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Rumors and Insurrection

Lacy K. Ford, Jr.

in Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South

This chapter examines the immediate reaction of upper South whites to the publication of David Walker's Appeal and Nat Turner's slave revolt in Virginia. The deep fear and persistent anxiety that the ... More

This chapter examines the immediate reaction of upper South whites to the publication of David Walker's Appeal and Nat Turner's slave revolt in Virginia. The deep fear and persistent anxiety that the Turner insurrection aroused among upper South whites, and white Virginians especially, is discussed as background to a growing popular interest in accelerating the demographic reconfiguration of slavery in the region.Less

Prologue: What’s Past?

Christopher Tomlins

in In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History

This introductory chapter considers what called William Styron's fictive realities into being, and how they were crafted. Styron had written The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), which represented ... More

This introductory chapter considers what called William Styron's fictive realities into being, and how they were crafted. Styron had written The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), which represented itself as the autobiographical narrative of the African American slave-turned-rebel leader, Nat Turner. The chapter asks what made his work a “meditation on history”—and why it failed. It also takes a look at whether it might be possible to redeem Nat Turner from endless deferral—the effect of multiple attempts to “understand” him as a figment of text without listening to (or for) him as a person. African American popular culture has tried, with some success, to retrieve Nat Turner, to recognize and assimilate him to itself, without deferral. However, this chapter considers whether or not he will ever be able to achieve a historical presence of his own that is other than past, and how.Less

Nat Turner’s Orientation beyond the Doctrine of Man

Joseph Drexler-Dreis (ed.)

in Beyond the Doctrine of Man: Decolonial Visions of the Human

Nat Turner, as a leader of the 1831 Southampton slave rebellion, described a religious commitment that shaped his worldview and daily practices, and which ultimately manifested in his leading a slave ... More

Nat Turner, as a leader of the 1831 Southampton slave rebellion, described a religious commitment that shaped his worldview and daily practices, and which ultimately manifested in his leading a slave rebellion. The task of interpreting the meaning of Nat Turner and the Southampton slave rebellion—highlighted by William Styron’s 1967 novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and the debate that ensued after its publication—discloses the persistence of Sylvia Wynter’s category of “Man” as a descriptive statement of the human within colonial modernity. This chapter opens up the need to re-visit Nat Turner, and to see how his life and worldview reveal possibilities beyond Man. It argues that religious practices and theological epistemologies can present an alternative to Man and that Nat Turner’s life and thought show one way such practices and epistemologies have been actualized beyond the doctrine of Man.Less

Hybrid Messiahs

Thomas O Beebee

in Millennial Literatures of the Americas, 1492-2002

New World populations call into question all definitions of identity that rest on clear oppositions between those recognizably like and those unlike a predefined European self. Though the New World ... More

New World populations call into question all definitions of identity that rest on clear oppositions between those recognizably like and those unlike a predefined European self. Though the New World has no monopoly on hybridity, the sheer numbers of people brought together through conquest, enslavement, transportation, and voluntary immigration make hybridity an essential concept for understanding the history and culture of the Americas, and one that has stimulated some of its most powerful literary texts. As pointed out in the first chapter, millennial discourse is an eschatechnology inherent to structures of power in the Americas. When it confronts itself in hybridized form, paranoia and panic are inevitable and tend to get played out in the confusion between Messiah and Antichrist. Messiahs of the New World are painfully aware of themselves as simultaneously Self and Other, as I will show in this chapter, and their messianism seeks a symbolic resolution to this conflict. Melville’s Captain Ahab is presented as the archetype of the hybrid messiah, which then guides the chapter’s remaining study examples of Nat Turner, Louis Riel, Wovoka, Antônio Conselheiro, Jim Jones, and David Koresh, both as historical persons and as literary characters.Less

“Negroes, and Blood, and Horror”: William styron, Existential Freedom, and The Confessions of Nat Turner

Jonathan W. Gray

in Civil Rights in the White Literary Imagination: Innocence by Association

This chapter discusses the controversy that resulted from a response to William Styron’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Confessions of Nat Turner. In 1968, Beacon Press published William Styron’s ... More

This chapter discusses the controversy that resulted from a response to William Styron’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Confessions of Nat Turner. In 1968, Beacon Press published William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, a collection of essays edited by distinguished historian John Henrik Clark. To liberal thinkers and academics, the Ten Black Writers represented the logical end of the more militant strains of the Civil Rights Movement. According to them, Styron’s book criminally denied the historical Nat Turner revolutionary agency, underplayed the impact of slavery, overlooked the importance of religious thought in Black life, and cherry-picked historical evidence in order to reinforce notions central to white supremacy. The positive reception of the book, which led to a Pulitzer, only confirmed the worst fears of the “militant” scholars who were profoundly offended by the novel.Less

John Brown and Nat. Turner

Shawn Leigh Alexander

in T. Thomas Fortune, the Afro-American Agitator: A Collection of Writings, 1880-1928

This chapter presents the editorials, “John Brown” and “Nat. Turner”, Fortune's side of a debate with Frederick Douglass Jr. over the need for African Americans to erect a monument in honor of John ... More

This chapter presents the editorials, “John Brown” and “Nat. Turner”, Fortune's side of a debate with Frederick Douglass Jr. over the need for African Americans to erect a monument in honor of John Brown. While Fortune saw the necessity of honoring Brown, he did not see the need of the African American community to give their pennies to perpetuate the memory of the Sage of Osawatomie. Instead, evoking a sense of race pride, Fortune called on the community to honor Nat Turner, a forerunner of Brown and “a black hero.” Fortune questions why every time the community “move[s] that somebody's memory be perpetuated, that somebody's memory is always a white man's.” It was such demonstrations of “the absence of race pride and race unity,” argued Fortune, “which makes the white man despise black men all the world over.”Less

Looking for Law in The Confessions of Nat Turner

Christopher Tomlins

in Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places: Justice Beyond and Between

From Harriet Beecher Stowe to William Styron and Sharon Ewell Foster, from Kyle Baker to Nate Parker and others, American popular culture has found Nat Turner endlessly fascinating. The fascination ... More

From Harriet Beecher Stowe to William Styron and Sharon Ewell Foster, from Kyle Baker to Nate Parker and others, American popular culture has found Nat Turner endlessly fascinating. The fascination of course extends to historians. Particularly in recent years, scholars have dug deeply into the local history of what came to be called "The Turner Rebellion." The result is a greatly enriched archive. Still, much of what is known of the event itself and of its eponymous leader-and hence the manner in which both event and leader are portrayed-remains dependent on Thomas Ruffin Gray's famous pamphlet The Confessions of Nat Turner. Naturally one must ask whether a hastily written twenty-page pamphlet rushed into print by an opportunistic white lawyer, down on his luck and hoping to cash in on Turner's notoriety, actually deserves to be treated as empirically reliable access to the mentalités of those engaged in executing an "insurrectory movement." Should the pamphlet survive that test, a second question immediately surfaces: precisely what is it that the pamphlet evidences, and how? This essay seeks an answer through consideration of a number of recent literary analyses of the genre of Gray's pamphlet and through application of the concept of genre to Turner's own words.Less

Drawing the Unspeakable: Kyle Baker’s Slave Narrative

Conseula Francis

in Comics and the U.S. South

Nat Turner, a comic book written by Kyle Baker, is about the life of African American slave Nat Turner and his infamous 1831 slave insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia. Aside from its ... More

Nat Turner, a comic book written by Kyle Baker, is about the life of African American slave Nat Turner and his infamous 1831 slave insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia. Aside from its incredibly violent story, the book seems to be, as critic Marc Singer suggests, an attempt by Baker to “jazz up slavery.” Baker draws on Thomas Gray’s 1831 The Confessions of Nat Turner, rather than the now considerable body of historical and creative work devoted to Turner and his raid, as the text of his book. This chapter offers a reading of Nat Turner to analyze Baker’s visual rendering of the fugitive slave narrative form through a strategically violent aesthetic that takes issue with Gray’s 1831 account. In particular, it examines how Baker reinvents the basic rhetorical premises of the slave narrative with Nat Turner. It also cites the example of Denmark Vesey and his failed insurrection in Charleston, South Carolina, to demonstrate the legacy of the respectability/morality required by the nineteenth-century slave narratives.Less

Eating Nat Turner

Vincent Woodard

in The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture

This chapter examines the black radical movement of the 1960s to further illuminate the myriad social, spiritual, political, and moral implications of white hunger for and consumption of the black ... More

This chapter examines the black radical movement of the 1960s to further illuminate the myriad social, spiritual, political, and moral implications of white hunger for and consumption of the black male slaves. It highlights William Styron's novel The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967). This novel, along with Ten Black Writers Respond (1968), the edited black response to the novel, marked the first time that the subject of homosexuality during slavery had received sustained, public debate. The chapter describes what many black intellectuals and activists refer to as Styron's “homosexual” representation of and degradation of Nat Turner's life and revolutionary efforts—an effort which many scholars contest. This national debate, occurring in the 1960s, demonstrated how, for black people, the memory of slavery and questions of cultural origins attached to the slave ship had profound political implications rooted in the history and memory of slavery.Less

Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (2003)

James Naremore

in Charles Burnett: A Cinema of Symbolic Knowledge

Very little is known about Nat Turner, the leader of the most famous slave revolt in American history. As Burnett’s experimental film shows, however, Turner was, in life, the property of slave ... More

Very little is known about Nat Turner, the leader of the most famous slave revolt in American history. As Burnett’s experimental film shows, however, Turner was, in life, the property of slave owners, and after death, he became the property of various interpreters of his actions. Many whites have viewed him as an insane monster, and many blacks have regarded him as a revolutionary hero. He is the subject of oratory, literature, drama, film, and scores of historical writings. Burnett’s film seizes on these many representations and shows what they reveal about American history and society. It consists of interviews with a wide range of blacks and whites, plus a series of dramatic scenes based on writings about Turner, in which six different actors play him. Burnett has given us a meta-interpretation and the best way of understanding the Turner revolt. Less

The Upper South Debates Slavery and Colonization

Lacy K. Ford, Jr.

in Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South

This chapter examines the upper South's political and policy response to the Turner insurrection. In the pensive months following Nat Turner's rebellion, Virginia formally reconsidered its official ... More

This chapter examines the upper South's political and policy response to the Turner insurrection. In the pensive months following Nat Turner's rebellion, Virginia formally reconsidered its official policy toward both slavery as an institution and the free black population within its borders. Pro-slavery planters from Virginia's Southside region advocated tough new measures to enhance white security, including tighter control over the free black population and greater vigilance over the institution of slavery itself. But with the state's tobacco plantations in relative decline and the comparative return on slave labor diminished, many Old Dominion leaders wanted to use the sense of urgency spawned by the Turner insurrection to take bolder steps toward addressing the problem of slavery.Less

Confessions: Of Text and Paratext

Christopher Tomlins

in In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History

This chapter analyzes the pamphlet, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831), written by a white attorney named Thomas Ruffin Gray. The pamphlet “immediately became the standard account” of the event ... More

This chapter analyzes the pamphlet, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831), written by a white attorney named Thomas Ruffin Gray. The pamphlet “immediately became the standard account” of the event that became known as the Turner Rebellion. The event has spawned many commentaries, both historical and literary. Without exception all grant considerable prominence to Gray's pamphlet. But like all documents generated in the course of master-class investigations of slave revolts, alleged or actual, The Confessions raises obvious evidentiary quandaries: credibility, reliability, authenticity. The chapter considers precisely what kind of historical source this document entails, how it should be interrogated, and what it can tell us. In doing so, this chapter investigates the pamphlet's paratextual aspects.Less

The spiritual challenge of nat turner, 1831 – 1835

Charles F. Irons

in The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia

This chapter discusses how a group of black revolutionaries led by Nat Turner began their campaign at a time when the county's white population was particularly vulnerable. The black revolutionaries ... More

This chapter discusses how a group of black revolutionaries led by Nat Turner began their campaign at a time when the county's white population was particularly vulnerable. The black revolutionaries first entered the home of Turner's owner, Joseph Travis, and killed all seven whites whom they found inside. The rebels then collected a few new recruits and some supplies before marching to a nearby farmhouse and performing a similar slaughter. They suffered their first casualties in a “battle” near the home of James W. Parker but pressed on toward the county seat of Jerusalem, where they planned to gather additional weapons and ammunition. By the next morning, notwithstanding the setback in “Parker's Field,” Turner and his companions had killed almost sixty Southampton County whites and sent a wave of terror rolling across Virginia and the slaveholding states.Less

Hard Lessons in Hollywood Civics: Managing the Crisis of the Liberal Consensus

Joshua Glick

in Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History, 1958-1977

As Wolper Productions continued to make documentaries and experiment with fiction, the studio provided a professional entry point for promising talent and off-and-on employment for filmmakers ... More

As Wolper Productions continued to make documentaries and experiment with fiction, the studio provided a professional entry point for promising talent and off-and-on employment for filmmakers involved with New Hollywood features. This chapter investigates Wolper Productions’s output during a period in which the film and television industries faced a precarious financial situation. The studio helped create a political imaginary for Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. Additionally, Wolper Productions’s forays into programs with Jacques-Yves Cousteau charted a fresh path for nonfiction. Packaging American history or capturing recent events, however, soon proved to be a troublesome venture. Wolper Productions’s prospective adaptation of William Styron’s novel The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) was one of the earliest attempts by a major studio to make a commercial film about black power themes and figures. The opposition to the film, however, resulted in a public relations disaster for Wolper Productions. Wolper and his circle came to understand the importance of having community support from the minority group the studio sought to represent.Less

“Utmost Freedom of Imagination”: William Styron 1967

George Cotkin

in Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility

Novelist William Styron had long thought about blurring the line between fact and fiction by writing about a black slave named Nat Turner, who had led a rebellion in the nineteenth-century South. By ... More

Novelist William Styron had long thought about blurring the line between fact and fiction by writing about a black slave named Nat Turner, who had led a rebellion in the nineteenth-century South. By the time Styron published his genre-bending book, which depicted Nat as an ineffectual, neurotic leader and desirous for a white woman, the Black Power movement was flourishing. While novelist and essayist James Baldwin defended his friend’s artistic freedom and daring, many black intellectuals condemned him vociferously. This chapter also places the novel within the confessional mode central to the New Sensibility and understands it within the context of studies of slavery from this period. It considers the book an early example of a postmodern sensibility.Less

[Page 3] To the Public.

Nat Turner

in The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va.

This part of the book publishes Thomas R. Gray's statement to the public about the confessions of Nat Turner that follow.

Fugitive Slave Narratives and Atlantic Conspiracies

Gretchen J. Woertendyke

in Hemispheric Regionalism: Romance and the Geography of Genre

This chapter traces the influence of the Haitian Revolution throughout the long nineteenth century on fugitive slave narratives and the development of the gothic romance in the nineteenth century. By ... More

This chapter traces the influence of the Haitian Revolution throughout the long nineteenth century on fugitive slave narratives and the development of the gothic romance in the nineteenth century. By “fugitive” I mean to highlight the absence of such narratives from critical histories of the form, and the ways in which they fail to conform generically to traditional slave narratives such as Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. By identifying the fugitive narratives of Gabriel Prosser, of Denmark Vesey, and of Nat Turner, I want to highlight their importance to an emerging form of the romance in the period and the inseparable associations with the Haitian Revolution. Attending to both geography and genre at once illustrates that the slave revolution in Saint-Domingue functions as a specific political subtext and produces a clear generic template for the gothic romance in the United States.Less

Merely Rhetorical: Virtual Democracy in William Wells Brown's Clotel

Ivy G. Wilson

in Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Politics in the Antebellum U.S.

This chapter illustrates how Brown's understanding of the oratorical forms of rhetoric including addresses, debates, and speeches depends upon recognizing how he distinguishes “rhetoric proper” from ... More

This chapter illustrates how Brown's understanding of the oratorical forms of rhetoric including addresses, debates, and speeches depends upon recognizing how he distinguishes “rhetoric proper” from the “merely rhetorical.” By examining the various modes of rhetoric in Clotel (1853) from formal speeches to seemingly mundane songs, it outlines an African American engagement with the Declaration of Independence and Patrick Henry's maxim to contest the institution of chattel slavery. Central to the book's larger claims about how blacks participated in the civic sphere and as an example of what Harriet Mullen has called “resistant orality,” the chapter underscores Brown's use of the slave Sam's ostensibly rudimentary and unskillful song as a model for how Brown's own novel itself assumes the form of political discourse.Less