Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion

Thomas Jefferson once said, “I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.” Jefferson’s statement on rebellion is in some ways true, rebellion can be good every now and then because it makes the government reevaluate the way situations and politics are being dealt with. For example in the case of Nat Turner, a slave rebel in 1831, a man who organized a rebellion against white slave owners in Southampton County Virginia. Some people believe that the rebellion caused the Civil War to occur sooner than it should have because the aftermath of the it lead to even tighter restrictions on African Americans

Greenberg would be that the historians involved present him only as a hero and never offer any other perspective or fully address his violent rebellion that killed 60 white slave holders. The only person who offers a different view on him is William Styron. The book is biased because it doesn’t depict him as anything other than a hero. They also disregard and criticize the portrayal of Nat Turner provided by Styron in his novel The Confessions of Nat Turner because they don’t agree with the role he had in the book. This is shown in the interview of Alvin F. Poussaint, M.D., where he argues that the book was full of language that worshiped white people. Through out their articles it is evident that they have an idea and view of who can, and should be able to tell the story of Nat Turner, and what their purpose should be. The setup of the book is not complicated but the flow of the book can be a bit confusing. Another fault in the book is that several of the articles and essays are repetitive and describe situations in the first person as if they were there and include dialogues that haven’t been proven to happen. Some of the bad aspects of the book would be that it was made to accompany a documentary. It also strays off topic by integrating the last portion about Nat Turner in Hollywood. It dedicates the last section to the opinions and answers to questions from the interviews that aren’t as related tot the topic as the other essays and articles within the book. The structure of the book was not complicated but the flow of it was. It wasn’t like most texts that slowly move into the following topic this book jumped right into it and often only provided two to four essays or articles within each section to describe events and