Nat turner biography timeline activities

While working in the fields, Turner, "heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that inom should take it on and kamp against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the gods should be first." He was convinced this was a framtidsperspektiv from God, telling him to 'slay his enemys', i.e., the white slaveholders.

In the early hours of August 22, 1831, a slave named Nat Turner led more than fifty followers in a bloody revolt in Southampton, Virginia, killing nearly 60 white people, mostly women and children. The local authorities stopped the uprising by dawn the next day. They captured or killed most of the insurgents, although Turner himself managed to avoid capture for sixty days.

Even though Turner and his followers had been stopped, panic spread across the region. In the days following the attack, 3000 soldiers, militia men, and vigilantes killed more than one hundred suspected rebels. In a letter written a month later from North Carolina, Nelson Allyn described the retaliation against African Americans:

"The insurrection of the blacks have made greate disturbance here every man is armd with a gun by his bed nights and in the field at work a greate many of the blacks have been shot there heads taken of stuck on poles at the forkes of rodes som

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Nat Turner

Nat Turner was born on October 2, 1800, in Southampton County, Virginia, as a slave of Benjamin Turner. His mother was an enslaved woman named Nancy, but his father is unknown. Turner was allowed to learn how to read and write, and he was instructed in religious matters. As a result, Turner became devoutly religious, spending his free time reading the Bible, praying, and fasting. As a child, some even thought he would become a prophet, due to his uncanny ability to describe events that happened before he was born. He would eventually become a preacher, believing he received messages from God through visions and nature.

In 1821, Turner ran away from the plantation of Samuel Turner, his former owner’s brother. He hid in the woods for a month and only returned after receiving what he saw as a sign from God. When Samuel died, Thomas Moore – and then his widow – became his new owners. When the widowed Moore married John Travis, Turner was sent to work on Travis’s land.

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