The Prophet

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Nat Turner was born into slavery in 1800 in Virgina and he grew 2 become a slave preacher. Within time he began to build a religious following that was ready to start a revolution against his white master under the belief that god chose him to lead the blacks to freedom. On August 13, 1831 Turner saw a halo around the sun and took that as a sign from God that it was time to start the revolt. Beginning on August 22 and lasting for two days, Turner and seventy recruits went on a rampage, killing Turners master and 58 men, women, and children. Many blacks didnt join Turner's group they feared the consiquences of his methods, but the rebellion only lasted two days and Nat Turner managed to escape. The first report of the Turner revolt was sent in the form of a letter from the Postmaster of Jerusalem to the Governor of Virginia, it was published in the Richmond Constitutional Whig of August 23, 1831, the letter pressed for the support of the military to help catch Turner and his followers who may have escaped.  The miltary decended on Jerusalem the next day, and a massacre of blacks began in Southhampton which was done by vigilante groups who wanted revenge.  Hundreds of blacks were killed, most of which were totally innocent of any involvement or knowledge of Nat Turner's rebellion. By August 31, 1831 almost all of Turner's followers were captured with the exception of him, despite a large-scale manhunt and a continuing stream of newspaper accounts of his escape or capture, he was able to hide in the woods of Southampton, not far from where the rebellion had began. On October 31, Benjamin Phipps, a local farmer, spotted and captured Nat Turner at gunpoint. On November 5, Turner was convicted of insurrection and sentenced to hang and on November 11 the sentence was carried out. Since the 1790's when slaves rebelled in Santo Domingo and slaughtered 60,000 people, Southerners realized that their own slaves might rise up against them a number of slave revolt conspiracies were uncovered in the South between 1820 and 1831 but none frightened Southerners as much as Nat Turner's rebellion.

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