Nat Turner
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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, wit
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lave system itself that caused Negro unrest" (9). The basis for opposition to slavery came from certain religious quarters, and it was articulated in religious terms. Meanwhile, in this context, there was the maturing figure of Nat Turner, referred to as the "smart nigger" of Southampton, Virginia. His personality appears to have been distinctive in various ways. As Oates explains, Turner was "generally regarded him with mixture of disdain, curiosity, indulgence, humor, and even a little respect. They let him have a last name" (Oates 52). That is important because slaves either had no last name or were given the surname of their masters.
Unlike many slaves, he was able to read. In his powerless situation and in a society that valorized Christianity and Christian texts in general, his reading preferences tended toward religion. Equally, they tended toward the apocalyptic; that appears to have been a function of the desperation of Turner's situation as a slave. The whole matter was aggravated by two events--one institutional and one natural and local in Southampton. By 1831, public discourse of slavery and antagonistic North-South debate had heightened, with the appearance of Garrison's abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. That fu
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Approximate Word count = 1411
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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