Inspired by Nat Turner's Rebellion, John Brown led a raid on the federal armoury at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. Using coded songs to mobilize enslaved people to the woodland, he had gathered around 70 rebels by August. Turner originally planned to strike out on 4 July – the day when, as Frederick Douglass observed, the hypocrisy of the white elite was most stark for the enslaved.īut Turner was ill, so he pushed back the uprising by a month, which gave him more time to organize. Then, on 12 February 1831, he took a solar eclipse as God’s sign to launch his rebellion, and began preparing. Nat Turner was embracing the revolutionary thread in Christian teaching. Turner frequently experienced visions of God, which earned him the title of ‘Prophet’ on the plantations.Īnd in the Spring of 1828, Turner became convinced God was calling on him to overthrow slavery.Īs Jesus preached in the Gospel of Matthew, when the Kingdom of God came about on Earth, ‘the last shall be first and the first last.’ Nat Turner was a deeply spiritual man, but he didn’t just use Christianity to cope with his oppressors – he used it to fight them.Ī contemporary depiction of Nat Turner 'in conference' with other slaves in Virginia. Whilst some African Americans moved north to states where slavery had been abolished, most weren’t so lucky.īut under the violent plantation regime of Virginia, he used the strength of his Christian faith to endure. In his autobiography, Malcolm X praised Nat Turner for putting 'the fear of God into the white slave master.' This was the hell which Nat Turner was born into. Torture, murder and rape were all part of its administrative repertoire, upheld by the law. On this day in 1800, Nat Turner was born into slavery in Southampton County, Virginia.īy this point, the United States had won its ‘liberty’ from Britain, but slavery remained as widespread and brutal as ever – especially in the South.ĭefined as three-fifths of a human being by the Constitution of 1787, the US was an open-air prison for enslaved African Americans. In 1831, Nat Turner led 70 rebels in an insurrection against slavery that cost him his life
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