Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory by

Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2003-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

NINE

Nat Turner and Sectional Crisis

LOUIS P. MASUR

The heavens darkened and Nat Turner prepared to strike. “And on the appearance of the sign, (the eclipse of the sun last February) I should arise and prepare myself, and slay my enemies with their own weapons,” he proclaimed. The sign that signaled the beginning of the rebellion was no figment of his imagination. “THE GREAT ECLIPSE OF 1831,” alerted Ash’s Pocket Almanac, “will be one of the most remarkable that will again be witnessed in the United States for a long course of years.”1

On that day, 12 February 1831, Americans from New England through the South looked to the heavens. One diarist saw “men, women and children…in all directions, with a piece of smoked glass, and eyes turn’d upward.” The Boston Evening Gazette reported that “this part of the world has been all anxiety…to witness the solar eclipse.… Business was suspended and thousands of persons were looking at the phenomena with intense curiosity.” The Richmond Enquirer noted, “Every person in the city was star gazing, from bleary-eyed old age to the most bright-eyed infancy.”2

In his Confessions, Turner explained that, following the eclipse, he initiated plans to strike on 4 July, but he fell ill and postponed the revolt until, in August, “the sign appeared again, which determined me not to wait longer.” That reappearing sign was every bit as real as the first one. Down the east coast, noted an observer in Philadelphia, the “western heavens seemed as one vast sea of crimson flame, lit up by some invisible agent. Thousands of our citizens gazed at the spectacle—some with wonder, others with admiration, and others fearful that it was a sad augury of coming evil.”3

Turner’s insurrection marked a seismic shift in sectional tensions between South and North. The work of liberation and retribution begun by Turner in Virginia opened a national debate that fueled regional rivalries and triggered a wide-ranging discussion over what to do about slavery in Virginia. In assessing the multiple causes of the rebellion, southern writers placed northern interference high on their list. Even in praising Northerners for their sympathy, southern editors displayed acute sensitivity to sectional tensions. One writer expressed relief that, in most northern newspapers, “we have seen no taunts, no cant, no complacent dwelling upon the superior advantages of the non-slave holding states.…We have no doubt, that should it ever be necessary, the citizens of the Northern states would promptly fly to the assistance of their Southern brethren.” The Alexandria Gazette quoted New York papers that expressed support and offered “arms, money, men…for the defense of our Southern brethren.” The New York Telegraph opined, “The spirit of the times rebukes discord, disorder, and disunion.”4

The problem, thought most Southerners and Northerners, was a small but influential group of reformist demagogues and religious fanatics who nurtured disaffection and fomented servile insurrection. “Ranting cant about equality,” a Southerner argued, heated the imagination of the enslaved and could create the only force that might lead to a general insurrection across the South—“the march of intellect.

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