Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County by Allmendinger Jr. David F

Author:Allmendinger, Jr., David F. [Allmendinger, Jr., David F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2014-09-24T21:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

* * *

TELLING EVIDENCE

Can you not think the same ideas, and strange appearances about this time in the heaven’s might prompt others, as well as myself, to this undertaking?

—Nat Turner, The Confessions of Nat Turner

CHAPTER TEN

* * *

The Inquiry

I have examined every source for authentic information.

—Thomas R. Gray, letter, Richmond Constitutional Whig

Gray must have returned from Norfolk on Thursday morning, 25 August, in company with the expedition he had been sent to recruit from Fortress Monroe and the U.S. ships Warren and Natchez. “The weather was oppressively warm,” a member of the expedition wrote after their day-and-a-half trek, “and the men suffered exceedingly.” They found Jerusalem crowded with country people and militia units from surrounding counties; Gen. Eppes, who had established headquarters in town the previous day, directed the Norfolk officers and men to make camp at the racetrack on the northwest side of the town.1 So scarce was space that Eppes’s quartermaster, Francis E. Rives of Prince George County, had to rent an office in Gray’s house, five doors from the courthouse and six from the jail. In keeping with the military atmosphere, the quartermaster’s assistant soon would be referring to the young attorney as “Major Gray.”2

At nine o’clock that morning the Richmond Dragoons, between sixty and seventy cavalrymen under Capt. Randolph Harrison, rode into town, accompanied by Pleasants of the Whig, the only journalist to visit the county after the uprising. Pleasants, too, complained of the heat. For six full days, the Dragoons would make their headquarters at Henry B. Vaughan’s tavern and take some meals there, though they bedded down elsewhere. Pleasants apparently introduced himself at once to the town’s postmaster, Theodore Trezvant, whose store and house stood across Main Street from the tavern, a few steps north of the courthouse and the jail.3 The postmaster, who was privy to details gathered at the courthouse by his older brother James (the magistrate and congressman), already had dispatched to Richmond two early reports, one of which Pleasants had cited in the Whig.4

From Trezvant’s place, the journalist evidently made his way to the jail, where he found thirteen prisoners, “one or more of them severely wounded.” He then must have called on the man who in two months’ time would write down Nat Turner’s confession. That evening, by candlelight, perhaps in Gray’s office, Pleasants drafted the opening section of a dispatch to the Whig. He knew by then that the insurgents had attacked the Travis farm first. He included details he must have obtained from Gray concerning the scene at the Waller farm; and Gray must have given him a fresh, if not yet final, list of white victims, naming twenty-three individuals (with some errors) and putting the number of whites killed at sixty-two. On Saturday, 27 August, Pleasants finished his dispatch and sent it along with the fresh list to Richmond, where both documents appeared on Monday, 29 August, in the Whig.5

That tabulation of victims and attacks was the sixth of fifteen such documents published between August

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