In The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion, Stephen Oates gives an account of the brief but deadly slave revolt in and around Southampton, Virginia, in 1831. His controlling theme is that of religion and the profound influence that it had on the development of Nat Turner's charismatic persona and his rationale for engaging in a project of deliberate murder of people who had--at least in the context of slavery as a given of Turner's experience--treated him quite decently. Oates develops a portrait of the revolt's moral climate around the fateful and powerful encounter between religious feeling, limited education, and a profound, real, and unlimited capacity to identify injustice as the fundamental condition of slave experience. That encounter accounts for the "fierce" character of Turner's behavior. Equally, however, given the religious/moral justifications that the American antebellum slaveholding society had constructed for slavery as an institution, the reaction of authorities and society more generally to the rebel slaves after they were apprehended vividly demonstrates the (fierce) extent to which slaveholders were willing to go to protect relatively narrow economic interest and privilege.
What becomes clear very early on in Oates's narrative is that there was a religious context in which the 1830s discourse and social relationships regarding American slavery was being played out. Religion played a role in the lives of both slaves and their white masters, with white churches well established and anchored in slaveholding communities more or less providing moral cover and sanction for slavery and the more or less informally configured slave churches, "now a forest clearing, now a tumbledown shack" (Oates 25), articulating Christianity in a way that created a longing for freedom among the slaves themselves. The result of this dual track of religiosity, which was aggravated by occasional incursions of antislavery preachi...