Nat Turner's Rebellion, Southampton County, Eighteen Thirty-One

On the night of the twenty-first of August, eighteen thirty-one, in Southampton County in the southeastern corner of Virginia, an enslaved man named Nat Turner led a group of fellow enslaved people out of the farm where he lived and into one of the most significant events in American history. Turner was thirty years old, deeply religious, and had spent years in private meditation on what he described as divine visions calling him to act. What followed over the next forty-eight hours left fifty-five to sixty white Virginians dead and shook the entire slaveholding South to its foundation.

The rebellion was suppressed within two days. Virginia militia and armed white civilians, ultimately numbering in the thousands, swept through Southampton County. In the violence that followed, more than one hundred Black people were killed, the vast majority of whom had no part in the uprising. Turner himself evaded capture for nearly two months, was taken on the thirtieth of October, tried, and hanged on the eleventh of November at Jerusalem, the county seat now called Courtland.

The aftermath reached far beyond Southampton County. The Virginia General Assembly convened a rare open debate on slavery in the winter of eighteen thirty-one to thirty-two, the first and last such debate any Southern legislature would hold before the Civil War. The debate ended with slavery intact and the slave codes dramatically tightened. Teaching enslaved people to read became a crime. Free Black Virginians lost what few legal rights remained to them.

Turner's own account, dictated to his attorney Thomas Gray and published as 'The Confessions of Nat Turner' in November of eighteen thirty-one, remains a primary document in American history, though historians note it was recorded and filtered by a white advocate and should be read with that lens in mind.