Imagining the End: Visions of

The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the late Insurrection in Southampton, Va., as

fully and voluntarily made to Thomas R. Gray 

(Baltimore, MD, 



). Quotations from the

Confessions

 are followed by page numbers from the reprinting in Henry Irving Tragle (ed.), 

The

Southampton Slave Revolt of 



: A Compilation of Source Material

 (Amherst, MA, 



).



. For a fuller account of  the revolt see Stephen B. Oates, 

The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s

Fierce Rebellion 

[



] (New York, 



). Tragle’s 

Southampton Slave Revolt

 reprints the relevant

source materials.



. The best brief  discussion of  slave revolts in the United States is in Eugene D. Genovese,

Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made

 (New York, 



), pp. 



–



. This account is

given full-length amplification in Genovese’s 

From Rebellion to Revolution

 (Baton Rouge, LA,



). On the aftermath of  Nat Turner’s rebellion see Oates, 

Fires of Jubilee

, pp. 



–



;

Herbert Aptheker, 

Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion

 (New York, 



), pp. 



–



 and 



–



; John

H. Cromwell, ‘The Aftermath of  Nat Turner’s Insurrection’, 

Journal of Negro History

 



 (



):



–



; and Peter H. Wood, ‘Nat Turner: The Unknown Slave as Visonary Leader’, in Leon

Litwack and August Meier (eds), 

Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century

 (Urbana and Chicago,

IL, 



), pp. 



–



.



. James McDowell, a Virginia legislator, cited in Eric J. Sundquist, 

To Wake the Nations:

Race in the Making of American Literature

 (Cambridge, MA 



), p. 



; anonymous letter of



 September 



 from Jerusalem, Virginia to the Richmond 

Constitutional Whig

, reprinted in

Tragle, 

Southampton Slave Revolt

, p. 



.



. Aptheker, 

Nat Turner

, pp. 



–



.



. Oates, 

Fires of Jubilee

, p. 



.



. Sundquist provides a full account of  issues of  authorship and authenticity in the

Confessions

 in 

To Wake the Nations

, pp. 



–



. His entire discussion, pp. 



–



, forms an

essential prelude to any study of  the 

Confessions

. Quote at p. 



. Sundquist and Wood, ‘Nat

Turner’, explore the implications of  the recent discovery that Thomas R. Gray was not (as was

long thought) the wealthy lawyer and slaveowner Thomas Gray but rather his son, who had

been recently disinherited at the time of  Turner’s confession. Recent work that casts yet further

uncertainty on the relation between the rebellion and the accounts that survive of  it is surveyed

in Tony Horwitz, ‘Untrue Confessions’,