NAT TURNER, BLACK PROPHET

The story of an infamous slave rebellion and its enigmatic leader.

In this remarkable book, historians Kaye and Downs explore the 1831 rebellion led by Nat Turner, a brilliant and charismatic enslaved man who, as an evangelical Methodist, claimed visionary powers. The authors focus on how Turner came to understand himself as carrying out a divine plan, involving mass violence in the name of a people’s liberation, foretold in the Hebrew Bible. Paying close attention to their subject’s religious claims, they place his actions within the context of 19th-century evangelicalism and its expectations about how God might speak directly to individuals. In the authors’ interpretation, Turner becomes a prophet-general carrying out what he took to be not merely a revolt against enslavement, but a holy war. The authors provide exceptionally informed and persuasive commentary on the religious milieu in which Turner took on his prophetic role, the psychology of his recruitment of other enslaved men, and the dynamics of slaveowners’ brutal responses to the attack launched against them. Kaye and Downs unflinchingly portray the grotesque violence unleashed by the rebellion, and they incisively analyze its origins in specific religious and racial ideas. Especially illuminating are the author’ speculations—sometimes adventurous but always backed by a careful weighing of available evidence—about how particular signs of divine intent would likely have been interpreted by Turner as well as by those around him. Though rigorously detailed and thorough in its explication of social and religious history, the narrative grippingly leads us through Turner’s spiritual evolution and the chaotic results of his rebellion. Ultimately, we receive a startlingly vivid and revealing picture of “the reasons he urged his company to kill, and the new world he hoped to bring into being.”

A profoundly insightful analysis of a controversial figure and the rebellion he led.