Week 7 of the 1526 Project turned to Nat Turner, and the tragic event we now call "The Nat Turner Rebellion" in August of 1831 in Southampton County in southeast Virginia.
This quotation from the curriculum has stayed with me:
The white Christian establishment of the American South reacted with terror. New laws were passed across the slave states forbidding enslaved people from learning to read, from gathering for worship without a white minister present, from preaching at all. The Bible was the proximate cause of Nat Turner. The masters had given him the Bible, and the Bible had told him what to do, so the Bible needed to be suppressed.
The same book slaveholders used to justify bondage was, in Turner's hands, the thing that convinced him God required its end. The backlash that followed was not only about violence. It was about who gets to read at all, specifically read Holy Scripture, and who is empowered, permitted, or prohibited from interpreting it for themselves.
I have also been thinking about how a modern psychiatrist might read Turner's story: his visions, the voices he claimed to hear, and his professed sense of divine mission. Today, a medical professional encountering those symptoms would likely consider "bipolar disorder with a manic episode" as descriptively explaining Turner's actions and motivations. He would be regarded by science and law enforcement as delusional, and tragically misdirected, in need of medication and treatment, as well as involuntary incarceration to prevent harm to himself and others. In 1831, of course, the situation was different. Turner was captured after two months in hiding, tried, and hanged, his body reportedly skinned and rendered for grease afterward. In the immediate aftermath, a mob, militia, and posse of white men swept through the county and killed between 100 and 200 other African-American people, many of whom, by most accounts, had no connection to the rebellion at all. The 1831 rebellion and uprising of Nat Turner and the enslaved African Americans who joined him was a violent chapter in the history of the United States, with impacts that touched generations of people even to our present day.
In writing these words and offering this analysis, I am not offering a definitive mental health diagnosis for a man who has been dead for nearly two centuries. That clinical lens should not become a way to explain away what he did, or to reduce a person shaped by slavery's violence to a set of symptoms. But it is significant that modern Protestant Christianity, at least in mainstream versions, rejects the existence and possibility of modern day prophets. Growing up Presbyterian, this is something I remember being taught in eighth grade Communicant's class, and in other lessons from the pulpits of our various churches throughout the years.
Even if we hold this possibility of a bipolar diagnosis for Nat Turner alongside the historical record, a harder question is raised, one the curriculum itself does not shy away from: What kind of system produces actions and events like the Nat Turner rebellion and the ensuing violent backlash? Turner killed children, and that fact deserves to be named plainly, not minimized.
At the same time, the deeper question is not just about one man's visions, his mental state, or his violent actions. It is about an institution, chattel slavery, that made violence the ordinary condition of Black life for generations, and about the white supremacy that outlived slavery's legal end and still shapes who gets heard as a prophet and who gets dismissed as a threat, or as unwell.
I do not think we should look away from either aspect of the 1831 Nat Turner Rebellion: not the violence, and not the system that produced it.
Thanks for reading my reflection. Learn more about our study of the 1526 project on:
Week 7, Nat Turner: Visions of Justice. Project 1526, Resistance500.com.