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’,
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