# Nat Turner Nat Turner (1800-1831) was an enslaved Virginian, a literate Baptist exhorter known among Black and white neighbors as "The Prophet," and the leader of the deadliest slave rebellion in United States history. Over roughly forty-eight hours in August 1831 in Southampton County, Virginia, Turner and his followers killed approximately fifty-five to sixty-five white people, including women, infants, and children. He was captured after two months in hiding, tried, and hanged on November 11, 1831. He is on this page because the codex does not get to skip him. Turner was unmistakably a Christian by his own self-understanding, he drove the rising from scripture and from visions he took to be from God, and he never recanted. Any account of Black identity and Christianity that includes [Frederick Douglass](/codex/frederick-douglass/) and omits Turner is a curated account, not a truthful one. What follows is the record, and then the assessment, in that order. ## Life **Origins (1800-1821).** Born October 2, 1800, in Southampton County, Virginia, on the property of Benjamin Turner. His mother was named Nancy; his grandmother, called Old Bridget, was reportedly devout and appears to have shaped him early. By his own account in the *Confessions*, adults around him, both enslaved and white, treated him as marked from childhood. He describes telling other children about events that had occurred before his birth, and reports that his parents and others said he was intended for some great purpose. He learned to read with unusual ease and had no memory of learning the alphabet. Literacy was central to him and to what he became, and it is the reason Virginia moved against Black literacy after his death. **Religious formation (1821-1831).** Turner fasted, prayed alone in the woods, studied scripture, and preached to gatherings of enslaved and free Black people as an exhorter within the Baptist orbit. He was not ordained; his standing was charismatic and prophetic rather than institutional. Around 1821 he ran away from a harsh overseer and stayed out roughly thirty days. He returned voluntarily, and said the Spirit had told him to return to his earthly master, a decision that astonished the other enslaved people and which he reports without embarrassment. In 1827 he baptized a white man named Etheldred T. Brantley in a stream after Brantley's repentance, the local white churches having refused them the use of a church. **The visions.** The *Confessions* record a sequence. He heard a voice, which he identified as the Spirit that had spoken to the prophets, telling him to seek the kingdom of heaven and all things would be added to him. He saw white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle, with the sun darkened, thunder rolling, and blood flowing in streams. He saw lights in the sky, figures in blood on the leaves, and drops of blood on the corn. In May 1828 he reports being told that the Serpent was loosed, that Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that Turner should take it up and fight the Serpent, because the time was approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first. He took the solar eclipse of February 12, 1831, as the sign to begin. He first set the rising for July 4, 1831, and fell ill. On August 13, 1831, an atmospheric event gave the sun an unusual greenish cast, and he took that as the final signal. ## The rising, August 21 to 23, 1831 Turner and a handful of trusted men met on Sunday, August 21, 1831. Late that night they entered the house of Joseph Travis, who had charge of Turner through marriage to the mother of Putnam Moore, the child who legally owned him. The Travis household was killed, including an infant, whom the rebels returned for after leaving the house. Turner said of Travis in the *Confessions* that he was a kind master and had placed the greatest confidence in him. The rising was not revenge against a personal cruelty. It was directed at the institution and at the population that held it, and Turner said so. Over the next day and a half the band moved house to house across Southampton County, killing the white households they reached and gathering recruits, growing to roughly fifty or sixty men, some mounted. Among the dead were the Whitehead family and a group of children at Levi Waller's, where a school was in session. The rebels were armed largely with axes, knives, and captured firearms. On August 23 they were broken by militia and armed civilians before reaching the county seat at Jerusalem, and the force scattered. Turner hid in the neighborhood, at one point in a hole under a fallen tree, for about two months. He was found on October 30, 1831, by Benjamin Phipps. He was tried at Jerusalem on November 5, pleaded not guilty on the ground that he did not feel guilty, was convicted, and was hanged on November 11, 1831. ## The aftermath The reprisals were larger than the rising. Militia units and white mobs killed Black people across Southampton and the surrounding counties, most of them uninvolved. Historians commonly estimate at least a hundred killed and possibly around two hundred; the number is unrecoverable because most of the killings were extrajudicial and unrecorded. Militia officers issued orders condemning the indiscriminate killing, which is itself evidence of how far it had gone. The courts tried roughly forty-five to fifty enslaved and free Black people in Southampton. Around eighteen were executed by the state and a further group were transported, meaning sold out of the state. Patrick Breen's study of the trial records documents that some white slaveholders intervened to save accused people, in part because an executed slave was a destroyed asset, a detail that says a great deal about the moral logic of the system. Two consequences matter more than the body count. **1. Virginia debated emancipation and refused it.** In the winter of 1831-32 the Virginia General Assembly held a genuine, extended debate on gradual emancipation, prompted directly by Southampton. It failed. Virginia chose to double down instead. **2. The South legislated against Black preaching and Black literacy.** Virginia and other Southern states responded by restricting or forbidding Black people, enslaved and free, from preaching, from assembling for worship without white supervision, and by tightening the criminal prohibition on teaching enslaved people to read. That second consequence is the fact the codex cares about most, and it should be stated plainly. When the enslaving South saw a Black man read the Bible and conclude that God opposed slavery, its considered legislative response was to take the Bible away from Black people. That is a confession. It is the same confession the 1807 [Slave Bible](/codex/slave-bible/) makes in print, which excised roughly nine tenths of the Old Testament including the whole Exodus deliverance. The enslavers were not confused about what scripture taught. They were afraid of it. ## The *Confessions* as a source Nearly everything known about Turner's interior life comes from *The Confessions of Nat Turner*, taken down in his jail cell by Thomas Ruffin Gray, a local white attorney, and published at Baltimore in November 1831. Gray copyrighted it and it sold widely. The source needs handling with care in both directions. - **Against over-trust:** Gray was hostile, was writing for a white Southern market, had a financial motive, and frames the text with his own editorial commentary describing Turner as a fanatic. Turner never saw a printed copy. The words are filtered through a man with reasons to shape them. - **Against over-suspicion:** the factual outline of the rising can be checked against court records, newspaper accounts, and the trial transcripts, and it holds up. Gray had no motive to invent Turner's theological self-presentation, which cut against the interest of a proslavery public by showing a devout, literate, coherent Black man rather than a beast. The scholarly consensus, running through Henry Irving Tragle, Stephen B. Oates, Kenneth Greenberg, David Allmendinger, and Patrick Breen, is roughly this: the events are reliable, the religious self-understanding is substantially Turner's own voice, the diction has been smoothed by Gray, and the framing is Gray's throughout. Cite it as the best available source and as a mediated one, not as an unmediated autobiography. The single most-quoted exchange comes at the end. Gray asked whether he now found himself mistaken. Turner answered: > Was not Christ crucified? Whatever else it is, it is not the answer of a man who thought he had been running a criminal enterprise. ## Turner's theology Turner's frame was apocalyptic and prophetic rather than doctrinal or exegetical. Four features define it. 1. **Direct address.** He believed the Spirit that spoke to the prophets spoke to him, and he took private revelation as sufficient warrant for action. He did not build his case from a chain of texts, and he did not submit it to any church for testing. 2. **Signs in nature.** The eclipse and the discolored sun functioned as commands. This is a reading practice, not an argument, and it is unfalsifiable in a way scriptural argument is not. 3. **Reversal.** The controlling text is the promise that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. He read it as an announcement of imminent temporal reversal, to be executed by human hands, rather than as eschatological. 4. **Judgment, not deliverance.** This is the deep difference from the wider tradition. The Exodus, the master narrative of enslaved Christianity, has God bring the people out. Turner cast himself as the instrument of the plagues rather than as one of the people waiting on deliverance. He moved from the role of Israel to the role of the destroying angel, and that transfer is where the trouble begins. ## Theological and ethical assessment The codex judges Turner by Christian criteria, because those are the criteria he claimed. This is the same method applied to slaveholding preachers elsewhere in the codex, and it has to run in both directions or it is not a method. The framework is [Just War Theory](/codex/just-war-theory/). **On the cause, Turner has more standing than most people assume.** - **Just cause.** Chattel slavery is a grave and ongoing injustice, and by scripture's own reckoning the enslavement was a capital crime: the Mosaic law imposes death for kidnapping and selling a human being ([Exodus 21:16](/codex/exodus-21-16/); [Deuteronomy 24:7](/codex/deuteronomy-24-7/)), and Paul lists slave-traders among the lawless in [1 Timothy 1:10](/codex/1-timothy-1-10/). The wrong Turner rose against was real, was continuing, and was condemned by the book both sides claimed. See [Biblical Slavery Objection Defeater](/codex/biblical-slavery-objection-defeater/). - **Last resort.** For a man held as property there were no ordinary remedies. No court would hear him, no legislature represented him, no vote was his, no petition was competent, and leaving was itself a felony. The criterion of last resort presumes a person with legal standing. Turner had none. - **Right authority.** The classical criterion restricts war-making to the legitimate sovereign, and on a flat reading Turner fails it. But the tradition is not flat here. Aquinas holds that a tyrannical government is not just and that disturbing such a government is not sedition, the tyrant being the seditious party (*Summa Theologiae* II-II q.42 a.2 ad 3). The Huguenot *Vindiciae contra tyrannos* (1579), the Scottish covenanting tradition, and later Bonhoeffer all press in the same direction. Whether a regime that classes human beings as property retains the authority whose absence would condemn Turner is a genuinely contested question inside Christian ethics, not a settled one. - **Reasonable hope of success.** He had essentially none, and appears to have expected divine rather than military victory. This criterion he fails. **On the conduct, the assessment is not close.** - **Discrimination and non-combatant immunity.** The tradition forbids absolutely the deliberate killing of non-combatants. Turner's plan targeted whole households from the first night, and the dead included women, small children, and an infant killed after the rebels returned for it. The doctrine of double effect does not reach this, because double effect covers foreseen but unintended harm arising alongside a legitimate objective. Here the killing of non-combatants was the objective of the opening phase, not a side effect of it. **The verdict.** Turner's grievance is vindicated by scripture, and his cause meets criteria that the Christian tradition takes seriously. His method violates a constraint that the same tradition holds without exception. Both halves are required. Saying only the first produces hagiography, and saying only the second produces the enslaver's account, in which the crime began in August 1831 rather than in the hold of a ship. A further point of honesty: the violence Turner answered was greater than the violence he did, was continuous rather than lasting forty-eight hours, was legal, and was defended from pulpits. Naming Turner's killings as wrong does not require pretending the surrounding order was innocent. It was not innocent, and Christian ethics condemns it more comprehensively than it condemns him. ## Turner and Douglass The two men are the two poles of enslaved Christian response, and both are Christian. | | Nat Turner | [Frederick Douglass](/codex/frederick-douglass/) | |---|---|---| | Warrant | Private revelation, visions, signs | Public argument from the text of scripture | | Model | The prophet as executor of judgment | The prophet as covenant prosecutor | | Method | Armed rising against households | Escape, press, platform, and later armed enlistment | | Accountability | Answerable to God alone | Answerable in public argument, and reversible under it | | Outcome | Suppressed in two days; Southern reaction tightened | Helped move a nation toward emancipation | The historical link between them is documented and specific. In 1843, at the National Negro Convention in Buffalo, Henry Highland Garnet delivered an address calling the enslaved to rise, and named Turner in it, saying that despotism had recorded his name on the list of infamy but that future generations would remember him among the noble and brave. Douglass spoke against the address, arguing that it would bring slaughter on people who could not win. It failed adoption by one vote. That is the whole argument in one room. Douglass was not saying the cause was unjust. He was saying that the method would kill the people it meant to free, which is what had happened in Southampton twelve years earlier. And Douglass himself moved: by 1849 he said publicly that he would welcome news of a rising in the South, and by 1863 he was recruiting soldiers. The difference between the two men narrowed considerably over time, and it was always a difference about means, never about whether slavery was a sin. ## Memory and reception Turner has been contested continuously for nearly two centuries, which is itself part of what he is. - **Antebellum abolitionists.** Henry Highland Garnet praised him in 1843. Harriet Beecher Stowe appended the *Confessions* to her 1856 novel *Dred*. Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote a sympathetic account in the *Atlantic Monthly* in August 1861. - **The proslavery South.** Used him to argue that Black literacy, Black preaching, and Black assembly were inherently dangerous, and legislated accordingly. - **Twentieth century.** Herbert Aptheker's *American Negro Slave Revolts* (1943) placed him in a long tradition of resistance. William Styron's 1967 novel won a Pulitzer and drew a book-length rebuttal, *William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond* (1968), over its portrayal of Turner's interior life. The dispute was largely about who has authority to narrate him. - **Present.** He remains a figure claimed by Black liberation traditions, treated warily by mainstream white memory, and rarely examined on the theological terms he actually used. ## How objectors use Turner, and the honest reply **"Nat Turner proves religion causes violence."** Concede immediately that Turner was a Christian, that his motive was religious, and that he killed non-combatants. Do not run a no-true-Scotsman defense; it is unnecessary and it is dishonest here. See [No True Scotsman Charge Defeater](/codex/no-true-scotsman-charge-defeater/) and [Religion Causes Violence Objection Defeater](/codex/religion-causes-violence-objection-defeater/). Then collect the larger concession. To use Turner at all, the objector has to grant that an enslaved Black man reading the Bible for himself concluded that God stood against slavery and against the people holding him. That concession is fatal to the companion objection that Christianity was a slaveholder's tool imposed on passive Africans. The objector cannot have Turner as evidence of Christian violence and simultaneously have Christianity as the enslaver's instrument of pacification, because Turner is the strongest possible counterexample to the second claim. He is on the record as the thing the enslavers were most afraid the Bible would produce, and their own statute books say so. **"Christianity has no resources to condemn what Turner did."** It has the standard resources, and this page applies them: non-combatant immunity, right authority, and reasonable hope of success are Christian criteria, not secular imports, and Turner is judged by them here. The same framework convicts the slaveholding preachers far more comprehensively. A tradition that supplies the ruler by which its own members are measured is displaying the self-correction mechanism, not the absence of one. See [Christians Behaving Badly Defeater](/codex/christians-behaving-badly-defeater/). **"Turner shows the Black Church is violent at its root."** The historical claim is backwards. The dominant enslaved Christian tradition is the Exodus tradition of waiting on deliverance, the hush harbors, the spirituals, and the AME and Baptist institution-building. See [Hush Harbors](/codex/hush-harbors/) and [Black Christian Agency](/codex/black-christian-agency/). Turner is the exception that the tradition itself did not follow, and the leading Black Christian voice of the next generation argued against his method in public. ## Primary and scholarly sources - Thomas R. Gray, *The Confessions of Nat Turner* (Baltimore, 1831). Mediated, hostile, indispensable. - Southampton County court records and trial transcripts, 1831. - Henry Irving Tragle, *The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation of Source Material* (Massachusetts, 1971). - Stephen B. Oates, *The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion* (Harper and Row, 1975). - Kenneth S. Greenberg, ed., *Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory* (Oxford, 2003). - David F. Allmendinger Jr., *Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County* (Johns Hopkins, 2014). - Patrick H. Breen, *The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt* (Oxford, 2015). The careful study of the trials and the reprisals. - Vanessa M. Holden, *Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner's Community* (Illinois, 2021). ## See also - [Frederick Douglass](/codex/frederick-douglass/), the other pole of enslaved Christian response, and Turner's most significant Black Christian critic - [Just War Theory](/codex/just-war-theory/), the framework this page applies to the rising - [Slave Bible](/codex/slave-bible/), the printed version of the same fear that produced the post-1831 literacy laws - [Black Christian Agency](/codex/black-christian-agency/), the wider pattern Turner belongs to and departs from - [Hush Harbors](/codex/hush-harbors/), the worship setting where enslaved biblical interpretation was formed - [Religion Causes Violence Objection Defeater](/codex/religion-causes-violence-objection-defeater/), where the standard deployment of Turner is answered - [Christians Behaving Badly Defeater](/codex/christians-behaving-badly-defeater/), the self-correction framework applied here - [Black People Shouldnt Be Christian](/codex/black-people-shouldnt-be-christian/), the objection this page bears on most directly
## Common questions this page answers **Q: Who was Nat Turner?** Nat Turner (1800-1831) was an enslaved man in Southampton County, Virginia, who was literate, preached as a Baptist exhorter, and was known locally as "The Prophet." In August 1831 he led the deadliest slave rebellion in United States history, killing roughly fifty-five to sixty-five white people over about forty-eight hours. He was captured after two months in hiding and hanged on November 11, 1831. **Q: Was Nat Turner a Christian?** By his own account, unambiguously. He fasted, prayed, studied scripture, preached to Black congregations, and in 1827 baptized a white man named Etheldred Brantley. He understood the visions that prompted the rising as coming from the same Spirit that spoke to the biblical prophets. Asked in jail whether he now found himself mistaken, he answered, "Was not Christ crucified?" **Q: What did Nat Turner believe God told him to do?** The *Confessions* record a sequence of visions: white and black spirits in battle with the sun darkened and blood flowing, figures in blood on leaves, and a voice telling him in 1828 that the Serpent was loosed, that Christ had laid down the yoke, and that Turner should take it up and fight, because the time was approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first. He took the solar eclipse of February 1831 as the signal to act. **Q: How many people did Nat Turner kill?** His band killed approximately fifty-five to sixty-five white people, including women, children, and an infant. The reprisals afterward were larger: militia and mobs killed at least a hundred and possibly around two hundred Black people, most of whom had nothing to do with the rising, and the state executed roughly eighteen more after trial. **Q: Was Nat Turner's rebellion justified?** Assessed by the Christian just-war framework, the answer splits. His cause was grave and real, scripture itself makes enslaving and selling human beings a capital crime, and as a man held as property he had no legal remedy of any kind, so the just-cause and last-resort criteria weigh in his favor and the right-authority criterion is genuinely contested inside the tradition. But he had no reasonable hope of success, and the deliberate killing of women, children, and an infant violates non-combatant immunity, which the tradition holds without exception. His grievance is vindicated; his method is not. **Q: Does Nat Turner prove that religion causes violence?** He proves that a religious motive can drive a massacre, which no serious Christian account denies. What the objection cannot survive is the other half: to use Turner at all requires granting that an enslaved Black man reading the Bible for himself concluded God was against slavery and against his enslavers. That concession destroys the companion claim that Christianity was a slaveholder's tool imposed on passive Africans. **Q: What happened after Nat Turner's rebellion?** Virginia's legislature debated gradual emancipation in the winter of 1831-32 and rejected it. Virginia and other Southern states then passed laws restricting or forbidding Black preaching and Black assembly for worship, and tightened prohibitions on teaching enslaved people to read. The South's considered response to a Black man reading the Bible and concluding God opposed slavery was to take the Bible away from Black people. **Q: Are the Confessions of Nat Turner reliable?** Partly, and it depends what you are asking of them. The text was taken down by Thomas R. Gray, a hostile white attorney with a commercial motive, and framed with his own commentary, so the wording and framing are his. But the factual outline checks out against court records and newspaper accounts, and Gray had no interest in inventing a devout, literate, coherent Turner. Historians generally treat the events as reliable and the religious self-understanding as substantially Turner's own voice, while reading the framing as Gray's. **Q: How were Nat Turner and Frederick Douglass different?** Both were enslaved Black Christians who concluded slavery was a sin, and they differed on warrant and method. Turner acted on private revelation and armed rising; [Frederick Douglass](/codex/frederick-douglass/) argued publicly from the text of scripture and worked through escape, press, and platform. In 1843 Douglass spoke against an abolitionist address that had praised Turner, arguing it would get people killed who could not win. The gap narrowed later: by 1849 Douglass said he would welcome a Southern uprising, and by 1863 he was recruiting Black soldiers. The disagreement was always about means, never about whether slavery was evil.