Nat Turner, Black Prophet

Starred review from July 1, 2024
The story of an infamous slave rebellion and its enigmatic leader. In this remarkable book, historians Kaye and Downs explore the 1831 rebellion led by Nat Turner, a brilliant and charismatic enslaved man who, as an evangelical Methodist, claimed visionary powers. The authors focus on how Turner came to understand himself as carrying out a divine plan, involving mass violence in the name of a people's liberation, foretold in the Hebrew Bible. Paying close attention to their subject's religious claims, they place his actions within the context of 19th-century evangelicalism and its expectations about how God might speak directly to individuals. In the authors' interpretation, Turner becomes a prophet-general carrying out what he took to be not merely a revolt against enslavement, but a holy war. The authors provide exceptionally informed and persuasive commentary on the religious milieu in which Turner took on his prophetic role, the psychology of his recruitment of other enslaved men, and the dynamics of slaveowners' brutal responses to the attack launched against them. Kaye and Downs unflinchingly portray the grotesque violence unleashed by the rebellion, and they incisively analyze its origins in specific religious and racial ideas. Especially illuminating are the author' speculations--sometimes adventurous but always backed by a careful weighing of available evidence--about how particular signs of divine intent would likely have been interpreted by Turner as well as by those around him. Though rigorously detailed and thorough in its explication of social and religious history, the narrative grippingly leads us through Turner's spiritual evolution and the chaotic results of his rebellion. Ultimately, we receive a startlingly vivid and revealing picture of "the reasons he urged his company to kill, and the new world he hoped to bring into being." A profoundly insightful analysis of a controversial figure and the rebellion he led.

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August 1, 2024
Nat Turner, born enslaved in Virginia in 1800, was "intensely curious, literate, and faithful" and had a "precocious and peculiar connection to God." Given his "inspirational gifts," his family argued for his freedom, but even though the white Turners welcomed him in church, they would not liberate him. So begins the manyfaceted story of the man whose visions inspired him to declare war on Southampton County's enslavers. Outlined by historian Kaye and completed after his death by historian Downs, this is an eye-opening account of slavery in the region and how the Methodism of the time, "a religion on fire," combined with Turner's intensifying visions and prophecies, induced him to preach, and, ultimately, organize and lead the indelible 1831 uprising. In meticulous detail, the authors chronicle the rebellion, the white "campaign of terror" that extinguished it, how Turner was captured after hiding for ten weeks, how his famous jail Confessions were transcribed and published by a white lawyer, his execution, the long ripple effects of the violence, and why Nat Turner remains "an icon of Black power."

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