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
Gabriel
Prosser and
Denmark
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 been denigrated
in his time and ours for
what he accomplished. In essence, commentators on Nathaniel Turner,
his visions, and his religious work have not considered him in
his full integrity in his words or 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 Nathaniel 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 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 differ 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."
Nathaniel 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 "1831
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 Nathaniel Turner,
such "an earthen vessel," could have received a call
to prophesy from Christ;
that is, Turner was no true prophet; 2) If such a man as Nathaniel 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 Nathaniel 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 refuses to believe that Turner,
like others, can not believe, 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 Nathaniel 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's
forgiveness. The leading commentators on Turner,
like the descendants of slaveholders in Southampton County,
Virginia, et al., have not,
however, forgiven him, the prophet of Southampton. 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 Nathaniel
Turner was an "extraordinary man." His reactions to
Turner’s "1831
Confessions" are, however, mixed. Eight years old at
Turner’s death, Higginson doubted the depths and heights of
Turner’s Christianity. He concluded that 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 "1831
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 and Gray. 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 Turner 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 once the first Negro novelist,
historian and abolitionist William Wells Brown initially wrote in
1861 that Nathaniel 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 African
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 Nathaniel Turner’s life and
religion.
On the 100th 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
Nathaniel 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 Turner’s life and its
meaning resurfaced during the turbulent challenges to American
democracy in the 1960s and 1970s. In their American 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 Nathaniel 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, Gross
and Bender
defended
William
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 either religion or
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 Nathaniel 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 Nathaniel 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 (possibly
his father); Samuel
Turner, son of Benjamin (and possibly his half brother); 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 "1831
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 "1831
Confessions,"
nevertheless, should be read as a Christian martyr text (Boyarin,
p. 121).
Though he and his fellow religionists
were affected by 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
Martin Luther, as one of the "masks of
God," wherein God worked out his purpose with regard to
black slavery in America.
Sources
Consulted
Bennett, Jr., Lerone.
Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America, 1619-1964.
New York: Pelican, 1968.
Boyarin, Daniel.
Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making
of Christianity and Judaism. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Clarke, John Henrik, ed.
William Styron’s Nat Turner:
Ten Black Writers Respond. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968.
Foner, Eric, ed.
Nat Turner: Great Lives Observed.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,1971.
Francis, Gilbert, and Katherine Futrell. Nat Turner
Insurrection—1831. Southampton County Historical Society Living Library, 4 tapes.
Gaustad, Edwin Scott, ed.
Religious Issues in American
History. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1968.
Gross, Seymour and Eileen Bender.
"History, Politics, and Literature: The Myth of Nat Turner."
American Quarterly, Vol. 23 (October 1971),
pp. 487-518.
Hall, Thomas Cunning.
The Religious Background of American
Culture. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1930.
Hopkins, Dwight.
Down, Up, and Over: Slave Religion and
Black Theology. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000.
Ogbonna, Jeffrey and Green Ogbar. "Prophet Nat and God’s
Children of Darkness: Black Religious Nationalism." Journal of Religious
Thought, 53/54 (1997), pp. 51-72.
Schneiders, Sandra M.
The Revelatory Text: Interpreting the New Testament as Sacred
Scripture. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991.
Teubal, Savina J.
Hagar the Egyptian: The Lost Tradition
of the Matriarchs. San Francisco; HarperCollins Publishers, 1990.
Tragle, Henry Irving.
The Southampton Slave Revolt of
1831: A Compilation of Source Material. Amherst: The University of
Massachusetts Press, 1971.
Wilmore, Gayraud S.
Black Religions and Black Radicalism.
Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1972.
* *
* * *
Nathaniel
Turner:
Christian
Martyrdom in Southampton
A
Theology of Black Liberation
By Rudolph Lewis
Chapter 1: Scholarship, Sacred Documents, &
Folklore / Chapter 3 The
Confessions and Folklore
* *
* * *
 |
The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831
A Compilation of Source Material
By Henry
Irving Tragle
This case book
on the most significant slave revolt in American
history adds an important dimension to the study of
slavery in the United States. Tragle has not only
collected all the extant primary documents (the
trial record, newspaper accounts, letters, diaries
and other contemporary sources, most of which are
published here for the first time), he made several
trips to Southampton County to retrace the steps of
the rebels and to interview the present inhabitants,
both black and white, on the local traditions
surrounding Nat Turner.—University
of Massachusetts Press
The most
important single work ever published on the Turner
rebellion. Tragle's research is an example of
historical detective work at its best.—Eric
Foner, New York Review of Books |
Tragle's
methods are as important as what he has found. So much can be
done, he reminds us, with such non-narrative sources as tax
records and manuscript census returns, or by means of a patient
reworking of familiar soil.—Gerald
W. Mullin, The Journal of American History. 489
pages.* * *
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* * *
* *
|
The Price of Civilization
Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity
By Jeffrey D. Sachs
The Price of Civilization is a book that is essential reading for every American. In a forceful, impassioned, and personal voice, he offers not only a searing and incisive diagnosis of our country’s economic ills but also an urgent call for Americans to restore the virtues of fairness, honesty, and foresight as the foundations of national prosperity. Sachs finds that both political parties—and many leading economists—have missed the big picture, offering shortsighted solutions such as stimulus spending or tax cuts to address complex economic problems that require deeper solutions. Sachs argues that we have profoundly underestimated globalization’s long-term effects on our country, which create deep and largely unmet challenges with regard to jobs, incomes, poverty, and the environment. America’s single biggest economic failure, Sachs argues, is its inability to come to grips with the new global economic realities. Sachs describes a political system that has lost its ethical moorings, in which ever-rising campaign contributions and lobbying outlays overpower the voice of the citizenry. . . . Sachs offers a plan to turn the crisis around. He argues persuasively that the problem is not America’s abiding values, which remain generous and pragmatic, but the ease with which political spin and consumerism run circles around those values. He bids the reader to reclaim the virtues of good citizenship and mindfulness toward the economy and one another. |
 |
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* * *
 |
Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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* * *
update 28 June 2008
