Here is a link to Patrick Breen's presentation June 2019 during the week-long conference of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?461510-8/nat-turners-rebellion
1. What were the basic characteristics of the American system of slavery in the 19th century and how did these factor into the Nat Turner and John Brown slave insurrections?
2. Why was the Nat Turner rebellion so important?
Nat Turner destroyed the white Southern myth that slaves were actually happy with their lives or too docile to undertake a violent rebellion. His revolt hardened pro-slavery attitudes among Southern whites and led to new oppressive legislation prohibiting the education, movement, and assembly of slaves.
3. Non-slaveowners in the south, politically populists, were often anti-slavery in their immediate area for the same reason people today are anti-landfill. Were they in favor of freeing the slaves?
4. What were some similarities and some differences between the rebellions of Nat Turner and John Brown? (Example: were both violent enough to be classified insurrections?)
5. Why was John Brown (intelligent & hard-working) such a lousy businessman?
6. In what way(s) were the two rebellions complementary?
7. Why were Nat Turner and John Brown portrayed as fanatics?
8. As UA grads know only too well, an example of hegemony is the student government leadership in a school; the machine manipulates the value system and mores student life, so that their view becomes the world view. This is a southern tradition, an earlier example occurred in the aftermath of Nat Turner's revolt. What was it?
The resolution of the Nat Turner insurrection affords us an opportunity to discuss both the Southern class system uniquely detailed by W.J. Cash in his masterpiece "The Mind of the South" and "Oyer and Terminer" (hear and determine) legal system.
Oyer and Terminer was a ancient English institution that stood apart from common-law. It was for the special purpose of trying persons accused of treason or rebellion; it was a relatively private proceeding before judges who were frequently some of the great officers of the State. There was no jury nor was there the need for a grand jury indictment. It basically gave the aristocracy the power to kill or imprison any man that was obnoxious to the government. It was used to execute witches in Salem and in Virginia it evolved into a system that slave owners used to shelter their slaves. It expedited slave trials but it also put criminal prosecutions under the control of those reluctant to convict slaves because the State had to pay the slaveholder for any slave taken out of service or executed.
Ironically, blacks were better protected under slavery than under Jim Crow because of the financial reimbursement required to be paid by the state should a slave be lynched by a mob. A question raised by this is whether the tradition of slaves not being convicted factored into Jim Crow era mob rule.
Sunday October 16, 1859 was a surprisingly successful day. Without firing a shot, Brown had gained control of the arsenal, the armory grounds, and the rifle works. Though his men had mistakenly killed a free black man on the Potomac Bridge, the shooting had not brought armed residents into the streets. Brown had his hostages and eleven of their slaves under his control, and only one of those slaves had refused to carry a weapon when offered one. Three slaves had accepted firearms, a decision that would invite certain retaliation against them if Brown were defeated.
William Styron
Nat Turner controversy
Styron spent years researching and writing his next novel, the fictitious memoirs of the historical Nathaniel "Nat" Turner, a slave who led a slave rebellion in 1831.
James Baldwin read early drafts of Styron's new novel and predicted that Styron's book would face even harsher scrutiny than Another Country. "Bill's going to catch it from both sides," he told an interviewer immediately following the 1967 publication of The Confessions of Nat Turner.
Baldwin's prediction was correct, and despite public defenses of Styron by leading artists of the time, including Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, numerous other black critics reviled Styron's portrayal of Turner as racist stereotyping. The historian and critic John Henrik Clarke edited and contributed to a polemical anthology, William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, published in 1968 by Beacon Press. Particularly controversial was a passage in which Turner fantasizes about raping a white woman. Styron also writes of a situation where Turner and another slave boy have a homosexual encounter while alone in the woods. Several critics pointed to this as a dangerous perpetuation of a traditional Southern justification for lynching. Despite the controversy, the novel was a runaway critical and financial success, and won both the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the William Dean Howells Medal in 1970.
Movie Plot
In 1809, on a farm in Southampton County, Virginia, Nat Turner is a pre-teen slave boy. There is not enough food for all children and Nat's father Isaac notices that Nat is starving, so one night he slips out to steal some food. On the road, Isaac is caught by a posse led by Raymond Cobb. When Cobb tries to execute him, Isaac turns the tables, kills one member of the posse and flees. He then returns home, tells his family what happened and says that he has to leave the family immediately, but not without speaking to Nat once more, insisting that Nat is "a child of God" and has a purpose. When Cobb arrives and questions Isaac's family about his whereabouts, nobody says anything and Benjamin Turner, the owner of the farm, intervenes before Cobb turns violent.
When Elizabeth Turner, Benjamin's wife, notices that Nat has basic reading skills, she starts to teach him reading, hoping that he can be helpful in the household with his knowledge. The lessons center on the Bible. Elizabeth even goes so far as to have Nat read scripture during church gatherings. But shortly before Benjamin dies, presumably of tuberculosis, he decides that Nat will not continue his education but will instead work as a farmhand.
Now an adult, Nat is still picking cotton, but he also preaches and reads scripture for his fellow slaves on the farm. Samuel Turner, Benjamin's son, has become the head of the farm. During a slave auction, Nat is immediately smitten by one of the female slaves for sale, Cherry. He convinces Samuel to buy her as a wedding gift for Catherine Turner, Samuel's sister. Nat and Cherry fall in love, marry, and conceive a daughter.
Since the economic situation in the South is bad, many slaveowners have problems feeding their slaves and fear revolts. Reverend Walthall makes Samuel Turner an offer: several farm owners will pay good money if Samuel will travel to their farms with Nat and have Nat preach to the slaves to pacify them and convince them that the Bible requests them to endure their situations. Samuel, himself in financial trouble, reluctantly agrees. During their visits, Nat and Samuel witness emaciated and desperate slaves and, in some locations, horrifying treatment of the slaves by their owners.
Several additional incidents occur which infuriate Nat and make him more and more desperate:
Cherry is horribly beaten up and presumably raped by a group of white men, again led by Raymond Cobb. When Nat asks her who did it, she does not tell him because she fears his retaliation would lead to him being killed.
One night, Samuel hosts a party for guests whom he hopes could help improve his financial situation. One of the guests requests to rape one of the female slaves and Samuel acquiesces to the request, scarring her and her husband.
One day, when Samuel is not home, a white man who has been barred from all white churches in the county for unspecified crimes asks Nat to baptize him. Even though Nat knows that this act could lead to horrible consequences for him, he feels that it is his duty as a preacher and he performs the baptism, supported by Elizabeth Turner. For his insolence, he is whipped as a punishment.
When his grandmother dies, Nat decides that he will rise up against the slaveholders. He holds a secret night meeting with some trusted fellow slaves, among them one boy from another farm, and prepares them for the uprising. He also talks with Cherry, who still has not recovered from the beating, about the uprising and she gives him her blessing.
During the night, Nat and a fellow slave enter the house of their owners and kill Samuel and the manager. They then ask the other slaves of the farm to follow them, which most of them do. During the night, they take over several other farms and kill the slaveowners. During one of the takeovers, they notice that the boy has disappeared. A short time later, they are attacked by a group of people who had been alerted by the boy, and they have to retreat.
In the morning, they enter the town of Jerusalem to loot it for weapons. They are confronted by a group of white men, again led by Cobb, but they manage to defeat the group, with Nat personally stabbing Cobb to death. But when they enter the arsenal, they notice that it is empty. They are immediately ambushed by soldiers who kill every slave except for Nat, who flees.
When Nat manages to secretly meet Cherry once more, she tells him that innocent slaves have been murdered and more will be as long as Nat is on the run. So Nat turns himself in and is condemned to death. During the hanging, Nat notices the slave boy who betrayed the group in the crowd but Nat does not seem to harbor ill will towards him. The film ends with a fade of the boy's crying face into the face of an adult soldier who presumably is the same boy, grown up and fighting for the Union Army in the American Civil War.