*Includes pictures
*Includes a bibliography for further reading
In American history, there are few people as controversial or consequential as Nat Turner, who was one of millions of slaves in the South before the Civil War but ultimately led the nation's most notorious slave uprising. In August 1831, Turner led a rebellion that terrorized Virginia for several days, killing dozens of whites and freeing slaves as his band moved from plantation to plantation. The Richmond Enquirer reported, "A fanatic preacher by the name of Nat Turner (Gen. Nat Turner) who had been taught to read and write, and permitted to go about preaching in the country, was at the bottom of this infernal brigandage. He was artful, impudent and vindicative, without any cause or provocation, that could be assigned." Even after the uprising was put down, Turner evaded capture for a few months, and after he was captured, his "confessions" were taken down and published before he was executed. Virginia would put a total of 56 slaves to death for the uprising.
The repercussions of Nat Turner's rebellion across the South cannot be overstated. The fear imposed by the uprising led states across the South to enforce even tougher codes on slaves; since Turner had been taught to read and write, states forbade slaves from being taught to read or assemble, and in the aftermath, whites also treated blacks even worse, with an estimated 200 blacks being killed in an outbreak of violence. But while Turner was demonized by whites and held out as a stereotype of what a typical slave might do if given the chance, he was lionized among other slaves and free blacks as providing an example "when the first should be last and the last should be first." The polarization helped harden opinions on both sides, paving the way for future events like John Brown's attempted rebellion at Harpers Ferry in 1859.
Throughout the 1850s, American politicians tried to sort out the nation's intractable issues. In an attempt to organize the center of North America - Kansas and Nebraska - without offsetting the slave-free balance, Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois proposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The Kansas-Nebraska Act eliminated the Missouri Compromise line of 1820, which the Compromise of 1850 had maintained. Settlers could now vote whether they wanted their state to be slave or free, and the primary result was that thousands of zealous pro-slavery and anti-slavery advocates both moved to Kansas to influence the vote, creating a dangerous and ultimately deadly mix.
The most famous and infamous of them all was John Brown, one of the most controversial men in American history. A radical abolitionist, Brown organized a small band of like-minded followers and fought with the armed groups of pro-slavery men in Kansas for several months, including a notorious incident known as the Pottawatomie Massacre, in which Brown's supporters murdered five men. Over 50 people died before John Brown left the territory, which ultimately entered the Union as a free state in 1859.
After his activities in Kansas, Brown spent the next few years raising money in New England, and in 1859 he began to set a new plan in motion that he hoped would create a full scale slave uprising in the South. Brown's plan relied on raiding Harpers Ferry, a strategically located armory in western Virginia that had been the main federal arms depot after the Revolution. Given its proximity to the South, Brown hoped to seize thousands of rifles and move them south, gathering slaves and swelling his numbers as he went. The slaves would then be armed and ready to help free more slaves, inevitably fighting Southern militias along the way.
The fallout from John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was intense, and Brown's raid has often been considered one of the main precursors to the Civil War.