Traces of \"The Classic Ingredients

¶ … traces of "the classic ingredients of revolt" (Reckord, 1968) can be found in the slave rebellion led by the thirty-one-year-old slave Nat Turner, in Southampton County, Virginia. The rebellion that broke out on the 22nd of August 1831 was under the sign of deep religious experiences its leader, Turner had.

According to Makungu Akinyela, the fact that the slaves coming from different ethnic backgrounds were able to find a common denominator in the Christian religion they were encouraged to embrace by the white missionaries was the main reason they regained ethnic identity. As a result, the process of self-determination led to the outbreak of several rebellions throughout the American continent. Akinyela speaks of an "Africanized Christianity [that] forms the basis for the common ethnic identity, with its motivating cultural value (self-determination) and central organizing theme (resistant/resilience) seen in the ethos of Africans in America today"(Akinyela, 2003, pg. 255). There was already a "revolutionary philosophy" (Reckord, 1968) that was circulating in the south regions. The first slave revolt organized on a large scale happened at the beginning of the nineteenth century, under the leadership of Gabriel Prosser. A decade after that, two new rebellions broke out near New Orleans. The movement for repatriating freed slaved back to Africa and the failed rebellion plotted by Denmark Vesey in 1822 were other events that preceded Nat Turner's rebellion and provided examples for those who were living in slavery. (http://www.understandingrace.org/history/society/resisting_slavery.html )

The most relevant document for the motifs of Turner's rebellion is represented by the Confessions written by the attorney Thomas Grey who interviewed Turner in prison and starting gathering information on his long before he got the chance to speak to him in person. Grey confirmed that Turner was a religious fanatic (Greenberg, 2003, pg. 33) who thought of himself as having been chosen by God as a prophet to lead his people toward freedom and glory. He was a very intelligent young man who was not satisfied with his status and who thought of himself as being chosen by divinity to lead his followers to liberation. Although, "contemporary account of the revolt referred to him, generally, as a preacher"(Greenberg, 2003, pg. 47), Turner was preacher only in the sense that he was preaching to his fellows on some days about his God given mission and things to come. The causes and motifs for Turner's rebellion are still debated over. The documents written during the trial and ever since are agreeing on two facts that are certain: the very existence of the rebellion and the fact that it was organized under the leadership of Nat Turner. The facts about what happened during the day of the rebellion indicate that Turner and his acolytes who were approximately seventy people killed in cold blood almost sixty white people, regardless of their age or gender. The rebellion was indeed preceded by events that pointed toward a common cause found through Christianity and offered as a new form of freedom and a new ethnic identity offered by firm beliefs in supernatural and the power of the new faith preached by the Baptist missionaries and adopted to their own beliefs by the black slaves. Turner may have heard about the new liberation movements and the northern abolitionists and therefore he may have chosen his primary goal in starting an insurrection as being that of finding freedom for himself and his community. (Greenberg, 2003, pg. 49)