8/7/2023 0 Comments Nat tuner locationThey are defeated, and 95 rebels will be executed.ĭenmark Vesey, a free black man from Charleston, South Carolina, plans a revolution in which enslaved blacks will kill their masters and escape to Haiti. ![]() history: nearly 500 people armed with guns, pikes, hoes, and axes. In Louisiana, along the east bank of the Mississippi, Charles Deslondes leads the largest slave revolt in U.S. Of the 72 rebels who face trial, 26, including Gabriel, are found guilty and hanged. In Henrico County, Virginia, an enslaved blacksmith, Gabriel Prosser, plots to attack Richmond, but his plans are discovered. This revolt leads to the 1740 Negro Act, which prohibits slaves from growing their own food, congregating, and learning to read. In South Carolina, an enslaved African named Jemmy leads the Stono Rebellion, the largest uprising in the British mainland colonies. What stands in Southampton that reminds us of this history? It is here that I hope to uncover more about Turner and his band of rebels in an attempt to reassemble this lost history. What do we do with the controversial players in our past? It is at these cross- roads-and others like it-that many American stories sit unearthed, and untold. Modern roads cut through places where slaves once lived, died, and fought for their freedom, creating historical intersections between the past and the present. Today in Southampton County, several landmarks that existed in Turner’s time still dot the landscape, but the place itself looks very different. It is a key moment in the continuous quest for enslaved African Americans to gain the basic human rights denied to them: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Although many have tried to silence Nat’s story, the rebellion is too compelling to ignore. Turner and his soldiers were eventually caught and executed, their remains scattered or buried in unmarked graves in an attempt to blot out their existence. For many enslaved people-used to living in a brutal world that relied on abuse to control them-the future looked bleak. Living with the knowledge that his family could be taken away at any moment surely shaped Nat Turner’s outlook, as well as that of the rebels who fought with him. Thousands of slaves were sold out of Southampton County during the early 19th century. ![]() This “second middle passage” not only destroyed families but also served as a psychological scare tactic to keep people in line and break up resistance. Virginia plantation owners could make money by selling their slaves to the sugar and cotton plantations of the Deep South. The economy of the Deep South was booming and needed more laborers to sustain it, so slaveholders who lived farther north provided the workforce. ![]() By 1831, abolitionists were using the accounts of former slaves to illustrate its horrors, while southern planters, struggling to justify the institution, were claiming enslaved people were content.ĭuring Nat Turner’s lifetime, the domestic slave trade greatly intensified after the closing of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, which cut the external supply of enslaved Africans coming to the United States. Nat Turner’s rebellion came at a crucial time, more than 20 years after the closing of the trans-atlantic slave trade in 1808, which heightened debates around both the morality and sustainability of slavery. Freedom was always on the minds of the enslaved, and Nat Turner was no exception. Denmark Vesey’s 1822 plot in South Carolina, Gabriel Prosser’s 1800 conspiracy in Richmond, Virginia, Toussaint L’Ouverture’s successful liberation of Haiti in 1791, the 1739 Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, and the countless revolts that took place on land and sea, shaped the revolutionary spirit of enslaved African people. In the Colonies, slavery and resistance were restless bedfellows, as evidenced by several large-scale attempts to end the institution. This story appears in the January/February 2017 issue of National Geographic History magazine.
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