11/21/2023 0 Comments Voice nat tunerNat Turner understood his rebellion as an act of God. (Of the slaves who were tried or examined in the wake of the insurrection, 17 were discharged or acquitted, and some of those found guilty were “transported”-presumably sold elsewhere-rather than hanged.In August, 1831, Nat Turner led a group of enslaved and free black men in a rebellion that killed over fifty white men, women, and children. His confession made a great impression upon his interrogator, who asked him to say if other insurrections had been planned elsewhere. He was discovered by two black men after hiding in a hole in a field for six weeks, and they apparently alerted a white man, who came upon Turner armed but accepted his peaceful surrender. Turner did not, as the movie shows, surrender himself to stop the reprisal killings of black people, only to be fallen upon by a white mob. The killing of women and children is never shown. The battle allows Parker to give the impression that a large number of the white casualties were armed men killed in a fair fight, and the closing caption states only that “60 family members” were killed by the rebels. ![]() Thus there was no climactic battle in the town square such as the movie depicts. The alarm had been spread throughout the neighborhood by then, and a party of armed white men confronted, attacked and scattered the rebels before they reached the town. Joseph Travis, who was to me a kind master, and placed the greatest confidence in me in fact, I had no cause to complain of his treatment to me.” But a year and half earlier, in 1828, Turner said he had had his greatest visitation from the Holy Spirit, who commanded him to “fight the serpent, for the day was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first.” He interpreted that as a signal to kill white slave owners and their families, and he interpreted a total eclipse of the sun as a final call to action.īy morning there were about 60 of them, and they set off for the town of Jerusalem. His confession not only says nothing about any such incident, but instead states, “Since the commencement of 1830, I had been living with Mr. The film shows Turner driven to rebellion by repeated acts of cruelty, including the gang rape of his wife by white men and a severe beating from his master. In the film, Turner’s sense of his own great destiny is missing. Though Turner ran away from an overseer for some weeks at one time, he returned, much to the surprise of his fellow slaves, to pursue that destiny. He became convinced in early manhood that he was destined to do great things. He was obsessed with religion and the Bible, and as he explained, he heard the voice of the Holy Spirit and had visions more than once. Indeed, as he explained to his interlocutor Thomas Gray, his fellow slaves had deferred to his judgment even in his childhood. Turner, who was born in 1800, had begun to read voraciously at a very early age, and was the wonder of all who knew him, white and black. Turner’s confession reveals him to be an intellectual prodigy, a man of truly aristocratic temperament, and a religious fanatic. To outgrow the worst aspects of our history and to avoid reviving them, we would do well to understand it as it really was. Though the changes may make Turner more sympathetic, they do not, in my opinion, help Parker’s fellow citizens understand this horrifying event from our past. His confession is an extraordinary historical document, but filmmaker Nate Parker chose to disregard a great deal of it making his movie. ![]() That rebellion, the subject of the new movie The Birth of a Nation, killed 60 white men, women and children, most of them families sleeping in their beds, and led to the execution of a roughly equal number of black rebels and the reprisal murders of additional black people.įew famous criminals have left behind a more detailed record of their thoughts than Nat Turner, who was deposed at length by a local lawyer after his capture about six weeks after the rebellion. It inevitably provoked resistance and reaction, of which one striking example was the rebellion led by Nat Turner, an enslaved Virginia preacher, in 1831. Slavery in the United States was a cruel abomination under which millions of people suffered, and its scars linger to this day.
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