This paper reviews Stephen B. Oates's The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion, a historical account of the only sustained slave revolt in U.S. history. The review examines Nat Turner's background, his deeply held religious convictions, and the events of August 1831, when Turner and a small band of followers killed approximately sixty white Virginians before the rebellion was suppressed. The paper also considers the revolt's far-reaching consequences — including harsher slave codes and the hardening of proslavery sentiment in the South — and reflects on Oates's portrayal of Turner as an enigmatic revolutionary whose actions permanently altered antebellum Southern society.
In Stephen B. Oates's The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion, Nat Turner is presented as the Black American slave who led the only sustained, unrelenting slave rebellion in U.S. history, which took place in August 1831. Spreading terror throughout the white South, his actions set off a new wave of oppressive legislation prohibiting the education, movement, and assembly of slaves, and stiffened proslavery, anti-abolitionist convictions that persisted in that region until the American Civil War.
Turner's mother was an African native who passed on an ardent hatred of slavery to her son. He learned to read from one of his master's sons and enthusiastically absorbed intense religious training. In the early 1820s, he was sold to a neighboring plantation. During the following decade, his religious zeal grew close to fanaticism, and he came to see himself as called upon by God to lead his people out of bondage. He began to exercise a powerful authority over many of the nearby slaves, who called him "the Prophet."
The central ideas surrounding the book and the personality of Nat Turner were the fierce passion and zeal he demonstrated through his religious convictions, and the ever-present, growing hatred that formed the basis of his rebellion. However, it was not fanaticism alone but also his deep conviction and belief in justice that drove him to act.
In 1831, shortly after he had been sold again, a sign in the form of a solar eclipse convinced Turner that the hour to strike was near. He intended to capture the weapon store at the county seat, Jerusalem, and — after assembling many recruits — press on to the Dismal Swamp, thirty miles to the east, where capture would be difficult. On the night of August 21, in concert with seven fellow slaves he trusted, he unleashed a campaign of total destruction. Over two days, approximately sixty white people were killed. Doomed from the start, the rebellion was weakened by chaos among his followers and by the fact that only seventy-five Black men and women ultimately supported his cause.
Although the revolt was doomed from the outset, it had far-reaching consequences. The bravery and courage of Nat Turner was the root cause that made the rebellion possible in the first place — an act that, however ordinary it may seem today, was unimaginable within the slave community of that era.
"Harsher slave laws and end of Southern complacency"
"Oates's portrayal of Turner as enigmatic revolutionary"
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