A Few Words Apropos of the Pamphlet The Confessions of Nat Turner

Nat Turner realized at some point during his nine weeks and four days in hiding that what he might say if taken alive would be interesting to the public. In August of 1831, he had led the bloody uprising by forty identifiable slaves in Southampton County, Virginia, and had become the most sought-after fugitive of his time, a figure of legend. No longer an actor, he was now a narrator. He prepared a confession.

He surrendered at noon on 30 October, and for the next day and a half, in public, he rehearsed. Within two hours he was speaking, under guard, to a crowd of one hundred at a nearby plantation. The next day he held forth for nearly two hours in front of magistrates at the courthouse in Jerusalem. He made further remarks to a gathering at the jail. Finally, in his cell, during the first three days of November (while awaiting trial and execution), he dictated a finished statement to Thomas R. Gray, a young attorney of the town. (Poor Gray has suffered odium and neglect for his trouble; he was characterized wrongly in the 1967 novel by William Styron and ignored entirely in the 2016 film by Nate Parker, The Birth of a Nation.) Gray’s transcript was published in late November in the famous, aptly titled pamphlet, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831).

The prisoner began, Gray said, “without being questioned at all,” a sign of preparation. Turner recounted memories of childhood and even recalled memories of memories; he told of visions, signs in the heavens, voices he had heard, communications with a Spirit. He named his first six followers (five of them dead, one missing); he described some of the killings (including those of the Travis child and Miss Margaret Whitehead) and the galloping charge at the Waller farm. He told of his plan to spread “terror and devastation.”

Skeptics have doubted the authenticity of the finished confession from the day Gray published it. One reviewer in Richmond thought its style too eloquent and classical to have been spoken by a slave. Others have objected to the circumstances under which Turner spoke (in jail and in manacles) and to the difficulty of corroborating supernatural appearances. Many have noted that young Gray, the sole auditor, clumsily obtruded himself into the narrative, thereby introducing an enigma: whose words were these?

The skeptics may have a point about the language, although no one outside Southampton in 1831 knew how Turner spoke; nor was this the first time he had spoken his piece, as its eloquence might have indicated. Apart from its style, there are proofs elsewhere, in the substance of the narrative. There Turner planted a thorn bristling with details unique to his account, but consistent with evidence outside the text. It stands, a prickly hedge against loose fiction and myth, a guard against the planting of false memory. Skeptics have not breached it. The confession was no fraud. It was and is authentic.

David F. Allmendinger Jr. is professor emeritus of history at the University of Delaware. He is the author of Paupers and Scholars: The Transformation of Student Life in Nineteenth-Century New England and Ruffin: Family and Reform in the Old South. His latest book, Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County, is now available in paperback.