Gray before his trial as “white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle.” When he reached manhood, Turner began experiencing visions as he worked and prayed in the fields, beginning with the notion that he had been selected for a mission, then darkening over time into what he described to Southampton attorney Thomas R. He could read and write at a time when illiteracy was widespread even among whites, and his eloquence as a preacher was so pronounced that some whites and many blacks believed he was divinely inspired. “This was the horrible slaughter everybody had feared for years - and it was almost unbelievable.”īorn in 1800, Turner was touched early on by what he described in a jail cell confession as “uncommon intelligence” and “the impression that I was ordained for some great purpose in the hands of the Almighty.” “There had been slave uprisings before but nothing as large, as well organized and as bloody as this, both in terms of the killings and the reprisals,” historian John V. Had they reached nearby Jerusalem, now Courtland, they might have added to the 57 lives they ended.īut even after the militia arrived to blunt and disperse them, the blood still flowed, with more than 200 blacks savagely killed - and some beheaded - in a merciless riot of retribution. Dipping cloth in their victims’ blood, the horde of nearly 60 slaves fashioned grisly sashes, too, marking themselves as an army of vengeance and liberation.
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