CRITICAL PLACES: SOUTHAMPTON, VIRGINIA
(2023)

The Nat Turner Insurrection of 1831

The deadliest revolt of the enslaved in United States history was the Nat Turner Insurrection. There is uncertainty about the exact number, but 55 to 65 White people—men, women, and children—were killed during the three days that the rebels rampaged through the countryside attacking the farms of their enslavers. Farms that did not have slaves were not attacked. In suppressing the insurrection, some 175 enslaved and free Black men and women were killed either by the militia, by roving mobs, or by hanging after trial. Hundreds more were attacked, whipped, maimed or hanged in reprisal in neighboring counties.

The sheer violence of this rebellion, confirming the long-held worst fears of the enslavers, was reported widely across the country. One could say this was our first major media event. That it subsequently took weeks to capture Nat Turner only added to the frenzy. And the posthumous publication of The Confessions of Nat Turner, transcribed (and embellished) from jailhouse interviews by the intrepid local lawyer Thomas R. Gray, ensured that this dramatic story would remain a subject of fascination for years to come.

Volumes have been written about the insurrection, about Turner's visions, his complex character, and about the consequences. The attention has been such that Nat Turner’s revolt is one of the few that I would say is actually embedded in the landscape to this day. Tours are offered tracing the route of the revolt, and I counted at least 4 locations with historical markers.

On my first day in "Nat Turner Country" I met up with Ibn Khalifah, whose father Khalif Khalifah founded the Nat Turner Library in 1990. The library offers tours tracing "the steps of General Nat Turner and the Black Liberation Army." Next, the historian John Quarstein drove me around to various sites. I had come across his dramatic YouTube videos on the Nat Turner Insurrection when I first started researching the rebellion several years back. Also generously taking me on a tour was Bruce Turner, a great-great-great-grandson of Nat Turner. Bruce started by showing me the cemetery where generations of his ancestors are buried (though not Nat Turner, whose body was dismembered and the burial place is unknown). Lastly I met with Richard Francis. His ancestor Lavinia Francis survived the attack thanks to one of the men enslaved to her, "Red" Nelson who hid her in the attic. Richard, as Clerk of the Southampton Circuit Court, is the keeper of Nat Turner's sword.

In 1900 a young graduate student, William Drewry, produced a unique series of photographs of all the major sites of the rebellion for inclusion in his dissertation The Southampton Insurrection. Showing where Turner preached, where he met with his co-conspirators to plot the rebellion, each of the homes that were attacked, the site of the final battle, Turner’s hide-out, the place where he was hanged, and more, they are the closest thing we have to photographs of a rebellion.

Looking at these images, it occurred to me that when he made them, some 70 years after the revolt took place, there were still people around who lived through the revolt and could recount the events and show him the precise locations. Some years ago, I similarly photographed sites of trauma —these being related to the Holocaust— that were on the cusp of passing from living memory into history. That timing gave my photographs a fleeting immediacy which I recognize in Drewry's photographs.

As I was taken around the various sites of this marked landscape, each of my four guides had a personal perspective on, if not a personal connection to, the violent events that took place there almost 200 years ago. I thank them for sharing their thoughts with me. Their doing so made it a living history.

                  The Nat Turner Insurrection of 1831 / Southampton County, Virginia. 2023