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Nat Turner Research Paper

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Nat Turner
Biography
Born on the 2nd of October 1800, in Southampton County, Virginia, Nat Turner was a black American slave who led the only successful, sustained slave revolt, in August 1831, in the United States. As a child, he was recognized as having "natural intelligence and quickness of understanding, surpassed by few.” He grasped how to read and write when he was young. Turner was deeply religious and spent much of his time preaching to his slaves and reading to them Bible verses, praying, and fasting (Biography).
Turner's religious convictions manifested as frequent visions which he interpreted as messages from God. His belief in the visions was such that when Turner was 22 years old, he ran away from his owner; he returned a month …show more content…

Turner started with several trusted fellow slaves, and ultimately gathered more than 70 enslaved and free blacks, some of whom were with horses. He took a solar eclipse in August 13, 1831, as a sign that the time to rise up had arrived. He then began the rebellion a week later on August 22. The rebels traveled from house to house, freeing slaves and killing all the white people they encountered. As muskets and firearms were to difficult to collect and would gather unwanted attention from the neighbourhood, the rebels used knives, hatchets, axes, and blunt instruments instead of firearms. The group spared a few homes because Turner believed the poor white inhabitants thought no better of themselves than they did of …show more content…

Although Nat Turner survived for more than two months afterwards, the rebellion was quashed within two days.
Nat Turner was unsuccessful in his aspirations to end the practice of slavery. After the revolt, government officials tried forty-eight black men and women on charges of conspiracy, insurrection, and treason. In total, the state executed 56 people, banished many more, and acquitted 15. The state reimbursed the slaveholders for their slaves.
On October 30, Benjamin Phipps discovered him in a hole covered with fence rails. A trial was arranged; On November 5, 1831, Nat Turner was tried for "conspiring to rebel and making insurrection", convicted, and sentenced to death. He was hanged on November 11 in Jerusalem, Virginia. Turner's corpse was flayed, beheaded, and quartered. Antebellum slave-holding whites were shocked by the murders and had their fears of rebellions heightened; Turner's name became “a symbol of terrorism and violent

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