Gray was exaggerated bravado -or that the white lawyer ’s editorial hand helped shape the pamphlet published as The Confessions of Nat Turner ( Baltimore, 1831) -there is little reason to doubt Nat ’s assertion that he spent every possible childhood moment “either in prayer ” (p. Even assuming that some of what Nat later told to attorney Thomas R. As a devout Methodist, Benjamin Turner was not only aware of Nat ’s literacy, he even encouraged him to read the Bible, as did his paternal grandmother, Old Bridget, who Nat later said was “very religious, and to whom I was much attached ” (p. Upon being given a book, the boy quickly learned how to read, “a source of wonder to all in the neighborhood ” (Greenberg 1996, p. Later in life, Nat Turner insisted that his father ran away when he was still a boy.Įarly on, blacks and whites alike came to regard Nat as unusually gifted. Evidence indicates that after being purchased by Turner, Nancy was used as a domestic servant. Family tradition holds that Nancy landed in Norfolk five years before in 1795, the slave of a refugee fleeing the revolt in Saint Domingue. ![]() Bolstered by these “contraband” soldiers and by the successful enlistment of free black men into northern regiments, Lincoln’s army relied on black manpower to defeat the Confederacy and to usher in a “new birth of freedom.Abolitionist and rebel Nat Turner was born circa October 2, 1800, on the Virginia plantation of Benjamin Turner, the child of an enslaved woman named Nancy (the name of Nat ’s father is unknown). Fleeing their masters in unprecedented numbers, slaves emancipated themselves and sought protection behind Union lines. When the war came, it was the enslaved people of the Confederacy who succeeded in transforming Lincoln’s war aims from preserving the union to destroying slavery. At the same time, Harriet Tubman, a former slave, and John Brown, a white activist, took direct action to try to liberate as many southern slaves as they could-or die in the attempt. In outraged response, Harriet Beecher Stowe, a preacher’s daughter living in Ohio, penned Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, the novel that famously hastened the country along the road to Civil War. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was a great setback for American abolitionists, a sure sign that southern slaveholders remained in power in Washington. Lunch (participants provide their own)ġ:30 to 2:30 p.m. At first, Frederick Douglass was a staunch ally in this crusade, but he later broke with Garrison in favor of more militant action to speed slavery’s demise.ġ2:30 to 1:30 p.m. In the 1830s, Garrison spearheaded the creation of a national antislavery campaign that succeeded in raising public awareness and stoking moral outrage while remaining committed to nonviolence. Garrison and Douglassįew Americans were more profoundly affected by the actions of Walker and Turner than William Lloyd Garrison, an apprentice printer turned activist. Despite planters’ attempts to suppress the pamphlet, two years later, a Virginian slave named Nat Turner did as Walker had bid, leading the largest and bloodiest slave insurrection in American history.ġ1:15 a.m. In it, Walker, a free black Bostonian, challenged Thomas Jefferson’s racism and encouraged black slaves in the south to rise up in armed revolt. Richard Bell, associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, College Park, examines the history of antislavery between 18, tracing the efforts of black field workers, fugitives, and former slaves and of white activists, writers, and politicians to build an abolition movement that could bring slavery to its knees.ĭavid Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829) marked the beginning of a radical new phase in American antislavery. How did enslaved people and their free allies fight human bondage in America? What tools and tactics, means and methods did Americans from Nat Turner to Abraham Lincoln use to escape slavery or try to exterminate it?
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