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520   DOUGLASS' MONTHLY  SEPTEMBER, 1861

been in your power to profess yourselves to be above party and yet enjoy the reputation of being sincere.  Your mistake was a great one.  Cunning cannot correct it.  The only remedy is your repentance.

GERRIT SMITH.
PETERBORO, Aug. 13, 1861.

NAT TURNER'S INSURRECTION.
[From the Atlantic Monthly, for August, 181.]
During the year 1831, up to the 23d of August, the Virginia newspapers were absorbed in the momentous problems which then occupied the minds of intelligent American citizens:— What General Jackson should do with the scolds, and what with the disreputables—Should South Carolina be allowed to nullify? and would the wives of Cabinet Ministers call on Mrs. Eaton?  It is an unfailing opiate, to turn over the drowsy files of the Richmond Enquirer, until the moment when those dry and dusty pages are suddenly kindled into flame by the torch of Nat Turner.  Then the terror flares on increasing, until the remotest Southern States are found shuddering at nightly rumors of insurrection—until far-off European colonies, Antigua, Martinique, Caraccas, Tortola, recognize by some secret sympathy the same epidemic alarms—until the very boldest words of freedom are reported as uttered in the Virginia House of Delegates with unclosed doors—until an obscure young man named Garrison is indicted at Common Law in North Carolina, and has a price set upon his head by the Legislature of Georgia.  The insurrection revived in one agonizing reminiscence all the distresses of Gabriel's Revolt, thirty years before; and its memory endures still fresh, now that thirty added years have brought the more formidable presence of General Butler.  It is by no means impossible that the very children or even confederates of Nat Turner may be included at this moment among the contraband articles of Fortress Monroe.

Near the south-eastern border of Virginia, in Southampton County, there is a neighborhood known as 'The Cross Keys.'  It lies fifteen miles from Jerusalem, the county-town or 'court-house,' seventy miles from Norfolk, and about as far from Richmond.  It is some ten or fifteen miles from Murfreesboro' in North Carolina, and about twenty-five from the Great Dismal Swamp.  Up to Sunday, the 21st of August, 1831, there was nothing to distinguish it from any other rural, lethargic, slipshod Virginia neighborhood, with the due allotment of mansion-houses and log-huts, tobacco-fields and 'old-fields,' horses, dogs, negroes, 'poor white folks,' so called, and other white folks, poor without being called so.  One of these last was Joseph Travis, who had recently married the widow of on Putnam Moore, and had unfortunately wedded to himself her negroes also.

In the woods on the plantation of Joseph Travis, upon the Sunday just named, six slaves met at noon for what is called in the Northern States a picnic and in the Southern a barbecue.  The bill of fare was to be simple:  one brought a pig, and another some brandy, giving to the meeting an aspect so cheaply convivial that no one would have imagined it to be the final consummation of a conspiracy which had been for six months in prepartion.  In this plot four of the men had been already initiated—Henry, Hark or Hercules, Nelson, and Sam.  Two others were novices—Will and Jack by name.  The party had remained together from twelve to three o'clock, when a seventh man joined them, a short, stout, powerfully built person, of dark mulatto complexion and strongly-marked African features, but with a face full of expression and resolution.  This was Nat Turner.

He was at this time nearly thirty-one years old, having been born on the 2d of October, 1800.  He had belonged originally to Benjamin Turner—whence his last name, slaves having usually no patronymic—had then been transferred to Putnam Moore, and then to his present owner.  He had, by his own account, felt himself singled out from childhood for some great work; and he had some peculiar marks on his person, which, joined to this great mental precocity, were enough to occasion, among his youthful companions, a superstitious faith in his gifts and destiny.  He had great mechanical ingenuity also, experimentalized very early in making paper, gunpowder, pottery, and in other arts which in later life he was found thoroughly to understand.  His moral faculties were very strong, so that white witnesses admitted that he had never been known to swear an oath, to drink a drop of spirits, or to commit a theft.  And in general, so marked were his early peculiarities, that people said 'he had too much sense to be raised, and if he was, he would never be of any use as a slave.'  This impression of personal destiny grew with his growth; he fasted, prayed, preached, read the Bible, heard voices when he walked behind his plough, and communicated his revelations to the awestruck slaves.  They told him in return, that, 'if they had his sense, they would not serve any master in the world.'

The biographies of slaves can hardly be individualized; they belong to the class.— We know bare facts; it is only the general experience of human beings in like condition which can clothe them with life.  The outlines are certain, the details are inferential.— Thus, for instance, we know that Nat Turner's young wife was a slave; we know that she belonged to a different master from himself; we know little more than this, but this is much.  For this is equivalent to saying that by day or by night that husband had no more power to protect her than the man who lies bound upon a plundered vessel's deck has power to protect his wife on board the pirate schooner disappearing in the horizon; she may be reverenced, she may be outraged; it is in the powerlessness that the agony lies.— There is, indeed, one thing more which we do know of this young woman:  the Virginia newspapers state that she was tortured under the lash, after her husband's execution, to make her produce his papers:  this is all.

What his private experiences and special privileges or wrongs may have been, it is therefore now impossible to say.  Travis was declared to be 'more humane and fatherly to his slaves than any man in the county;' but it is astonishing how often this phenomenon occurs in the contemporary annals of slave insurrections.  The chairman of the county court also stated, in pronouncing sentence, that Nat Turner had spoken of his master as 'only too indulgent;' but this, for some reason, does not appear in his printed Confession, which only says, 'He was a kind master, and placed the greatest confidence in me.'  It is very possible that it may have been so, but the printed accounts of Nat Turner's person look suspicious:  he is described in Governor Floyd's proclamation as having a scar on one of his temples, also one on the back of his neck and a large knot on one of the bones of his right arm, produced by a blow; and although these were explained away in Virginia newspapers as being produced by fights with his companions, yet such affrays are entirely foreign to the admitted habits of the man.— It must, therefore, remain an open question, whether the scars and the knot wee produced by black hands or by white.

Whatever Nat Turner's experiences of slavery might have been, it is certain that his plans were not suddenly adopted, but that he had brooded over them for years.  To this day there are traditions among the Virginia slaves of the keen devices of 'Prophet Nat.'  If he was caught with lime and lamp-black in hand, conning over a half-finished country-map on the barn-door, he was always 'planning what to do, if he were blind,' or 'studying how to get to Mr. Francis's house.'  When he had called a meeting of slaves, and some poor whites came eavesdropping, the poor whites at once became the subjects for discussion; he incidentally mentioned that the masters had been heard threatening to drive them away; one slave had been ordered to shoot Mr. Jones's pigs, another to tear down Mr. Johnson's fences.  The poor whites, Johnson and Jones, ran home to see to their homesteads, and were better friends than ever to Prophet Nat.

He never was a Baptist preacher, though such vocation has often been attributed to him.  The impression arose from his having immersed himself, during one of his periods of special enthusiasm, together with a poor white man named Brantley.  'About this time,' he says in his Confession, 'I told these things to a white man, on whom it had a wonderful effect, and he ceased from his wickedness, and was attacked immediately with a cutaneous eruption, and the blood oozed from the pores of his skin, and after praying and fasting nine days he was healed.  And the Spirit appeared to me again, and said, as the Savior had been baptized, so should we be also; and when the white people would not let us be baptized by the Church, we went down into the water together, in the sight of many who reviled us, and were baptized by the Spirit.— After this I rejoiced greatly and gave thanks to God.'

The religious hallucinations narrated in his Confession seem to have been as genuine as the average of such things, and are very well expressed.  It reads quite like Jacob Behmen.  He saw white spirits and black spirits contending in the skies, the sun was darkened, the thunder rolled.  'And the Holy Ghost was with me, and said, "Behold me as I stand in the heavens!"  And I looked and saw the forms of men in different attitudes.  And there were lights in the sky, to which the children of darkness gave other names than what they really were; for they were the lights of the Savior's hands, stretched forth from east to west, even as they were extended on the cross on Calvary, for the redemption of sinners.'  He saw drops of blood on the corn:  this was Christ's blood, shed for man.  He saw on the leaves in the woods letters and numbers and figures of men—the same symbols which he had seen in the skies.  On May 12, 1828, the Holy Spirit appeared to him and proclaimed that the yoke of Jesus must fall on him, and he must fight against the Serpent when the sign appeared.  Then came an eclipse of the sun in February, 1831:  this was the sign; then he must arise and prepare himself, and slay his enemies with their own weapons; then also the seal was removed from his lips, and then he confided his plans to four associates.

When he came, therefore, to the barbecue on the appointed Sunday, and found, not these four only, but two others, his first question to the intruders was, How they came thither.  To this, Will answered manfully, that his life was worth no more than the others, and 'his liberty was as dear to him.'— This admitted him to confidence, and as Jack was known to be entirely under Hark's influence, the strangers were no bar to their discussion.  Eleven hours they remained there, in anxious consultation:  one can imagine those terrible dusky faces, beneath the funereal woods, and amid the flickering of pine-knot torches, preparing that stern revenge whose shuddering echoes should ring through the land so long.  Two things were at last decided:  to begin their work that night, and to begin it with a massacre so swift and irresistible as to create in a few days more terror than many battles, and so spare the need of future bloodshed.  'It was agreed that we should commence at home on that night, and, until we had armed and equipped ourselves and gained sufficient force, neither age nor sex was to be spared:  which was invariably adhered to.'

John Brown invaded Virginia with nineteen men, and with the avowed resolution to take no life but in self-defence.  Nat Turner attacked Virginia from within, with six men, and with the determination to spare no life until his power was established.  John Brown intended to pass rapidly through Virginia, and then retreat to the mountains.  Nat Turner intended to 'conquer Southampton County as the white men did in the Revolution, and then retreat, if necessary, to the Dismal

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Reviewed - removed unnecessary descriptions of format - see Instructions... & fixed a couple of typos (x2)