#9 Southern USA - Violent Prophecy vs Slavery

In August 1831, Nat Turner, an enslaved preacher, acted on visions he believed were divine. The uprising he led in Virginia, is often remembered in stark terms: a bloody slave rebellion that hardened the South’s defenses of slavery. But the true story of how his story was told during the past two centuries, is far more complex.

Was Nat Turner's faith a source of personal liberation, a strategic blueprint for revolt, or a combination of both? We move beyond the simple narrative of a “mad prophet” or a purely political revolutionary to explore how his religious convictions shaped a radical challenge to the slave system.

We explore how Turner’s faith was neither simple nor singular, and how, in the two centuries since, his figure has been claimed, interpreted, and weaponised for vastly different agendas—by abolitionists, white supremacists, Black nationalists, and artists.

To unpack this, we are joined by Professor Greg Downs, who has co-authored a new book on the Nat Turner Revolt with the late Anthony E. Kaye.

To find out more about our guest and his book, click here.

Watch the 'Birth of a Nation' trailer here from the 2016 film that is being discussed on this Putschcast episode.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_05 0:06

Welcome to Putcast, I'm Oliver Heuter, and by now you probably know that on this podcast we examine the forces that erupt to shatter the status quo. A few figures in history embody that exposes spirit more than Ned Turner. August 1831. In Southampton County, Virginia, an enslaved preacher acted on divine visions. He launched a rebellion that left over 50 white people and scores of black people dead in its wake. It was the largest slave uprising in the United States until the outbreak of the Civil War. But to call it just a revolt might miss the point. In today's episode, we will ask: who was Nat Turner? A man whose prophetic conviction forged not just a plan for escape, but a deliberate, shocking war against the institution of slavery itself by any means. We're joined today by Professor Gregory Downes, who has co-authored a landmark work, Nat Turner, Black Prophet, a Visionary History. He will take us behind the headlines of the day and help us to understand what made him tick and why is he still relevant today. Most importantly, I would also like to welcome my co-host and evert Nat Turner Studioso, Dave Sloney Sloan.

SPEAKER_07 1:23

Hey mates, I don't think I've ever been called a studioso before, but uh but here we are. We're talking about the Nat Turner Rebellion, which is a really pivotal moment in American history. The 1830s, which is halfway between the War of Independence and the Civil War.

SPEAKER_05 1:37

And you've done a lot of research uh leading up to this episode. There is quite a bit of uh literature out there, isn't there?

SPEAKER_07 1:43

Yeah, this is really, really well documented, and you'll find a lot of information on the internet and in mainstream media as well. But what I would encourage you to do is to read and be critical because there are a lot of different interpretations and lenses that you can look at this incident through. And uh forming your own opinion is part of the fun.

SPEAKER_05 2:02

Yeah, and uh today we will speak with uh Professor Greg Downs, and he'll give us a clear, more of a religious view on the Nat Turner persona. So it's not much about racial politics, uh slavery per se, but it's uh the importance of religion in Nat's uh life and work.

SPEAKER_07 2:20

No, it's it it's not a simple problem of slavery and blacks versus whites. Uh there are some deep religion kind of mystery that uh underpins this one. Nat Turner sees himself as a prophet. He's held out as a bit of an eccentric, his view of the world is definitely unusual, not shielded and filtered. Yeah, really looking forward to learning from Greg Downs, who's definitely the preeminent expert at this particular event in history.

SPEAKER_05 2:44

And it's the most recent book published last year, I think. And uh there's also a film that is 10 years old now, which we'll be referencing in the next hour or so. It's called Birth of a Nation. The main actor is Nate Parker. You might know him. Ned Turner is at the center of this film.

SPEAKER_04 3:01

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SPEAKER_05 3:34

I'm excited now to have uh Professor Gregory Downs here on Putcast for our very first North American episode. Gregory, could you just introduce yourself a bit and tell our listeners what your field of expertise is?

SPEAKER_06 3:47

Yes, I'm so excited to be here, and thanks for having me. I'm a uh professor of history at the University of California, Davis, specialist in 19th century U.S. history, um, which is the period of the growth of slavery, the coming of the Civil War, emancipation during the Civil War, and the struggle that Americans call reconstruction after the Civil War, um, and uh which is the period in which people aim to work out different competing visions of what a post-emancipation United States will look like. So I've written, published three books um other than the one that we'll talk about today, and another one that is forthcoming on why Reconstruction Matters, uh, that'll come out in 2027. And I published three uh three prior books on slavery, the coming of the Civil War, and especially Reconstruction.

SPEAKER_05 4:37

And our podcast is called Putchcast. We talk about coups, rebellions, revolutions, successful ones, failed ones. And that's why you're here today, and you've already given us a time frame, the 19th century. We've picked out a revolutionary that many people outside of America may not have heard of. Dave, who is it?

SPEAKER_07 4:54

Yeah, so we're talking about uh Nat Turner and the Nat uh Nat Turner's Rebellion, uh, which took place in the 1830s in uh in America. Now, this is a standout event uh in American history, in particular in that period uh between the War of Independence and the Civil War. So really happy to be talking to you about this one, Greg Downs. Uh the Putchcast audience uh is a global audience. Uh now I'm not an American, you might have guessed. Uh and many of our listeners uh probably fit into the same camp as a piece of American history. This is particularly important, but probably a bit of a blind spot for a lot of people. So just looking at unearthing it and uh and finding out the details and uh the implication of this particular event for America and in particular the story of slavery uh in America.

SPEAKER_05 5:40

Yeah, and we had a bit of a chat beforehand, uh, you know, discussing the topic of slavery in North America, which is obviously well documented. There's plenty of um documentation, there is uh films, TV series due to America being such a powerful voice in the world. Greg, for me, my first recollection of the topic as a young teenager was the 80s series North and South with Patrick Swayze in it and a few other people. Um and then and then going back going back to that, I think most, and maybe the same for our listeners, most topics around slavery always have to do with the civil war in some shape or form, because it's this obviously pivotal moment in US history. But today's topic is before that. And maybe you can give us a bit of a time frame of uh Nat Turnout. What was his period that he lived in?

SPEAKER_06 6:30

So Nat was born in 1800. Um, so he was he was the age of the century, um, and was born in a part of Virginia, uh, which is the state that is one of the two states that um straddles Washington, D.C., which was carved out of Virginia and Maryland, what we call the Upper South in the United States. But it was the center for a long time of American slavery. The plantations along the James River become a the first site of large-scale Anglo-American slavery and what becomes the United States. And there had been prior enslavement by Spaniards and others in Florida and places like that. Um, and then also becomes the centerpiece of the American Revolution, that a number of major leaders of the revolution, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, are um either residents on this James of these plantations that are large-scale plantations along the James River, or children of people who um had owned those plantations, who had themselves established plantations a little farther out. But over the course of the 1700s, many of uh the planters in that area burn through the land, as well as with population growth, there's pressure to move expand slavery um farther out. Some of that takes place in other states, um, including eventually to the Mississippi River and the major center of slavery there. Others go into what we call upcountry or Piedmont regions, which are upriver from the areas over the James River that are straight down into the into the Chesapeake, and are generally a little less amenable to plantation agriculture because of the hills and the soil, and because it's harder to navigate smaller rivers in that area, but are still below what we call the fall line, the period where the river has its last major waterfall and working its way down from um the Appalachian chain to the sea. And so the family that owned Nat had come, had been part of a Virginia movement into that area that was actually illegal on its own terms in the mid to late 1700s, prior to treaties with native uh nations that opened the region up for settlement. And so they had moved people down into enslaved people down into that region and brought them with them. So it's sort of at the edge or even frontier of slavery in Virginia as they arrive there. Um, it's a little disconnected from the vast plantations that people might go visit or protest in front of today. Um, and it's an area where slavery is growing pretty significantly, and yet it's also a little bit removed from the vast uh slave complexes of places like the James River, the islands off of coastal South Carolina, or the Mississippi River Valley, where it takes place on a much larger scale. So Nat is born there in 1800. There are different stories, a great deal around him is mysterious, but there are different stories about the ways that um about his parentage. Um the most common is that his mother was also enslaved by the Turner family, which makes sense, um, in that in American law, um, the children of an enslaved mother belong to the owner of the enslaved woman. But there's divergent views, stories that circulate about whether the mother herself had been imported from Africa or whether her mother, her grandmother, was also present on the plantation, which is what Nat says, that he's raised by his mother and grandmother. His father, Nat says, had escaped when he was a young boy and uh had not been seen again. And there's various stories about either his successful escape or his capture and killing, or um, or both. In this frontier area, both white and black Virginians quickly gravitate to um religions that are not part of the Church of England that had dominated the old river valleys. The Quakers established there quite early and they become a centerpiece of the American anti-slavery. Baptists, who are an older existing uh religious movement, but who explode suddenly in late 17th century, in late 18th century um United States, especially in these kind of frontier zones. And then the Methodists who develop out of John Wesley and Charles Wesley's reform movement within the Church of England, but emerges its own um denomination in the late 18th century, um, and attracts people also kind of far out and away from the centers of power.

SPEAKER_07 11:18

And and Greg, what you're saying there, that religious explosion, does that apply equally to slaves as well as the uh general American population?

SPEAKER_05 11:27

Did slave have a choice when it came to their religion?

SPEAKER_06 11:30

And this is both of these are really fascinating questions because scholars have wrestled with this, including the whole question of how to understand choice in a system of chattel slavery, right? They wrestle with this in the question of sexual relationships. Could enslaved women give consent um in cases where there's you know decades-long connections between people? Does that make sense? And how do we think of choice in something like this? Um, but when you look at the practice of church going, um, you see a couple of uh a couple of divergent strains. One of which is that some white enslavers um in until the 1820s or 1830s pay very little attention to religious training of enslaved people. Um, in part, this is a holdover from an assumption that um black Africans could be enslaved because they weren't Christians, that enslaving Christians was a sin, and a weariness as they get descendant generations who do Christianize, in part because there's not a critical anti-slavery movement that slave owners feel they have to defend themselves against. But the combination of what we call the evangelical waves that become the second great awakening and that Baptists and Methodists are at the center of, the rise of slavery critique that puts enslavers kind of back on their heels and feeling they have to justify it, and the solidifying of property law that says even if enslaved people are Christian, they're still enslaved, um, create increased interest by planters in um converting um uh enslaved people as a way of showing their reform, their goodwill. And yet also there's clearly room for choice that there are in most records of churches that keep these, records of people who are enslaved by people who don't go to a church, who do go to that church. There's some speculation, sometimes that was more appealing because you built other connections. Um, and there are places where you can see enslavers going to church, but not enslaved people. Um, and so there is clearly some choice. Now, the Methodism they grow up in is quite different than what we might think of if you if there are Methodists, you know, where you are now. Um and it's this world that Nat defines as kind of along with the love from his mother and grandmother is the central aspect of his raising.

SPEAKER_07 14:01

Yeah, okay, okay. So if we can get a little bit to the character of Nat um in in this religious context, uh I think one of the things that I uh I I've read uh from your book actually is that the uh the Turner family, uh the family that owns Nat um established and built a church. Um now Nat finds it, I guess, a lot distressing or conflicting um that the Turner family is committed to uh biracial Methodism. So uh the church is there for themselves as well as their slaves. And simultaneously, they're obviously committed to enslavement. The the Bible teaches that God is accepting of all races and all nations. So there's uh there's obviously a a sort of a conflict there that Nat can't quite get his head around, and that seems to be, I guess, one of the sparks um that uh sits there and kind of burns away uh within Nat and uh and ultimately results in this rebellion.

SPEAKER_06 14:58

His stories, which we'll talk about how they get recorded later, um, of his early days in the church are intense and largely joyful as a young child. He's clearly, by every account, including other accounts in the neighborhood, an extraordinarily bright child who picks up and absorbs things, who seems to teach himself to read um much earlier than other people, even though it was illegal for enslaved people to read, and becomes a source of wonder.

SPEAKER_07 15:28

Does he have a lot to read other than the Bible?

SPEAKER_06 15:30

Probably mostly the Bible. He never mentions anything else, and he has a really intense knowledge of the Bible, and there is a copy of what is purported to be his Bible and the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. that was kept by a white family for a century or more. And so he is, you know, impresses people, he's obsessed with memorizing the aspects of Methodism, which is really practices, hymns trying to perfect themselves to approach God, the kind of movement of what we call pietism through, and becomes renowned as someone who is bound to be a preacher. And there were black preachers and there were enslaved preachers. This is not completely um unimaginable that he's uh you know on this path. And it's in this context that he describes that his mother and grandmother who utilize their the respect they're held within this larger prayer meeting, uh, where black people certainly speak up about their prayers, um, and you know, um, you know, our participants start to suggest to people doesn't Nat seem like he's not like other kids? Doesn't it seem like God has called him to be a preacher? And what they are preparing the ground for is a broader religious community that will say Nat isn't fitted for field work, he's fitted to be a preacher, and therefore he should be freed. This period, as he's a young person, and really even more the decade before he's born, there's lots of free black people around. One of his enslavers' relatives had freed man their the whole side of that family had freed all of their enslaved people. So there are lots who had mostly taken the Turner last name. So there's actually lots of black turners around. And it's only as he's aging, getting closer to adolescence, that the practice of emancipating slaves becomes less and less common. Virginia makes it more difficult, passes laws to make it more difficult, and Methodism, which had incorporated an anti-slavery etho, even in the South, is withdrawing from that. So they're speaking about a Methodism they saw his mother and grandmother, and that's fading as he ages.

SPEAKER_05 18:05

Of how he grew up and what shaped his world. The Bible was certainly his main source of information. He would have seen other preachers, white or black. The living circumstances that Ned Turner grew up in, you've already spoken, they're pretty much at the frontier of slavery. So we're not talking a very established area. I assume they're big farms. The Bible for him, the stories in there must have been from another planet, because if you are living on the, you know, the outskirts of Virginia, New York or other cities would have been a world away, let alone Egypt or any other mysterious places. It was probably like from a fairy tale and to him. What I've always learned in my few parts of exposure to that history is that there was mainly uh slaves who had to work the farms, and then there were ones that were seen as more privileged who were in the home doing house duties, kids played with white kids to keep them entertained. Do we know how Nett grew up? Did he have time for this, or did he have to work the fields for 14 hours a day in horrible conditions?

SPEAKER_06 19:02

As a young child, he's a close playmate of one of the Turner children who is not killed. Other Turns are killed in the rebellion that we'll get to. And he's clearly privileged. But a few things happen. As he becomes an adolescent, he is sent into the fields. Um, at the death of his enslavers, he is given in wills to young children who then, you know, it becomes their parents or their uh guardians, become the caretakers. He's hired out for him and for his mother, it seems very shocking reinsertion into um enslaved life as a field laborer. It's not cotton fields or tobacco in that region. It's apples for things like brandy and cider. It is uh corn. There is some cotton and an increasing amount, um, but it's not the heart of that belt. But yes, he'd have been working in these um patterns of. Seasonal agricultural forced labor. He has scar signs that he's been beaten at one point for what they would have called impudence for disobedience. And that he's seen as someone who has to be forced into field work because he is so obviously different. And it's in this context, instead of aging into be a preacher, he ages into being, as he becomes an adult, something more like an eccentric. Other enslaved people know that he has an intense relationship with God, but he is not someone that is running what we would call Brush Harbor uh churches where enslaved people meet in the wood. He's known as a religious figure, but more of a uh eccentric one.

SPEAKER_07 20:45

Is his view of himself as a prophet uh supported by the people around him?

SPEAKER_06 20:51

This is something that emerges as he ages, that he has this first vision in 1822, so at the age of 22, he runs away, maybe in fear, he doesn't say why. Then he comes back, which is that shocks and dismays most of the other enslaved people who think he's a fool for this, and they mock him as he says they murmur against him, using a word that Moses used to describe when the people turned against him.

SPEAKER_07 21:18

So his own is punishing for having run away.

SPEAKER_06 21:21

That is not the incident that's a that's attached to the beating, which happens a little later in his life. We're not sure exactly how, but it appears that he's separated from a woman who he is not married formally or legally, but be you know, been married to, um, and a child, a son, who um belong to someone else in the neighborhood and are separated away. He's going through this period of intense alienation and he starts having deep more and more visions, and really shocking visions, signs of um, you know, wars in the sky between white and black spirits, signs of blood on the leaves. Um, and then as he gets into deeper into the 1820s, he has he hears God's voice um repeating at first biblical verses, which is not in and of itself that unusual, but then other language, other words, which is you know, uh goes beyond, you know, what what normal uh would be considered normal in those contexts, and he sees an image of Christ crucified in the sky and says he realizes the constellations are not the constellations, but they are Jesus returning, yeah, that is bleeding down into the world, and that this is the sign to him that the end of the world has come, and that what God is calling him to do is to be a general in the battle for the end of the world apocalypse.

SPEAKER_07 22:43

In the book, Nat's um Nat's visions are described in uh in some detail. Some of them have uh a practical and a physical explanation, you know, solar eclipse, volcanoes that um that are going off in Central America at the time, um and and uh I guess uh anomalies like this. What do you believe is behind these visions?

SPEAKER_06 23:02

Well, I'm working through, you know, an oddity of the book is that a close friend of mine had started it and conceived it and then and then died. And then I did the work of we had worked together for a year while he was suffering, and then I did the work of bringing his vision to fruition. So I'll I'll answer a little bit more like how my friend Tony Kay, please, who was the originator of this, thought of it, because that's what I was trying to carry about, carry out. He was wary of the idea that some scholars have that we look for a correlative for every vision for a simple reason. All of those things are true. There were eclipses on these days, there are other people who see them, and they don't, by and large, with maybe one exception, attach them to apocalyptic end times until the big eclipse at the end. In other words, if it was obvious that these things um caused these visions, why didn't anyone else have them? Something different is happening for Nat. Um, the other thing I think is that Nat would have believed they were real. Um, that he was, you know, deeply immersed in the lives of the prophets of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible. He was aware of the things they saw, some which are well known in Christianity, the burning bush, others are, you know, less so. Um, and he would have believed that they were they were true. Um, getting beyond that, that he took it seriously and literally into did he actually see something that you know an outsider would observe? That's that's probably beyond our scope as a historian.

SPEAKER_07 24:31

Yeah. I I think what I'm really trying to understand is um how the people around Nat and those that joined him in the rebellion um saw him uh and his um I guess declaration of being a prophet, are they motivated purely by that? Do they believe in that uh to the degree that Nat does? Um or are they slaves who are uh I guess you know, seeking rebellion for obvious reasons? Opportunists, basically. Yep. And Nat is the Nat is the you know the match that gets struck that starts that.

SPEAKER_06 25:04

You know, some of both, and I'll talk just a little bit, you know, hopefully fairly briefly about these waves of people joining. When he first he is known for his even white people around know that he's talking about these visions. Um and they don't immediately see them as uh in fact, many of them don't consider them a threat at all, with one exception, um, the brother of of his of his of his final enslaver, um, don't consider him a threat. They think A, there's a lot of prophets around. Uh there's a number of white and and black prophets. They may not see that as unusual, and B, he's a well-known eccentric, so they don't think he can lead people. Um, but he does over um 1830 start to build up a group of four people who he trusts and tells us. Now, all of these people are connected in one way or another to the cluster of families around, mostly Methodist. Many of them have, like Nat, been passed from one person to another. And some of them, like Nat, had probably come to learn that they had been mortgaged and there was a potential of being moved again. So they all have plenty of grounds for personal grievance. How many of them believe in Nat is hard to know. He believes that this core group does. When they finally meet to plan the uprising, they bring a couple of other people, one of whom clearly does not want to join, but is coerced into joining, essentially. And then once they start moving, they are having people coming purely opportunistically, and then they are essentially drafting or coercing, forcing people to join them. You know, how much the other people care or even after a while know that Nat is inspired by a prophecy is really impossible to say. It's common in the p interrogations after for people to talk about his prophecies, but it is not clear um how many beyond himself and maybe a small core were actually motivated by that. They saw a chance to to strike against slavery and joined up, and they saw a person who believed he could win, which of course is you know the key thing in a question like this. Why have confidence?

SPEAKER_07 27:19

Yeah, this seems to be a common ingredient uh in you know a lot of the rebellions and uprisings that we that we cover, that there's a uh a central figure with a good degree of charisma um that's able to uh I guess influence and lead. And that's interesting because you've described him as an eccentric, um, but he is highly energized and has a very clear kind of purpose and direction of travel, and I think people seem to gravitate to that.

SPEAKER_04 27:45

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SPEAKER_05 27:54

We're speaking with Professor Gregory Downes, author of Nat Turner Black Prophet A Visionary History. We've just learned um about the religious uh historical context in the early 19th century USA, which was a young country at the time. There wasn't a clear division yet, as I understand it, between North and South that sort of started to evolve over the next decade or two. Basically, around the topic of slavery, but also the industrialization, probably had a thing or two to play, that the North became more and more powerful. We've learned that Nat was very intelligent, charismatic. He had the Bible as his main source of information. At the very start, or early on, um, Gregory, I spoke about you know the popular culture I've uh I've been exposed to and that I consume and still do. And there is a film about Nat Turner from 2016 called Birth of a Nation, which is uh almost a biopic, you can say. And um I've watched it twice with a few years um in between, and again it's been 10 years this year. First of all, can I can I ask you what you think of the film before we actually start talking through the rebellion? Because I would love to ask you a few questions of how much is Hollywood, how much is true. What was your first what was your first reaction when you saw the film?

SPEAKER_06 29:08

You know, I I'll I'll split it in two because I saw it as a person, and then you know, um, you know, and then I joined this project of my friend uh in common. I mean, I I think I was glad that it was brought to the screen. It came out in a way that kind of muddied its its release because there were accusations against the filmmaker one of the filmmakers. Um, and so it, you know, did not, it was a sort of big buildup, and then it kind of uh passed more quickly because of uh of that. And you know, Tony Kay, who had originated the project, was pretty wary of it for reasons that, you know, I think, you know, you can either attribute to historians nitpicking or to really principled, you know, questions. One of which is, you know, the the thing that he has, you know, was resistant to in most of the pop cultural visions. The other big one would be William Styron's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner. The thing that Tony was wary of was a strong desire to put Nat in one of two categories, one of which is person motivated by personal grievance, which is clearly got to be true at some level, but also got to be insufficient, right? There are millions of enslaved people who have, you know, enormous reason for grievance under a system of slavery, and very few of them start organized rebellions. And so he thought that kind of missed the point. But the other category he can be put into is there's really two categories, but that fit together, one of which is liberal revolutionary, kind of the next revolutionary, which really does not capture what he was aiming toward, as we'll talk about, or kind of proto-black nationalist. Um, and and both of those he felt like really were efforts to turn Nat into a figure for the current day, to make him a usable figure for for protesters or activists today, which they need. Um, and yeah, but in the process, they lost the strangeness and specificity of Nature.

SPEAKER_00 31:04

Your slaves sure do know how to behave. Well, they got Finn. One of them's preaching. People might pay good money to have them calm down a bit, especially by one of their own.

SPEAKER_01 31:16

Lead you to Eda 218. Submit yourselves to your masters, and only to those who are good considerations, also to those. What do you think you're doing?

SPEAKER_03 31:38

You don't preach it for a little while. Learned your lesson.

SPEAKER_05 31:47

In the film, he has this very long-standing relationship with his owner, I think it's uh Sam Samuel Turner, and um he becomes uh a catch cow for him to use that term, um, going from farm to farm, appeasing other slaves with his prophecy, but then he's exposed to extreme violence that he has not experienced in his own life. This is all according to the film, where you can you you can see two male slaves being force fed, and this is very graphic, by their teeth being chiseled out beforehand before a metal funnel that's being shoved down their necks, and they're being forced fed because they refuse to work. And this is one of the incidents that he witnesses that radicalize them to use that word. And then you've just mentioned it, Greg. There is a moment where he baptizes a white man on the land on the farm of his owner, which then is in the film the point of conflict, the first open point of conflict with his owner, and he takes it from there and it leads to the rebellion. Is that what happened?

SPEAKER_06 32:50

Well, some element no one knows, and some element not really. Uh, yeah, he had been for the last several years of his life controlled by essentially guardians, um, as he's willed to um younger, um to younger heirs who are not of age, or you know, to the control of widows who then marry other people. Um, so he's actually owned by uh a non, you know, he's not owned, but he's managed by a non-turner who is the husband of uh the mother of his um uh of his you know titular owner. Um and so the break with the you know direct Turner male um adult supervision had been quite a bit earlier. He is hired out in that period and certainly seems particularly upset about that. There's a record that other white people in the area know about this baptism, but n and and that he's mocked for it, but not you know, brutalized for it. In terms of overall brutality, it's hard to get imagine that there wasn't brutality of many kinds going on around him. And so any of that is plausibly true. And in a film where you want to show what slavery is, they're certainly you know by the on the on firm ground and saying this is a part of slavery. It's also interesting that Nat never refers to that in his own words or in the words remembered by uh you know recounted by others. Oh, that's really good to know that as a motivation.

SPEAKER_05 34:22

So this is there are historical examples for this. This definitely happened. If he was witness to it, we do not know. Okay.

SPEAKER_06 34:29

Yeah. Good to know. And he never refers to that as his motivation.

SPEAKER_05 34:32

Which is the key question of today's episode here. What was his motivation? Because it is all about revolutions, which he clearly or rebellion started. What was his initial motivation? Because we know he was religious all those years. He's probably witnessed violence many times over. He's he's had a tough life like everyone did in those days. But was there a spark like in the film where where there is this you know uh eruption of of emotions between him and his owner? Was there a historical moment what was the final spark in the powder cake here?

SPEAKER_06 35:04

The only answer we have is his answer, which is that it is God chastising him for having received these commands and not acted on them. And that God has sent him, you know, not long prior, a claim that, you know, the statement that the serpent has been unloosed and that it is time to act, and that he is risking God's punishment by not acting. And this is what he describes as the inciting event. It is true that there's rumors circulating around the neighborhood, accurate, that there's a danger of the people being held at some of these local plantations being broken up by a call in of a of a loan that they were collateral for. So that totally would make sense as a potential spark. His narrative is that he's motivated by this increasing fervor of his visions, connection of those with this eclipse that convinces him it is God's sign, as eclipse sometimes factors in the Bible, that it's God's sign to act.

SPEAKER_02 36:09

My ancestors and unborn children rejoice. Are we dead? No. I say we are now alive, seeing through eyes that have been denied us since being born into the darkness of bondage. Stand with us, that your other captive brothers and sisters also know freedom. Stand that our children for generations to come will know that with the supernatural power of God we straightened our backs against the works of the evil one. Stand with us.

SPEAKER_05 36:48

To bring us back to the events of the time, Ned Turner was born in 1800. He grew up a smart kid learning a lot. The Bible is part of his reality. I think that's definitely true. There's this, you know, uh for an atheist listener out there, it'll be hard to understand, but this is this is what he lives and he sees himself on the planet as part of God's domain, and things escalate. There might be various reasons for it. We spoke about them. You also just named a political reason behind it. So there's discussion about, you know, um, you can't have it both ways. Like, our slaves people are there not, like on the one hand side, they're meant to be property that you can buy, on the other hand, we want them because we probably get bigger tax allocations or whatever the reasons were were, you know, representation in in in the parliament, etc. The next question for me is when does he take up arms? Is there a time, a date when the first bullet is fired, the first person is killed? Is there that moment in the Nepturna Rebellion?

SPEAKER_06 37:46

So after the eclipse, after uh they move, he calls a time for his what he calls his captains to meet. Um, and they gather, they um work out the plan. There are a couple of unexpected people there, the brother-in-law of one of his captains, etc., and there's debate about how to deal with them. He tells them what they're gonna do, he leaves them alone while they drink. At midnight, they march to the house of um his uh you know, the people who control them, the Travises. He breaks in and kills them, and then he goes across the way and kills um her brother. This is what's the Francis family, a family that had married into the Turners. And um they then gather people and um force some to join and start marching. So he himself at this point hasn't killed anybody. He's conveyed a message that they are supposed to kill everyone, including young children. And this has been a thing that has tortured um sympathetic readers of the Nat Rebellion, um, because you know, there's a lot of people who, you know, are ready to sign up for rebellion to change the way things are, and not to sign up for uh bashing uh infants' heads against chimneys.

SPEAKER_07 39:02

This is a really uh a really poignant point, I think, in this story. Um so there seems to be a directive uh to kill men, women and children, and and you know, babies are included in that, and not just because they're in the way, but um they seem to go out of their way to kill men, women and children.

SPEAKER_06 39:21

Um at one point they leave, realize they've forgotten and they go back uh to kill someone and they go back. So they actually slow their progress.

SPEAKER_07 39:29

What's behind that?

SPEAKER_06 39:30

And it is something that you know we could get at from a couple of ways. I mean, people have talked about the culpability of all white people in a system of slavery, not just slave owners. There have people who've said this gets overstated because there are times when they ride by houses and he doesn't there are times when he's moving in a direction and they pass people and they're like, Should we go see um, you know, attack those people? And he's like, Leave them alone. We're going to this. So it's not true that like literally everybody dies. Um, and Nat himself. Only kills one person at his own hand, though he calls in Will who he calls the executioner, um, to kill people for him.

SPEAKER_07 40:08

I find that interesting. That's not much of a soldier himself, is he? Um. And he's got this sword that's pretty weak and ineffective. Yeah, he he seems to be very much symbolic.

SPEAKER_06 40:20

You know, Tony Kay, who had conceived the project, was a friend of mine and a historian, and then um was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and passed, uh asked me to complete the project for him. So what he had conceived was the concept of harem warfare, which is the description of the way warfare is fought in parts of the what Christians call the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible. And there the most famous example would be Joshua in the Battle of Jericho, where people sometimes know the song. But these are stories in which God commands people as an act of prayer to go capture a city and kill everyone, including men, women, children, cattle. And it is reads, you know, in contemporary worlds as a kind of parable of settler conquest, like uh, you know, a genocide, you know, that you're clearing a land to create a space, you know, for uh the chosen people. But it is spoken of as a holy obligation. Um people are criticized in the Bible when they don't follow through on it. Um and it is clear that in, especially in the in the in the book of Joshua and in some related books, um, that it's held up as the way to uh you know, a kind of holy warfare. Um and it seems to be the best explanation for where um that and its play out in the book of Revelation seem to be the best explanation for Nat. Now, possibly for some of the people in his band, it's revenge because they are often at sites where some among them have either been enslaved or have friends and family enslaved. Um, but for others it's actually a problem. There are people who are willing to fight, but not to s kill women and children.

SPEAKER_05 42:02

This is what makes Ned Turner such a challenging character in American history, isn't it? That he's not this clear-cut uh historical hero fought for a just cause, which he did, but the methods he chose are very, even at the time, very, very controversial and unjust, I would just say, especially if it's you know violence directed at people who had nothing to do with slavery.

SPEAKER_07 42:25

And I think this explains the Hollywood interpretation, uh, because there's a lot that's quite inconvenient um uh about what is a you know a really strong and powerful story.

SPEAKER_05 42:35

But the film shows it. The film has some real gruesome, gruesome scenes in it. How how he um almost hammers out his owner's heart. Like um, and there's many, many other scenes that uh that are really violent that I think a lot of people would have left him, wouldn't it? Uh, were there people breaking away from him or did they follow him no matter what?

SPEAKER_06 42:55

There are definitely people breaking away. Um, some of them are people who've been coerced. Um there's some of this is surely people after they've been captured saying, I didn't want to, but others are people seen running away. And you know, that the Nat says they have to set up guards at the back of their phalanx to make sure that wavering people can't get past what he thinks are the true believer.

SPEAKER_07 43:18

I think it's important to understand that that this definitely isn't a general rebellion of slaves in this area. Um, Nat has to work really, really hard on like recruitment, and I guess um, you know, swelling the rebellion as it takes place over a couple of days. Um, and in the end, what he's able to recruit at maximum about 40 people uh is what it gets to before they basically meet resistance and enormous retaliation from white militias.

SPEAKER_06 43:43

And he seems to have deliberately kept it very quiet. Other rebellions, you know, had been spoken of. He says that he knows this, possibly he's referring to an 1822 rumored rebellion in South Carolina, detached to Denmark Vesey, a free black carpenter there, um, that also has religious motivation, but where um black people uh come and tell whites that it's gonna happen and leads to a mass inquisition. And so he's there's a strategic reason to keep it quiet and not be working so hard at recruitment beforehand, but he also seems here to have a sense that God will reveal to others um that this is their mission.

SPEAKER_07 44:24

He he does have that faith in that as I take one step, then the next step will sort of reveal itself. That seems to be his like his modus operandi. Is that accurate?

SPEAKER_06 44:34

That's right. He's very interested in um what we might call tactics, how you fight once you're fighting. And he's very interested in staying in the back and playing, not playing, but being the general saying, you know, send people here, send a second charge. Um, so he doesn't, you know, expect that you win without trying. Um, but he's, you know, his strategy, strategic thinking is more focused on one goal. And this is, you know, probably has to do with a you know historic, um, what anyone else would call a coincidence, which is the county seat of this county um was at the time known as Jerusalem. It later gets its name changed, possibly because of the memory of the Turner Rebellion. And of course, Jerusalem is the site both in the Hebrew Bible, his stories of harem warfare, um, and in Revelation of God's fulfillment of the kingdom. And so he's key strategic goal is get to Jerusalem, get to this county seat, which is just a few hundred people living in town, get to this county seat, capture it, and then God will bring the next stage in the end of the world and the second coming.

SPEAKER_05 45:45

Professor Greg Downs, could you just summarize in a in a few sentences for us the actual rebellion? So from start to finish with a few dates, numbers involved, and locations?

SPEAKER_06 45:56

So they move from house to house on their way to Jerusalem, but at one point um they split into two groups, um, not seemingly by Nat's choice, but by demands of some other people who have joined up but want to rescue um people that they're attached to and possibly take vengeance on, you know, particularly in slavers that they have uh particular grievances again. So those things are clearly shaping some of the others. He's somehow able to bring them back together, which itself is somewhat miraculous. Um, and but they're delayed, they get chewed near the path to the bridge over the river to um Jerusalem. They would still have more miles to go. Their men insist on going in, seemingly against Nat's will, um, to go and to rescue people they know. While they're there, um the um a group of white militia who have gathered um overnight come from the town of Jerusalem. There's actually two different militias riding around trying to find him. Um he encounters the first and outmaneuvers them and sends them in flight. And as he's trying to press his advantage, the second one comes up behind them kind of by uh chance, um, and they drive him back and break up the group. He most people flee um and um some are butchered down, most people flee. He grabs a group and tries to make another roundabout way to Jerusalem. Um that, you know, he realizes is blocked. They go to a large uh quarters of enslaved people and try and recruit and get ready the next morning. The next morning he launches, uh he goes to recruit at the plantation next door. There, there's a pitched battle that he loses. Um he goes with a couple of uh of other people fleeing with him. Um they go to the woods and he tells them, uh, go and search and tell everyone else to meet here. When they don't come back, he realizes they're not, and he goes into hiding, moving at one place. And so then there are this incredible spectacle where everyone else is killed or captured, except Nat. And wild stories start to spread. What happened, right? People are counting the dead, they're trying to figure out what happened. There's different people, there's people who think there are multiple groups, there's people it takes months for people to really work out it's one group. Um, the dead come to a, you know, about 50, you know, a little more than 50 white people or so in the area. Um, and people are going out in searching expeditions, and also wild rumors are spreading that he's gotten to the north, that he's gotten to Canada, that he's gone south to get more people, that he started rebellions in North Carolina. And as he's week after week hiding out, we don't know that much of what he does. He says that he never turns to the local enslaved people for help because he doesn't want one to endanger them or two to be turned to end by them.

SPEAKER_05 49:00

So it's a bit late by then, isn't it? Like now all of a sudden he starts worried about the people that he uh trying to send to the to the to the certain deaths. Um and and so there is no final big uh showdown battle as in the film.

SPEAKER_06 49:15

No, there are a couple of there's a uh, you know, there are these two battles they lose, one with a larger group and then another with a smaller group uh the subsequent day. And he's hiding out for uh you know for weeks and weeks at a time. And then when one of um the enslaving family um passes by, he steps out and exposes himself, pauses, and then gives over his sword and he surrenders. So he hands himself in after several weeks. We don't know exactly why then. Is it that person? Is it his um belief that it's his only way to get to Jerusalem and his hope that once he's conveyed there, if he doesn't get killed, God will still be an instrument. And he's taken, um, people start firing guns as he's brought in in celebration. There's a story that's gonna be a very important thing.

SPEAKER_05 50:09

This is white people, I assume white people are celebrating.

SPEAKER_06 50:12

There's a story of a black woman who comes up and the mother of one of the people kill, black people killed in the rebellion, comes up and smacks him and curses him for you know leading to the death of her son. Uh plausible, but we don't know for sure it happens. There's a story that some white people try and kill him and that other whites fight them off. Plausible, but then other people say no. And as he's taken these miles in, he tells people over and over, I saw prophecies, God told me to do this. And so they're all hearing it. They take him in, he's put in jail. At this point, there have been the executions of a number and the exile of a number of people who participated to different degrees. So he's the last person outstanding, but there are a few other people awaiting trial, especially a couple of free black people who get swept up in it and uh who have a separate criminal process. So he um a he a local lawyer, he's assigned to one lawyer, a different local lawyer who had represented other of the rebels, comes to see him and asks if he can interview him. And over three days, they conduct long interviews that the white lawyer writes down, himself had been an enslaver, now on hard times, writes down. And this is what purports to be with some narrative interludes by the white lawyer, the narrative of Nat Turner. And what not all of the claims about his motivation are based on it, but you the most intricate ones are.

SPEAKER_07 51:42

And this becomes the confessions?

SPEAKER_06 51:44

Yes, you know, he he attends the trial, this lawyer. Um, the trial is not that long, though there is, you know, the sort of evidence of a procedure and a full jury. Um, um, at that point, um, says something like he doesn't see himself as guilty, you know, presumably because he's acting in God's will. Um, and that, you know, says by some accounts something like, I've already told um this white lawyer um what has uh you know, you know, what transpired, though not everyone says so. He's sentenced uh to be hung. The lawyer leaves before the hanging and rushes to get the get it published because he's afraid surely other people will. He does pretty well with that book, doesn't he? Immediate bestseller. He doesn't end up wealthy. Uh you know, he's sort of begging for a political job um, you know, in the 1840s. So it's not clear if he made a lot of money and then lost it, or in for the world without copyright. He um made money for, I mean, there was you know, without any enforcement of copyright, it got pirated immediately. And so it became certainly a huge production. He was hoping to make a lot of money from it. Um it's hard to know. He was an atheist, by the way, which also puts an interesting light, his interest in the religious uh connotations. Yeah. Nat is is hung in the town square, um, right outside the courthouse. We don't know a lot. There are different stories that circulate among black Virginians about what happens, some of which are clearly mythic. Um, and um then there's a sort of incredibly gruesome set of stories about what happens to his body, which focus on its desecration of his skull being, you know, kept for by people, of uh other things, uh, you know, of his butt flesh being melted into fat, of people keeping his skin and turning it into lampshades. Certainly there's no doubt that there's some you know ritual kind of desecration of him, but you know, knowing exactly what parts did every thing that white Virginias later pointed to as a family relic actually connect to him, or were they associating him with some, you know, things they had with things like this is hard to know.

SPEAKER_05 54:05

A horrific, horrific part of uh American history there. And just looking back at it now, almost 200 years later, uh I know the British abolished slavery only a few years after the Ned Turner Rebellion. I'm sure that was not related, but I'm sure word travelled fast. What was the implications of the rebellion? Did it improve the life of slaves or did he achieve the opposite?

SPEAKER_06 54:28

So there's a moment where an omniscient person uh could have thought he had achieved what he wanted, which is in the aftermath, a member of the Randolph family, which is family tied to Thomas Jefferson, starts to say to other aristocratic Virginians, My wife wants to move to Ohio. Like she thinks this is no place white people are not going to be able to survive under slavery. She's clearly more bothered by the murder of white people than enslavement. And he starts talking up, and a proposal actually develops a couple of different proposals. And the governor actually says, we need to do a, you know, what he thinks of as a sensible plan to put Virginia on a path to enslavery. He calls a secret session because of the Nat Rebellion. You know, they consider different plans, all of which are about saving white Virginians from the problems of running slavery. So there are things like long-term gradual uh emancipation with forced exile of free black people away, and very long, slow, you know, uh management. They don't pass, but there is significant, you know, um discussion of them and support for them. This turns out to be the last time a southern state seriously debates ending slavery. And that thing you said early on, that the sectional differences emerging. Well, many northern states, all northern states except for Vermont at the time of the American founding, had had slavery. And in many states it had either faded away or been legislated against or been um, you know, stricken down by courts. And so it's going. And there's real reason to think, you know what, if Pennsylvania is going to get rid of slavery and New Jersey and New York, it's gonna be Maryland and then Virginia.

SPEAKER_05 56:17

Why stop why not?

SPEAKER_06 56:19

Like it didn't, you know, there were lots of slaves in New Jersey, right? Like, why not? And yet instead the line is drawn. And even Delaware, which has very few, um, never considers, seriously considers emancipation. So this turning point in a really bleak way. They what the legislature does in Virginia is they legislate against black preachers, black literacy, black mobility. And many states pass a series of laws saying the problem is black preachers. That's odd since Nat wasn't even a preacher in uh in those terms, right? And then Methodists start denying licenses to black preachers, which actually causes an uproar among some white Methodists who are like, the whole point of this is we decentralize power. We can, you know, we can say who is who is licensed. Um, and so there's real, you know, crackdown, a belief the preachers are you know at the heart of the problem of managing uh slavery, and so a push to force planters to pay to have imported preachers brought in to preach to black people so they can control the message, obey your masters.

SPEAKER_05 57:26

Thank you very much for your time. We have run out of time, Greg. Uh this is a topic we could talk about, David, for for many, many more um hours, I think. And uh you've you've read the book yourself. Uh please pick it up as well if you can, Nat Turner, Black Prophet a Visionary History. Greg, um, we will speak again. I'm sure there are other revolutionaries in the 19th century USA. Uh, we want to thank you for your time. Is there one last personal comment you have on the topic of Nat Turner? What is your personal view?

SPEAKER_06 57:56

I mean, as a historian, I wrestle less with my personal view and more about what it tells us to pay attention to. And to me, you know, for people interested in rebellions and revolutions, it reminds us they can have unlikely sources and they can attract um wide ranges of people motivated, some opportunistically, some in very different ways. And I think it's very easy a lot of people, you know, for highly educated self-conscious revolutionaries to think the only, you know, way a revolution happens is if there's more and more highly educated self-conscious revolutionaries. But in practice, it turns out often not to be the case, and that there's other things that motivate people that start to draw in and create situations where people can act. Um, and so I think just that attentiveness to the different aspects of culture that can be useful in making a case against the status of reality today, what seems like reality today, is something that anybody trying to create change through whatever mechanism is well advised to pay attention to, not to try and impose the vision they've learned, but to listen and learn about the way things that are out there in the culture that can be utilized and turned toward those ends.

SPEAKER_05 59:11

Thank you very much. And for everyone else listening, remember the film Birth of a Nation 2016, and main actor was Nate Parker. A bit of Hollywood, of course, but I think it's a really good starting point on the topic of uh the Nat Turner Rebellion.

SPEAKER_07 59:25

David, um Oh look, I I I would encourage you to read the book first. So have a look for it. Nat Turner Black Prophet by Tony Kay and Greg Downs. Uh it is a really interesting read. I've got pages and pages of questions I didn't get to ask today because this is truly a uh a kind of a complex and multifaceted little situation uh that turns out to be very emblematic in the history of America. So a great one to learn about, and hopefully we get to talk about it more soon.

SPEAKER_05 59:50

All right. Well, book first, then the movie. Um again, thank you very much. This was Putschcast on Nat Turner. And if you're interested in someone very, very similar, check out our episode. On Thomas Münzer. He was also a preacher. He also led a very violent revolution in the name of God. And he just lived 300 years earlier. I don't think they knew each other, obviously, but the story is just so similar. Thank you very much.