[On September
9, 1739, enslaved African Americans began a brief but bloody rebellion in
South Carolina. So this week on the 280th anniversary I’ll
AmericanStudy Stono and other rebellions and contexts, leading up to a weekend
post on cultural representations of such revolts.]
On one challenge
and one benefit to remembering the rebel leader as an American hero.
A few weeks
back, a scholarly friend on Twitter shared a Virginia license plate that
offered a tribute to Nat
Turner, leader of a late August, 1831 slave revolt that became one of the largest and most
significant in American history (I can’t find the image now, but the plate
read something like NATTRNR). Another academic Twitter friend responded, asking
(in implicit conversation with the ongoing debate over Confederate memorials in
Virginia and beyond) why they aren’t statues and tributes to Turner throughout
the state, memorializing him as the revolutionary leader and figure that he
quite literally was. The presence of all those white supremacist neo-Confederate
tributes offers one clear explanation for that absence, of course—communities that
for a century honored men who committed treason in defense of slavery weren’t
likely to have also honored enslaved revolutionaries. But while those white
supremacist perspectives of course remain (DUH, said 2019 America), our
communities and collective memories have certainly moved beyond them in all
sorts of ways. So should we erect Nat Turner statues throughout Virginia?
In a moment I’m
going to make the case that we should do so, but it’s important to note that
the question is a complex and fraught one, for one particular reason that
differentiates this revolt from the others about which I’ve written this week:
Turner and his fellow rebels killed many of the white families at the
plantations where they stopped to free enslaved people, with the revolt’s white
casualties eventually numbering 60 men, women, and children (including ten under the
age of five). It appears that these murders were not incidental but purposeful,
and in fact exemplified one of Turner’s central goals for the revolt (as he
would later recount them in the controversial document The Confessions
of Nat Turner): he hoped not just to gain freedom for enslaved African
Americans, but also and perhaps especially to spread “terror and alarm” among
the area’s white population. That goal makes Turner quite literally a
terrorist, and while he and his fellow rebels committed those acts of terror in
direct relationship to an entirely understandable cause, they nonetheless
purposefully and consistently committed them. To my mind, that makes Turner
distinct from a parallel revolutionary
leader like Harriet Tubman, who certainly was willing to fight slave-owners
but did not (as I understand the history at least) make killing them a central
priority alongside freeing enslaved people.
So the story of
Nat Turner is, to put it succinctly, not without its controversies and horrors.
But of what historical figure can we not say the same? Abraham Lincoln, to cite
one relevant example, ordered
the mass hanging of 38 Dakota Native Americans during the Civil War, a
history that we certainly should remember much more consistently but that does
not (I would argue) mean the Lincoln Memorial or other such tributes are not
appropriate. To be sure, statues or memorials to Turner would need to include
the violence of his rebellion (just as memorials to Lincoln should mention his
complexities more fully than they currently do). But in the multi-century
battle against slavery, a battle that culminated quite directly in the Civil War,
Turner and his fellow rebels comprise one of the most striking and successful
acts of resistance and revolution. If we want to represent that battle as a
defining history of American inclusion (and I certainly think we should do so),
then yes, Nat Turner needs statues and tributes as a complex but crucial leader
in that fight.
Last rebellion
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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