Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion

173 Pages·1937·1.57 MB·English

by  Herbert Aptheker

Copyright Copyright © 1966, 2006 by The Estate of Herbert Aptheker.
All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note
This Dover edition, first published in 2006, is an unabridged republication of the
work originally published by Humanities Press, Inc., New York, in 1966. A
Preface to the Dover Edition has been added.
9780486137308

International Standard Book Number: 0-486-45272-7

Manufactured in the United States of America
Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, N.Y. 11501
Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
PREFACE TO THE DOVER EDITION
FOREWORD - THIRTY YEARS AFTER
INTRODUCTION
THE ENVIRONMENT
THE EVENT
THE EFFECTS
CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
APPENDIX
A CATALOG OF SELECTED DOVER BOOKS IN ALL FIELDS OF
INTEREST
PREFACE TO THE DOVER EDITION
Herbert Aptheker wrote Nat Turner’s Rebellion as his Master’s Thesis at
Columbia University, and submitted it in February 1937. The only work on
Turner prior to Aptheker’s study, titled The Southampton Insurrection, was
written by William S. Drewry and published in 1900. It treated the insurrection
with fear and contempt and sexualized Turner’s motives. While Aptheker was
studying at Columbia, the most authoritative works on slavery to date had been
written by Ulrich B. Phillips. These works, entitled American Negro Slavery
(1918) and Life and Labor in the Old South (1929), both achieved critical
acclaim. They exonerated the South of its “peculiar institution,” observing that
Negroes were particularly and naturally fitted for slavery. While Phillips noted
some cruelties on the part of masters or overseers, enslaved Africans had no
names, no countries or places of origin, and no historical agency. Aptheker was
part of a revisionist movement in the historical profession that owed its
intellectual heart to African American scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter
G. Woodson, and Rayford W. Logan.
Writing against the grain of the established historical profession in American
universities, Aptheker’s thesis was a prelude to his dissertation, American Negro
Slave Revolts, first published by Columbia University Press in 1943. “The
Turner Cataclysm” was a chapter in the dissertation. Aptheker first published his
Rebellion in 1966 at the apex of the civil rights and black power movements and
a year after the Watts Uprising. It was initially published as a hardcover book by
Humanities Press with the imprint of the American Institute for Marxist Studies,
which he directed, and later as a popular paperback edition by Grove Press.
Aptheker was involved in a swirl of controversy the following year with the
publication of William Styron’s novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner. The
novel purported to be in Turner’s voice. One reviewer noted that Styron showed
us the “strange, mad mind of Nat Turner,” and offers a “passkey to the dark
dungeon of his sexual imagination.” Aptheker wrote a fierce critique of Styron
in Political Affairs, the Communist Party’s theoretical journal in October 1967.
He was also deeply involved in encouraging and assisting in the publication of a
response to Styron by African American intellectuals under the editorship of
John Henrik Clarke, entitled The Second Crucifixion of Nat Turner, which was
published in 1968. Outraged at Styron’s appropriation of a black hero in the
particular political context of the black power movement, contributors to the
Crucifixion included Lerone Bennett, Jr., Dr. Alvin Poussaint, Vincent Harding,
and Ernest Kaiser. When plans were announced for a Hollywood movie based
on Styron’s novel, the black community mobilized such opposition that no actor
could be found who would agree to play the lead role of Nat Turner.
As the United States moves deeper into the twenty-first century, racism
continues unabated albeit in ever new forms and patterns. Debates on
immigration and racial profiling, the incarceration of shocking numbers of
African Americans, especially young men, and the 750% increase in the
incarceration of women since the 1970s, especially African American women,
continues the kind of criminalization of a people so evident in the
characterizations and debates surrounding Nat Turner. Perhaps then, in
considering the reprinting of Herbert Aptheker’s work the historical record may
yet again shed light on the present moment. He would, in any event, be very
pleased.

Bettina Aptheker University of California
Santa Cruz
FOREWORD
THIRTY YEARS AFTER
There is no book dealing with the revolt of slaves in Southampton County,
Virginia, in August, 1831, led by Nat Turner, except that written by William S.
Drewry and published more than sixty-five years ago. Of that work sufficient is
said in the pages that follow; here it need but be commented that for the truth of
the Turner event it would have been better if Drewry had never published.
Toward the close of the 19th century, the young Harvard student William
Edward Burghardt Du Bois, was fascinated by the Turner event; encouraged by
Professor Albert Bushnell Hart he spent much time studying it. His doctoral
thesis, however, was on the suppression of the African slave trade, and Du Bois
did not publish any study of Turner. He almost did, though, and therein lies a
story.
In the first decade of the twentieth century, the Philadelphia publishing firm of
George Jacobs & Co., launched the American Crisis Biography series, under the
editorship of the historian, Ellis P. Oberholtzer; the idea of the series, explaining
its title, was to produce biographical studies of personalities identified with
particularly critical episodes or periods in American history. Du Bois’ reputation
as a scholar already was well established—in 1896 his Harvard Historical
Studies Number I, and in 1899 his study of The Philadelphia Negro—University
of Pennsylvania Studies Number 14—and in 1903 his masterpiece, The Souls of
Black Folk had appeared.
Hence, Mr. Oberholtzer asked Dr. Du Bois if he would undertake for the
Jacobs series a biography of Frederick Douglass who had died in 1895. Du Bois
agreed, and a contract was signed. Word of this agreement, however, got out of
the Jacobs office and reached the ears of Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee.
Mr. Washington let it be known that he was not pleased with the choice of a
biographer for the late Douglass and that a more worthy choice would be—Mr.
Washington. This settled that question, and poor Mr. Oberholtzer wrote in
evident embarrassment to Dr. Du Bois of the necessary switch in authors for the
Douglass book; at the same time, he asked Du Bois to suggest his own choices
for biographical treatment.
Dr. Du Bois, put out, but exercising his considerable powers of restraint,
reminded the Jacobs firm of their contract, yielded to its decision on Douglass
and then stated he wished to produce a volume on either of two subjects: Nat
Turner or John Brown!
The Jacobs firm, faced with the problem of Du Bois as an author—he had
already launched the terribly radical Niagara Movement—now had to choose
between a black insurrectionist or a white one. It chose, of course, the white
man; thus did Du Bois’ John Brown appear (first in 1909) while Du Bois’ work
on Turner never did get done.
In the heady New Deal days of the ’30’s, Professor Rayford W. Logan
conceived of a Committee whose purpose it would be to erect a monument to the
memory of Nat Turner; Dr. Du Bois told the young Logan that he doubted this
could be accomplished, but wished him well. Du Bois was right.
At the same time—and also a child of the times—the present writer, who
already had seen a good deal of the South and whose main interests for several
years had been devoted to U.S. history and especially to the subject of slavery,
began a study of what was then conceived generally to be an altogether unique
event—a slave insurrection in the United States.
The book now in the reader’s hand was written, then, thirty years ago, and
accepted as a thesis for the master’s degree at Columbia University in February,
1937. Professor Allan Nevins—though perhaps bothered by an overly intense
student—was encouraging; particularly helpful at that time was the late
Professor William L. Westermann, whose renown rested upon his mastery of
ancient slavery but who was fascinated by comparative studies and who
especially helped this beginner. For three decades this study has reposed on the
shelves of the Columbia library—not unread, I am happy to say—and now, at
last, a publisher has decided to give it life.
The bibliography appended hereto is full enough up to the date of its
compilation. Additional references to the Turner event itself, to slavery and to
the whole history of slave unrest are in the bibliography printed in the present
writer’s American Negro Slave Revolts (first published, 1943) and in the
prefatory note to the 1963 edition of that book. In addition, note should be taken
of John Lofton’s Insurrection in South Carolina: The Turbulent World of
Denmark Vesey (Yellow Springs, Ohio, 1964, Antioch Press) and the review of
that book by the present writer, wherein other sources also are cited (in Science
& Society, Summer, 1965, XXIX, 374-76). Also meriting attention is the article
by Marion D. deB. Kilson, “Towards Freedom: An Analysis of Slave Revolts in
the United States,” Phylon, Summer, 1964, XXV, 175-87.
There have been a few novels, in American literature, which have centered
around Negro slave unrest and uprisings. These include Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
massive two-volume Dred, published in 1856. Two years later appeared The Old
Dominion, from the pen of the English novelist, G. P. R. James, then a consular
agent in Richmond. Nothing further of this character appeared until 1899 when
Mary Johnston’s Prisoners of Hope and Pauline C. Bouve’s The Shadows Before
were published.
Then ensued a long interval terminated in 1936 by Arna Bontemps’ splendid
Black Thunder, while in 1944 another excellent work, The Red Cock Crows,
appeared from the pen of Frances Gaither. Two or three years ago it became
known that William Styron was working on a novel in which the Turner uprising
would play a major role, but as of this date the book has not appeared.
Occasional plays also have had as their themes slave rebellions.
Very recently, almost the entire text of the so-called Confessions of Nat
Turner was reprinted in the volume edited by Professor Harvey Wish, Slavery in
the South: FirstHand Accounts of the Ante-Bellum American Southland (N.Y.,
1964, Farrar, Straus & Co., pp. 5-22). Unfortunately, in this version the
appendices were omitted, thus removing from the eyes of the reader the
immediate cost of the effort to the Negro people in the numbers arrested,
banished, jailed and executed. Unfortunately, too, in his brief introductory note,
Prof. Wish repeats two well-worn errors: one leading the reader to believe that
“stringent codes for policing” came after the revolt when, in fact, as the work
that follows shows, many of them preceded the event. Further, Prof. Wish states
that the Revolt induced a “faltering” in “the flourishing emancipation movement
in the South.” It is highly dubious that there ever was in the South what may be
accurately described as a “flourishing emancipation movement;” certainly none
such existed by the time Turner rebelled. 1
Reflecting the obvious contemporary relevance of all evidences of Negro
militancy and mass action in the past is the fact that in a recent number (July,
1965) The Negro Digest reprinted in full an edition of the Nat Turner
Confessions issued in Petersburg, Virginia in 1881.
Thirty years after its original composition, then, and one hundred and thirty-