Nat Turner's Rebellion: The Uprising That Closed Virginia's Last Door

Nat Turner was literate, which was itself a crime. He was enslaved on a farm in Southampton County, Virginia, a tobacco-growing county near the North Carolina border, where he worked as a preacher to the enslaved community. He had been planning what he called his mission for years, waiting for a sign from God. He believed a solar eclipse in February of eighteen thirty-one was that sign.

On August twenty-second, eighteen thirty-one, Turner and a small group of men began their campaign at the farm where he was enslaved. Over the next seventy-two hours the group grew to somewhere between forty and seventy men. They moved from farm to farm through the county, killing the white people they encountered. By the time the Virginia militia mobilized and pursued them, about fifty five white people had been killed, the deadliest slave revolt in American history.

The official response was catastrophic in scale. Virginia militia and white vigilante groups killed at least one hundred and twenty Black people in the days that followed, with many historians considering that figure an undercount, the overwhelming majority of them uninvolved in Turner's rebellion. Turner himself evaded capture for about ten weeks, hiding in a cave near the farm where the revolt had begun. He was captured in late October, tried, and hanged on November eleventh, eighteen thirty-one.

What followed in the Virginia legislature is less remembered than the rebellion itself. In the winter of eighteen thirty-one and eighteen thirty-two, Virginia's General Assembly held the last serious legislative debate in any Southern state about whether to end slavery before the Civil War. Delegates from the western counties, who had fewer enslaved people than the Tidewater planters, argued for gradual emancipation. The Tidewater delegates argued that their entire economic system would collapse. The Tidewater position prevailed.

Virginia tightened its slave codes instead. Enslaved people were barred from learning to read or write. Free Black people were prohibited from assembling without white supervision. Local militias were given expanded authority to suppress any sign of organized resistance. The door that Nat Turner's rebellion had briefly cracked open was closed and locked from the outside, and it did not open again before the war.