Turner later described his own master as trusting and kind, but the “work of death” - as he called it - required that every slave owner and his family be fatally punished. Still, the brutality had little to do with how the slaves had been treated. “This was all about hatred - all about vengeance - all about what people will do after years of bondage.” His wife was virtually decapitated,” says Quarstein, who began working with the Southampton historical group a decade ago. Whitehead - who had allowed Turner to preach in his churchyard - pleaded to know why, only to be answered by cries of “Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!” So startled and confounded were the farms they attacked that dozens perished with no chance of escape or resistance.Ĭornered in a cotton patch, the Rev. With Turner and others mounted on horses, the band set out into the darkness, grimly determined “to carry terror and devastation wherever we went.” “They wanted to be recognized as worthy of being humans.” “One of the first things they did was to remove their old slave clothes and the cloak of invisibility and anonymity that had diminished them all their lives,” says Norfolk State University historian Cassandra Newby-Alexander, author of “An African American History of the Civil War in Hampton Roads.” They shed their ragged clothing for their owners’ attire, too, intent on declaring that their lives as slaves were over. “The murder of this family, five in number, was the work of a moment, not one of them awoke.”Īrmed with the Travis family’s guns, the slaves began to remake themselves, with Turner leading them in military drills. Travis shared the same fate, as she lay in bed,” Turner recounted. “Armed with a hatchet, and accompanied by Will, I entered my master’s chamber, it being dark, I could not give a death blow, the hatchet glanced off his head, he sprang from his bed and called his wife, it was his last word, Will laid him dead, with a blow of his ax, and Mrs. “They all wore something red,” says Southampton County Historical Society President Lynda Updike, a church member whose family has farmed here for generations.Ī week later, Turner met six lieutenants at swampy Cabin Pond, where they feasted on roast pork before agreeing to “commence their work” at the home of Turner’s master. Richard Whitehead and his white congregation failed to recognize the danger. That’s when Turner preached to the slaves gathered under a grape arbor at Barnes Methodist Church, where the Rev. 14 did his path to insurrection become apparent. 12, 1831, that “I should arise and prepare myself, and slay my enemies with their own weapons.” He also saw “drops of blood on the corn” as he labored, followed by increasing belief after the eclipse of Feb. Gray before his trial as “white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle.” When he reached manhood, Turner began experiencing visions as he worked and prayed in the fields, beginning with the notion that he had been selected for a mission, then darkening over time into what he described to Southampton attorney Thomas R. He could read and write at a time when illiteracy was widespread even among whites, and his eloquence as a preacher was so pronounced that some whites and many blacks believed he was divinely inspired. “This was the horrible slaughter everybody had feared for years - and it was almost unbelievable.”īorn in 1800, Turner was touched early on by what he described in a jail cell confession as “uncommon intelligence” and “the impression that I was ordained for some great purpose in the hands of the Almighty.” “There had been slave uprisings before but nothing as large, as well organized and as bloody as this, both in terms of the killings and the reprisals,” historian John V. Had they reached nearby Jerusalem, now Courtland, they might have added to the 57 lives they ended.īut even after the militia arrived to blunt and disperse them, the blood still flowed, with more than 200 blacks savagely killed - and some beheaded - in a merciless riot of retribution. Dipping cloth in their victims’ blood, the horde of nearly 60 slaves fashioned grisly sashes, too, marking themselves as an army of vengeance and liberation.
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