearly all societies that practice slavery or have practiced slavery in the past. A desire for freedom and the dream of successful rebellion is often the greatest object of song, art, and culture amongst the enslaved population. These events, however, are often violently opposed and suppressed by slaveholders.
Nat Turner was an enslaved African-American carpenter and preacher who led a four-day rebellion of both enslaved and free Black people in Southampton County, Virginia in August 1831.
David Walker was an American abolitionist, writer, and anti-slavery activist. Though his father was enslaved, his mother was free; therefore, he was free as well. In 1829, while living in Boston, Massachusetts, with the assistance of the African Grand Lodge, he published An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, a call for black unity and a fight against slavery.
Gabriel's Rebellion was a planned slave rebellion in the Richmond, Virginia, area in the summer of 1800. Information regarding the revolt was leaked before its execution, and Gabriel, an enslaved blacksmith who planned the event, and twenty-five of his followers were hanged.
The Stono Rebellion was a slave revolt that began on 9 September 1739, in the colony of South Carolina. It was the largest slave rebellion in the Southern Colonies, with 25 colonists and 35 to 50 African slaves killed. The uprising's leaders were likely from the Central African Kingdom of Kongo, as they were Catholic and some spoke Portuguese.
Herbert Aptheker was an American Marxist historian and political activist. He wrote more than 50 books, mostly in the fields of African-American history and general U.S. history, most notably, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943), a classic in the field. He also compiled the 7-volume Documentary History of the Negro People (1951–1994). In addition, he compiled a wide variety of primary documents supporting study of African-American history. He was the literary executor for W. E. B. Du Bois.
Denmark Vesey was a free Black and community leader in Charleston, South Carolina, who was accused and convicted of planning a major slave revolt in 1822. Although the alleged plot was discovered before it could be realized, its potential scale stoked the fears of the antebellum planter class that led to increased restrictions on both enslaved and free African Americans.
The Baptist War, also known as the Sam Sharp Rebellion, the Christmas Rebellion, the Christmas Uprising and the Great Jamaican Slave Revolt of 1831–32, was an eleven-day rebellion that started on 25 December 1831 and involved up to 60,000 of the 300,000 slaves in the Colony of Jamaica. The uprising was led by a black Baptist deacon, Samuel Sharpe, and waged largely by his followers. The revolt, though militarily unsuccessful, played a major part in the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire.
The Confessions of Nat Turner is a 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by American writer William Styron. Presented as a first-person narrative by historical figure Nat Turner, the novel concerns Nat Turner's Rebellion in Virginia in 1831, but does not always depict the events accurately. It is based on The Confessions of Nat Turner: The Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Virginia, a first-hand account of Turner's confessions published by a local lawyer, Thomas R. Gray, in 1831.
During the era of slavery in the United States, the education of enslaved African Americans, except for religious instruction, was discouraged, and eventually made illegal in most of the Southern states. After 1831, the prohibition was extended in some states to free blacks as well. Even if educating Blacks was legal, they still had little access to education, in the North as well as the South.
The history of slavery in Kentucky dates from the earliest permanent European settlements in the state, until the end of the Civil War. In 1830, enslaved African Americans represented 24 percent of Kentucky's population, a share that had declined to 19.5 percent by 1860, on the eve of the Civil War. Most enslaved people were concentrated in the cities of Louisville and Lexington and in the hemp- and tobacco-producing Bluegrass Region and Jackson Purchase. Other enslaved people lived in the Ohio River counties, where they were most often used in skilled trades or as house servants. Relatively few people were held in slavery in the mountainous regions of eastern and southeastern Kentucky; they served primarily as artisans and service workers in towns.
James Trezvant was a U.S. Representative from Virginia. He was also a slave owner.
The 1811 German Coast uprising was a revolt of slaves in parts of the Territory of Orleans on January 8–10, 1811. The uprising occurred on the east bank of the Mississippi River in what is now St. John the Baptist, St. Charles and Jefferson Parishes, Louisiana. The slave insurgency was the largest in U.S. history, but the rebels killed only two White men. Confrontations with militia, combined with post-trial executions, resulted in the deaths of 95 slaves.
Invisible churches among enslaved African Americans in the United States were informal Christian groups where enslaved people listened to preachers that they chose without their slaveholder's knowledge. The Invisible churches taught a different message from white-controlled churches and did not emphasize obedience to slave masters. Some slaves could not contact invisible churches and others did not agree with an invisible church's message but many slaves were comforted by the invisible churches.
Slavery in Virginia began with the capture and enslavement of Native Americans during the early days of the English Colony of Virginia and through the late eighteenth century. They primarily worked in tobacco fields. Africans were first brought to colonial Virginia in 1619, when 20 Africans from present-day Angola arrived in Virginia aboard the ship The White Lion.
Thomas Ruffin Gray was an American attorney who represented several enslaved people during the trials in the wake of Nat Turner's Rebellion. Though he was not the attorney who represented Nat Turner, instead he interviewed him and wrote The Confessions of Nat Turner.
Anti-literacy laws in many slave states before and during the American Civil War affected slaves, freedmen, and in some cases all people of color. Some laws arose from concerns that literate slaves could forge the documents required to escape to a free state. According to William M. Banks, "Many slaves who learned to write did indeed achieve freedom by this method. The wanted posters for runaways often mentioned whether the escapee could write." Anti-literacy laws also arose from fears of slave insurrection, particularly around the time of abolitionist David Walker's 1829 publication of Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, which openly advocated rebellion, and Nat Turner's Rebellion of 1831.
The treatment of slaves in the United States often included sexual abuse and rape, the denial of education, and punishments like whippings. Families were often split up by the sale of one or more members, usually never to see or hear of each other again.
William Henry Brodnax, was a nineteenth-century American militia Brigadier General and American politician from Virginia.
Slave rebellions and slave resistance were means of opposing the system of chattel slavery in the United States from 1776 to 1865. According to Herbert Aptheker, "there were few phases of ante-bellum Southern life and history that were not in some way influenced by the fear of, or the actual outbreak of, militant concerted slave action." Slave rebellions in the United States were small and diffuse compared with those in other slave economies in part due to "the conditions that tipped the balance of power against southern slaves—their numerical disadvantage, their creole composition, their dispersal in relatively small units among resident whites—were precisely the same conditions that limited their communal potential." As such, "Confrontation in the Old South characteristically took the form of an individual slave's open resistance to plantation authorities,"or other individual or small-group actions, such as slaves opportunistically killing slave traders in hopes of avoiding forced migration away from friends and family.
1 2 Breen, Patrick H. (2015). The land shall be deluged in blood: a new history of the Nat Turner Revolt. New York, NY. ISBN978-0-19-982800-5. OCLC892895344.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) "high estimates have been widely accepted in both academic and popular sources".
1 2 Allmendinger, David F. (2014). Nat Turner and the rising in Southampton County. Baltimore. ISBN978-1-4214-1480-5. OCLC889812744.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) Recent studies which review various estimates for the number of enslaved and free Black people killed without trial, giving a range of from 23 killed to over 200 killed.
↑ Gray-White, Deborah; Bay, Mia; Martin, Waldo E. Jr. (2013). Freedom on my mind: A History of African Americans. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2013. p.225.
↑ Nielson, Erik (2011). "'Go in de wilderness': Evading the 'Eyes of Others' in the Slave Songs". The Western Journal of Black Studies. 35 (2): 106–17.
1 2 Bisson, Terry; Davenport, John (2005). Nat Turner: Slave Revolt Leader. Chelsea House Publications. p.22. ISBN0791083411.
↑ Allmendinger, David (2014). Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County. Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 64. ISBN978-1421422558
1 2 Gray, Thomas Ruffin (1831). The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrections in Southampton, Va. Baltimore, Maryland: Lucas & Deaver, p. 11.
↑ Allmendinger Jr., David F. Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County. Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. pp. 21–22.
↑ Foner, Eric (2014). An American History: Give Me Liberty. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. p.336. ISBN978-0393920338.
↑ Ayers, de la Tejada, Schulzinger and White (2007). American Anthem US History. New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston. p.286.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
1 2 3 Gray, Thomas Ruffin (1831). The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrections in Southampton, Va. Baltimore, MD: Lucas & Deaver.
↑ Simkins, Francis and Roland, Charles. A History of the South (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1971), 126.
↑ Leigh, Philip. The Confederacy at Flood Tide (Yardley: Westholme Publishing, 2016), 193
↑ Richmond Enquirer (November 8, 1831), quoted in Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. 5th edition. New York: International Publishers, 1983. ISBN978-0717806058 pp. 298–299. Aptheker notes that the Enquirer was "hostile to the cause Turner espoused."
↑ Greenberg, Kenneth S. (2004). Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory. OUP USA. p. 146. ISBN978-0195177565.
1 2 Andrews, William L. (2008). "7". In Wimbush, Vincent L. (ed.). Theorizing Scriptures: New Critical Orientations to a Cultural Phenomenon. Rutgers University Press. pp.83–85. ISBN978-0813542041.
1 2 3 Parramore, Thomas C. (1998). Trial Separation: Murfreesboro, North Carolina, and the Civil War. Murfreesboro, North Carolina: Murfreesboro Historical Association, Inc. p.10. LCCN00503566.
↑ Richmond Whig (September 3, 1831) in Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. 5th edition. New York: International Publishers, 1983, p. 301. ISBN978-0717806058
↑ Richmond Enquirer (September 6, 1831) in Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. 5th edition. New York: International Publishers, 1983, p. 301. ISBN978-0717806058
↑ New York Evening Post (September 5, 1831), Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. 5th edition. New York: International Publishers, 1983, p. 301. ISBN978-0717806058
↑ Southern Advocate (October 15, 1831) in Aptheker, Herbert. American Negro Slave Revolts. 5th edition. New York: International Publishers, 1983., p. 201 ISBN978-0717806058.
↑ Rushdy, Ashraf (1999). Neo-slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 60. ISBN978-0-19-512533-7
1 2 3 Drewry, William Sydney (1900). The Southampton Insurrection. Washington, D.C.: The Neale Company. p.13, 151-153. via Internet Archive
↑ Fabricant, Daniel S. “Thomas R. Gray and William Styron: Finally, A Critical Look at the 1831 Confessions of Nat Turner.” The American Journal of Legal History, vol. 37, no. 3, 1993, pp. 332–61. JSTOR website Retrieved 23 Sept. 2023.
↑ French, Scot. The Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. 2004, p. 278-279. ISBN978-0618104482
↑ Walter L. Gordon, III, The Nat Turner Insurrection Trials: A Mystic Chord Resonates Today (Booksurge, 2009) pp. 75, 92.
↑ Greenberg, Kenneth S., Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory, 2003, p.71.
↑ Gibson, Christine (November 11, 2005). "Nat Turner, Lightning Rod". American Heritage Magazine. Archived from the original on April 6, 2009. Retrieved April 6, 2009.
↑ Roth, Sarah N. (2019). "Pamphlets". The Nat Turner Project. Meredith College. Retrieved December 20, 2022.
↑ "The Confessions of Nat Turner". The Richmond Enquirer. Richmond, Virginia. November 25, 1831. Retrieved December 19, 2022– via The Nat Turner Project.
Brodhead, Richard H. "Millennium, Prophecy and the Energies of Social Transformation: The Case of Nat Turner." in Imagining the End: Visions of Apocalypse from the Ancient Middle East to Modern America. A. Amanat and M. Bernhardsson, editors. London: I. B. Tauris, 2002. pp.212–233. ISBN978-1860647246
Nishikawa, Kinohi. "The Confessions of Nat Turner." The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature, 5 volumes. Emmanuel S. Nelson, ed. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2005. pp.497–98. ISBN978-0313330599
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