This dilemma is a problem of Quarles’ scholarship, however, rather than Turner himself. Yet such historical methods muddy the water and our view of Turner’s life. Turner, however, was in search for that which was real in the oppression that was American slavery. Quarles historical approach suppressed that which existed in the Christian slave consciousness: the prophetic voice.

Clearly, however much Prosser and Vesey were men of reason and found acceptable, the fact remains they never got off a rebellious shot. In contrast, God-directed, Turner could not be silenced nor his efforts thwarted. At their trials and at the gallows, Prosser and Vesey were both impressive martyrs. In their results, they, though courageous and well-meaning, were more men of words than of deeds. They never made an assault on the property of slaveholders nor dipped their hands in the enemy’s blood, an horrific mess for intellectuals who prefer the pristine cleanliness of abstractions. The two martyrs were hanged, 1800 and 1822, respectively, for what they planned to do. 

Turner, however, slaughtered men, women, and children in the name of Christ. Blood on his hands and ready to atone for his deeds, Turner was hanged and has denigrated for what he accomplished. In essence, commentators on Nat Turner, his visions, and his religious work have not considered him in his full integrity in his words nor his deeds.

Even when some black religionists consider Turner’s words, they surprisingly do not know what to make of them—his life, his Christianity. They seem too ready to believe that Nat Turner was not true to himself in all his words and actions. These religious critics seem unable to get beyond the surface meaning of Turner’s words. The general critical view tends to set Nat Turner’s religion outside of orthodox Christianity. For these critics, Turner’s Christianity is cultic, "mysteriously black," "black religious nationalism" (Ogbonna, p. 51). According to Dwight Hopkins, "Turner brought together a radical biblical understanding from the perspective of the bottom of society" (Down, Up, and Over, p. 135). 

The term "bottom of society" suggests that Turner had on his feet the mud of "enthusiasm," a code word used by more rationalist theologians when they want to disparage those who opt to work against the status quo. Hopkins, however, has never explored Turner’s interpretation of the gospels, or even the Old Testament, to discover his radicalism or lack thereof. Surely, Turner’s deeds were radical. But one did not have to be that radical to possess enmity toward the religion of slaveholders in Cross Keys.

Despite what some may believe, there is no unfathomable mystery in Turner. He talked about that which is at the center of Christianity, namely, God and man’s relationship with the divine and his neighbor. Turner at the "bottom of society" was not the causal factor in his exegetical interpretations of scripture. His view did not differed from his era. Turner said clearly he operated under a divine impulse. Faith was at the center of his religion. Whatever materialist factors Hopkins imagines produced Turner’s theology, Turner claimed he was taught by the Holy Spirit and Jesus of Nazareth, the prophet who was born in a stable. 

We may ask, in passing, Was Jesus’ position in Roman imperial society really that different structurally from that of Turner and other Christian slaves in America? Might not even an illiterate Christian slave see the similarity. As Hopkins’ said of Turner, the Pharisees and clerics believed that Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount "brought together a radical biblical understanding from the perspective of the bottom of society."

Nat Turner is too indecorous for Hopkins’ religious comfort and sophistication. Turner’s suspected mysticism is in a world beyond his understanding, beyond his intellectual and theological accessibility. According to Hopkins, Turner’s "religious language" is "steeped in symbolic and metaphorical discourse with encoded significance only Rev. Turner could decipher" (Down, Up, and Over, p. 135). Reading Hopkins’ comments, for a moment, one is led almost to believe Turner used language other than English and symbols other than Christian ones. 

Certainly, that was not the case. Yet Hopkins, a leading African-American Christian theologian, drew an exegetical blank in his reading of the "Confessions." Throwing up his hands in spiritual helplessness, Hopkins insinuates that Turner’s religion has some other source than the Christian Bible. Lacking expertise in Turner’s mysterious sources, Hopkins excuses himself of further commentary.

Clearly, Hopkins’ difficulties exist on two levels: 1) He does not believe that a man such as Nat Turner, such "an earthen vessel," could have received a call to prophesy from Christ. 2) If such a man as Nat Turner had indeed "communed" with the Holy Spirit, God would not have counseled mass slaughter, a holocaust. Such negations can only be balanced by these affirmations of the divine. None can proscribe God nor God’s relationship to Nat Turner or any other individual. God can not be bottled in a theological formula. 

Yet one understands Hopkins’ shortcomings with respect to these matters, for these objections are the barriers we must surmount to gain a truthful view of Nathaniel Turner’s life and the significance of his "Confessions." Turner asked, however, only for a momentary suspension of disbelief. It is a feat not too cumbersome, for in the world of literary and visual arts we do it all the time. In his religious skepticism, Dwight Hopkins, nevertheless, is not alone. His view is only the traditional one in contemporary dress.

Hopkins, like others, can not, refuses to believe that Turner, like Paul on the road to Damascus, "communed" directly with the divine. His "enlightened Christianity" can not countenance the thought. Such encounters, however, can be found in Turner’s "Confessions." In matters of scriptures, one has a choice to believe Paul’s call; one also has a choice to believe Nat Turner’s call. One is justified by one’s faith, except, probably, in matters of scholarship. Hopkins accepts Paul’s account of the divine and rejects Turner’s. In neither case can such phenomena be empirically verified. In his reservations, Hopkins’ theology differs very little from that of Turner’s oppressors.

Like others, Hopkins seems to believe only a "false Christ" could have commanded such violence. Turner suffered from hallucinations. That is, Turner was mad. It was too fantastic an act to be associated with Jesus of Nazareth, the man without blemish, without sin. Sins, however, disqualify none from the status of prophethood. Like Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David, Turner sinned and asked God forgiveness. The leading commentators on Turner have not, however, forgiven him. This mode of theological response to Turner’s religiosity has a history which extends back to the nineteenth century, to the writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson and William Wells Brown.

Higginson was a New England abolitionist and an aide to John Brown and commander of a black regiment during the Civil War. Higginson believed unquestioningly that Nat Turner was an "extraordinary man." His reactions to Turner’s "Confessions" are, however, mixed. Eight years old at Turner’s death, Higginson doubted the depths and heights of Turner’s Christianity. He concluded that Nat Turner was a "self-appointed prophet." For him, Turner was not a searcher after truth and justice. Higginson felt that slavery had caused Turner and his men to return to a state of savagery. 

Thomas R. Gray said as much in his appended comments to the "Confessions." Higginson believed the "insurgents" were possessed by some totem spirit still operative in their blood. But such ethnic condescension was not restricted to Higginson. It was typical of the age. For over a millennium, other prophets, such as Mohammed and Paul, received such opprobrium.

In his Atlantic Monthly article (August 1861), thirty years after the Southampton Rebellion, Higginson pointed out that Turner still horrified America’s memory and that he still evoked images of "wild retribution" (Foner, p. 135). The "wild" here is in the context of what is "civilized," of what is "primitive" and what is "modern." During this era of American life, any initiative by nonwhites in their own defense was portrayed adversely by the American press. Christian slaves usually found themselves described by American whites, in the vocabulary of the times, as a people in need of the civilizing influences of Anglo-Saxon culture. 

Higginson’s imaginative re-creation of Turner and his men tells us more about the writer than his subject: "Swift and stealthily as Indians, the black men passed from house to house,—not passing, not hesitating . . . nothing that had a white skin was spared" (Foner, p. 133). Much evidence exists, however, that Turner did not possess the indiscriminate hatred for whites Higginson imagined in his melodramatic re-creation.

Considered the first Negro novelist and historian, abolitionist William Wells Brown initially wrote in 1861 that Nat Turner was a "martyr to the freedom of his race, and a victim to his own fanaticism." Twenty years later in his My Southern Home (1880) Brown was unhappy with his religious/political explanation of Turner’s motives. 

Following Higginson’s lead, Brown refined his environmentalist interpretation of Turner and his deeds In this new work, he introduced anthropological, psychological, and sociological elements to explain Turner’s radical departure from what Brown viewed as enlightened Christianity. For Brown, to utter the names Turner and Christ in the same breath bordered on blasphemy. "Nat Turner’s strike for liberty," according to Brown, "was the outburst of an insane man—made so by slavery."

Clearly, Brown believed that the Prophet of Cross Keys was an impostor, a hoax—the fodder for minstrelsy. Brown pleaded with Negroes to put aside their past, presumably their savage Africa past, and advised them to "imitate the best examples set us by the cultivated whites, and by so doing we will teach them they can claim no superiority on account of race." 

Denmark Vesey was "noble," according to Brown, elevating Vesey above Turner (Foner, p. 145), even though Vesey, by some accounts, also planned to kill men, women, and children in his revolt (Wilmore, p. 61). For William Wells Brown, Turner was not only psychotic, but also immoral. Worst, he was not fully "cultivated." As with Higginson, Brown concerned himself more with his place, character, and temperament within Anglo-American culture than with Nat Turner’s life and religion.

On the 100^th anniversary of Turner’s Rebellion, in an Opportunity article (November 1931), entitled "Nat Turner: Fiend or Martyr?" Rayford W. Logan posed the recurring question concerning Turner’s character. Turner, according to Logan, had been made out by some to be a "bloodthirsty beast" (Foner, pp. 161-166). This view was implied in Higginson’ account and in Gray’s appended comments. This tradition of false characterizations began in the Virginia newspapers. Letter writers to the papers described Turner most frequently with the religious term—"fiend," one of Satan’s beastly minions seeking petty revenge (Tragle, pp. 35-156). 

In his appended remarks, Gray also reiterated the term "fiend" several times in his description of Turner. Emphasizing his less than human status, the "more responsible and reasonable" whites of Southampton believed Nat Turner became "wretched" because he lacked the mental capacity to manage religious concepts beyond his intellectual and moral reach. Gray believed that Turner’s early religious impressions from his parents warped his mind.

These attacks on Nat Turner’s life and its meaning resurfaced during the turbulent challenges to American democracy in the 1960s and 1970s. In their Atlantic Quarterly article (October 1971) on the mythic aspects of Turner’s life, Seymour Gross and Eileen Bender made their position blatantly clear with respect to the Nat Turner controversy then still brewing. They mounted a fundamental defense of William Styron and his Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), a work which many felt desecrated the memory of Nat Turner. Discounting the critical reactions of black intellectuals, Gross and Bender, two university professors, accepted unthinkingly pro-slavery characterizations of Turner.

With high-minded indignation, however, they defended Styron, a white Southern writer raised in Tidewater Virginia. Their defense was an offensive attack against the race-based arguments made by the "ten black writers" of William Styron’s Nat Turner (1968), edited by John Henrik Clarke. As self-appointed arbiters of the controversy, Gross and Bender concluded that there was no "right view" the "ten black writers" could sustain. On that point, their critique had bite in that the "ten black writers" did not consistently make discerning distinctions between fact and folklore, which in itself needs interpretation. Overall, Gross and Bender’s critique was a negative one. Their attempt to constrict Turner’s character to a singular view seems too abrupt, immodest, and wrongheaded.

Early in their essay, Gross and Bender made a forthright statement of their assessment of Turner and his career in Southampton. Turner, they concluded, was "a grandly mad or a madly grand slave." Neither Gross nor Bender, I suspect, were experts in neither religion nor psychology. Nevertheless, according to these two university scholars, Turner "rendered himself unavailable to normal human feelings." Like many Turner detractors, Gross and Bender believed that Turner, as a slave with a "kind master," had no cause for his "orgy of butchery," that his "motiveless malevolence" made him unmistakably a "bloody fiend" ("The Myth of Nat Turner," pp. 496-499). 

From their literary view, Turner was a monster, a Grendel, whose only hope was Hell. In fairness to William Styron the novelist, it must be said, his Freudian/existential approach, however, does not sustain the medieval view ascribed to Turner by Gross and Bender.

Because Turner is a "mythic figure," Gross and Bender believed that Turner’s life is thereby free game to any writer. They supported this position by summarily pointing out conflicting "facts" in a number of literary accounts, which were used for ideological ends. In that no one has gotten, heretofore, Turner’s story right, they reasoned such an endeavor was a lost cause. For, according to Gross and Bender, it is "perhaps impossible by now to unscramble all but the most salient facts of the Turner insurrection from the legendizing matter which has been spun around it" ("The Myth of Nat Turner," p. 499). To their satisfaction, sufficient historical facts can not be established.

Moreover, that others have made use of Turner as they please, Gross and Bender believed, it was perfectly legitimate for Styron, despite his historical errors, to do his "meditation on history," that is, aesthetically manipulate and color Turner’s life as his imagination guided him. In their view, the mythic and monstrous Nat Turner had no integrity that could be established; at least, none they would deign to grant. Such a wild argument in service of literary freedom, however, can not stand as scholarship. Slavery, race, sex, and religion and how these phenomena coalesce in our personal and national identities are exceedingly relevant matters in American culture, yesterday and today. Getting the factual details right trumps both myth and fantasy.

Gross and Bender rushed to judgment on Turner and the Southampton Rebellion. Like others before them, they were too cavalier in their disposal of Turner’s life and the memory of his life. Unaware to them at the time, their type of wild reasoning about the facts of Turner’s life in Southampton troubled more than just black intellectuals. Historian Henry Irving Tragle, thereafter, published his documentary history of the Southampton Revolt (1971), and folk historian Gilbert Francis of Southampton produced his video narrative of the Turner Rebellion. Styron’s novelized account cast aspersions and untruths not only upon Turner but also upon white families of Southampton.

Certainly, the project of reconstructing or "restructuring the real Turner" and the events of August 1831, is indeed a worthwhile endeavor, if truth is our object. In such a search, we can not begin with the standard view, the slaveholder or "white" view, that is, that Turner was "mad," a "fiend," a "beast." Such ribald attacks on Turner’s character do not bring us closer to the actuality of the events of Cross Keys. What is most regrettable in these recent writers on Turner is that they have no willingness to extend any respect or consideration to Turner as a Christian slave or any sympathy for his holy war on Cross Keys slaveholders. Gross and Bender, from a literary point of view, stood hardly in awe that Turner raised himself up from the pits of hell that was slavery against great opposition to a pinnacle of renown and a measure of respect for his Christian manhood.

To be just, we must approach Nat Turner conscientiously as a religious person, as a Virginia Methodist, and explore what that meant in the context of his life. Turner was well trained in this denomination’s religious views and sought continually to become a member of the local Cross Keys church. Wesleyan Methodism stood against slavery and slave trading, though over time these positions were modified in Southern practice. 

Virginia Methodism, at its best, in practice, had a Pauline view of slavery, which counseled a recognition of the slave’s humanity and encouraged Christian slaveowners to treat Christian slaves as their brothers in Christ. From 1780 to 1810, this Methodist position on slavery was a moderate one. They staked out a moral view between the radical Protestants, such as the Quakers and Unitarians, and those churches of the South that became "Slave-holding Churches," such as the "Old School Presbyterian, the Protestant Episcopal, the Roman Catholic and the Methodist Episcopal Church" (Hall, p. 287).

Though aligned with Methodists, Turner had views, of course, that varied with those of some Methodist slaveowners, who began more and more to emphasize race in their Christian perception of the world. Turner would have found William Ellery Channing (1780-1842), the Unitarian pastor of Federal Street Church in Boston, more acceptable in his racial views than those of many whites in his own community of Cross Keys. Channing preached often about Christian responsibility to one’s fellow man and "the moral importance of the question of slavery." 

In Chapter Five of Slavery (1835), Channing wrote: "According to our decision of it, we determine our comprehension of the Christian law. He who cannot see a brother, a child of God, a man possessing all the rights of humanity, under a skin darker than his own, wants the vision of a Christian. He worships the outward. The spirit is not yet revealed to him" (Gaustad, p. 160). 

The appropriate connection of slavery and Christianity was, for Turner, central to all his religious concerns. Race, however, seemed to have been a tertiary issue with respect to questions of spirituality and openness to salvation. As he became a man, Turner eventually concluded that the Methodists of Cross Keys lacked "the vision of a Christian."

What then was the character of Nat Turner? Was he insurrectionist, revolutionary, fiend, or holy man? To respond adequately to this question, we must follow his development in its religious context. Turner’s life conforms to four time divisions: 1800-1810; 1810-1823; 1823-1828; and 1828-1831. If one wants to "understand the cause of the insurrection," according to Gilbert Francis, a researcher and a descendent of Southampton slaveholders, one must "fully understand the four segments" of Turner’s life (Nat Turner Insurrection—1831, tape 1). These "segments" or phases correspond to Turner’s ownership by four different masters: Benjamin Turner; Samuel Turner, son of Benjamin; Thomas Moore; and Putnam Moore, son of Thomas.

Though rationalized, especially economically, Turner’s agrarian world was one in which revealed religion still had efficacy. To experience Turner’s religious world as a Christian slave of four masters, we need a deeper understanding of the religious environment in which Turner developed his religious consciousness. To provide a fair assessment of a sacred text, to use the words of Sandra M. Schneiders, we need to look at the "world behind the text." The "Confessions" is a text that is at once "literary-historical in form and historical-theological in content" (The Revelatory Text, p. 127). 

That is, there is a need for a greater understanding of the religious world behind the "Confessions." That world included the notion of dying for God. Instead of looking at Turner’s life as a model of martyrdom, the traditional historical effort has modeled Turner’s life as that of the trickster. For these detractors, the basic mode of Turner’s life is one of deception. The "Confessions," nevertheless, should be read as a Christian martyr text (Boyarin, p. 121).

Though he and his fellow religionists possessed a theology of biblical authority, Turner’s religious spirit went beyond biblical fundamentalism. Turner "communed" with the Holy Spirit in the manner of the first century Christian apostles. Turner reported numerous miracles, both natural and healing miracles, that need appraisal and the role they played in his spiritual development. Turner died confident of the truth of his mission and trusted in the mercy of God and his salvation. To take Turner at his word, this discussion will reconstruct Turner’s life by a full and sustained recognition of his religious integrity and truth, which hinges on his identity as a Christian prophet. The overriding intent of this work is to establish the credibility of Turner, in the words of Luther, as one of the "masks of God," wherein God worked out his purpose with regard to black slavery in America.

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update 28 June 2008