Nat Turner's Rebellion, A Gruesome Tale

Via mind jog by whatever on John Brown was the First “Domestic Terrorist”

 Nat Turner's Rebellion, A Gruesome Tale NamSouth  23 Jul 2008

 “The Land They Fought For”, by Clifford Dowdy, Pages 19 – 26

The twenty-first of August was a Sunday, in the season when the white people spent the day away at camp meetings. The weather was not hot for the season and the day was lazy on the quiet Travis farm. In The Preacher's cabin, his wife was fixing Sunday dinner for their child. In the woods below the fields, six of The Preacher's disciples were gathered in a glen, where to a Sunday feast they added some of the apple brandy which was always handy to acquire. Only one of them belonged to Mr. Travis-Hark Travis, a magnificently and powerfully built black man. Two others, Sam and the ferocious Will Francis, be­longed to one of Mrs. Travis' brothers. As farms were relatively few in the sparsely settled and wooded country, all the Negroes were in­timately acquainted.

The Preacher, after his custom of keeping himself aloof, joined the frolic in the middle of the afternoon, when several hours of feasting and drinking had his followers in receptive humor. From then until full night he coached them in the details of his predestined mission in which they were to be allowed to participate.

At ten o'clock they left the woods and silently approached the dark farmyard of the Travis house. All lights were out in the house, where the family, tired from their trip to the camp meeting, were asleep. In the farmyard stood a Negro named Austin, who joined them, and brought The Preacher's band to eight.

The seven followers went to the unlocked cider press while The Preacher studied the situation. When the silent men returned, The Preacher directed Hark, the Apollo, to set a tall ladder against an upper-story window sill. The Preacher climbed the ladder, stepped through the open window, and tiptoed through the familiar house down to the front door. When he opened it, his disciples crept in. The fear­some Will Francis held a broadax and one of the men gave The Preacher a hatchet. Without any other weapons, the eight men crept into the master bedroom, where Mr. and Mrs. Travis were asleep.

When The Preacher stood over them, he paused, looking on the face of the kindly man who had given him so many privileges. The other Negroes told him that the leader must strike the first blow. An­other pause, The Preacher struck suddenly and awkwardly down at the sleeping man.

The hatchet glanced off, giving a blow on the side of the head. Mr. Travis, startled into wakefulness, struggled out of bed, sleepily calling to his wife. When his bare feet touched the floor, Will Francis, with no confusion of purpose, brought the broadax down on his head in a single long stroke. Without another sound, Mr. Travis fell dead to the floor. Whirling, Will came down with the broadax again, and Mrs. Travis died in her bed without ever coming fully awake.

The sounds had not aroused the two sixteen-year-old boys - Mrs.Travis' son, Putnam Moore, and the apprentice, Joel Westbrook-asleep in the same bed in a room in another part of the house. They were killed before they were awakened.

Last The Preacher went into the baby's room. He had often played with the child and fondled it, and the baby smiled at him when he woke up. The Preacher backed out, unable to touch the child, and sent in Will and another follower to knock the baby's brains out against the brick fireplace.

With the house theirs, they took four shotguns, several muskets, powder and shot, and exchanged their clothes for garments of the dead men. To give a dash to the new costumes, they got some of the red cloth with which the top of the gig was lined and tore that into sashes to go around their waists and over their shoulders. The material gave out and they made other strips from sheets, which they dyed in the freely howling blood. The Preacher felt that this unit was now ready to serve as the nucleus around which all the slaves of the county would rally.
With some of the force mounted on the Travis horses, they went to the small farm owned by Mrs. Travis' brother, who was also the brother of the owner of Sam and Will. This younger Mr. Francis, a bachelor who lived with his one slave in a single-room house, came to the door when Will and Sam called to him that they had a message from his brother.

When he opened the door they grabbed him. He was a strong man and he fought, calling to his loyal slave for his gun. One of The Preach­er's men shot Mr. Francis' slave, Nelson, who managed to stagger to the back door and escape in the darkness to the woods. He started out to give the alarm to his master's brother, the owner of Will and Sam, but he didn't make it that far. Mr. Francis was finished off before Nelson had reached the woods, going down under repeated blows from the hatchet.

From there The Preacher's band walked on through the night to the home of Mrs. Harris, a widow with several children and grandchildren. Unbeknownst to themselves as they slept, this family was spared through the agency of their slave, Joe, who joined The Preacher on the condition that his people be spared.

With their first recruit, the band descended on the home of the widow Reese, whose front door was unlocked. They killed her in her sleep, her son as he awakened, caught the white farm manager who tried to escape in the darkness. He got off with his life by feigning death, though he was forever after crippled.

By then other slaves, too frightened to defend the whites but unwill­ing to join the insurgents, had fled before the band, and nearby planta­tions were warned. Not willing at that stage to risk losing any of his eight followers, The Preacher changed his course.

At sunrise on Monday morning they reached the substantial home of the widow Turner, set in a grove and flanked by a row of outbuildings. Mrs. Turner's manager was already at work at the distillery beside the lane to the house. He was shot and stripped, his clothes going to the last recruit, the Joe who had saved his own people. Mrs. Turner and a kinswoman were awakened by the shot and came downstairs to bolt the door. The fearsome Will battered the door down with several strokes of his ax, and the two women were grabbed in the hallway.

While they pleaded for their lives, Will went about his skillful work of execution on Mrs. Turner, and The Preacher pulled Mrs. Newsom, trembling violently, out of the door. He kept striking her over the: head with a sword he had acquired. The edge was too blunt to kill the screaming woman and Will, turning from the corpse of Mrs. Turner, methodically finished off The Preacher's victim with his ax.

They got silver there and more decorations for their costumes, and when they left the silent plantation at full daylight their number had spread to fifteen.

They divided, those on foot under The Preacher swinging by the Bryants', where they paused to kill the couple, their child, and Mrs. Bryant's mother, before joining the mounted force at the pleasant es­tablishment of Mrs. Whitehead.

When The Preacher's force got there, Mrs. Whitehead's grown son had already been hacked to death in a cotton patch while his own slaves looked on. Inside the house three daughters and a child, being bathed by his grandmother, were dead. Will was dragging the mother of the family out into the yard, where he decapitated her, and a young girl who had hidden was running for the woods. The Preacher caught her and, his sword failing him again, beat her to death with a fence rail. Another daughter, the only member of the family to survive, had made it to the woods where she was hidden by a house slave.

When they left the seven dead and mutilated bodies at the White­heads', The Preacher's band had grown and acquired more weapons and horses. They had also drunk more cider and brandy, and they moved boldly ahead to continue the massacre although they knew that the alarm was out by then. Several of the next small plantations in their line of march were deserted. The band divided again, with Will the executioner leading the mounted force toward the house of his own master, Nathaniel Francis, the brother of The Preacher's Mrs. Travis and of the bachelor whose slave, Nelson, had been among the first to give the warning.

Though the warning had not reached the Francis plantation, a Negro boy had told Mr. Francis a wild tale of the slaughter of his sister's family. Having heard nothing of The Preacher's band, Mr. Francis and his mother were on the way to investigate the grisly scene awaiting them at the Travis household.

Two of Mr. Francis' nephews, eight- and three-year-old boys, were playing in the lane as the Negroes rode silently toward them. The three-year-old, seeing the familiar Will, asked for a ride as he had many times before. Will picked him up on the horse, cut off his head, and dropped the body in the lane. The other boy screamed and tried to I hide, but they were too fast for him. Henry Doyle, the overseer, seeing this, ran to warn Mrs. Francis. He was shot dead in the doorway of the house, but not before he had warned Mrs. Francis. A house slave hid her between the plastering and the roof in one of the "jump" rooms, and kept The Preacher's band away from her hiding place by pretending to hunt for her. When the Negroes had gone on, the house slave of necessity with them, Mrs. Francis came down to find the other house women dividing her clothes, including her wedding dress. One attacked her with a dirk and another defended her. She escaped to join her husband and be taken to safety.

When the band left the Francis plantation, the alarm by then was general and the Negroes were beginning to get drunk. They headed for the road to the county seat. They found more deserted houses, where faithful slaves had left to hide their masters, and met other slaves who had waited to join the insurrectionists. At young Captain Barrow's the warning had been received and the overseer had escaped, but Mrs. Barrow, a woman of beauty, had delayed to arrange her toilet before appearing abroad. She tarried so long that the Negroes reached the house before she left. Her husband called to her to run out the back door while he fought from the front.

In leaving, Mrs. Barrow had the same experience with her house slaves as had Mrs. Francis. A younger one tried to hold her for the mob, while an older one freed her and held the young Negro woman while her mistress escaped. In front, Captain Barrow emptied a pistol, a single-shot rifle, and a shotgun, and fought with the butt of the gun across the porch, through the hall, and into the front room. He was holding them off when a Negro on the outside reached through the window and, from behind, sliced his throat with a razor.

The Preacher's men had a great respect for Captain Barrow's brav­ery. They drank his blood and spared his corpse mutilation. Instead, they laid him out in a bedquilt and placed a plug of tobacco on his breast.

It was ten o'clock Monday morning when they left there, and the two bands soon reconverged. They then numbered over fifty. The Preach­er's vision of a mass insurrection was coming true. White men were trying to form a force ahead of the band but some of the men, on seeing the bleeding and mutilated bodies of women, hurried back to their farms to hide their own wives and children. Hundreds of women and children were gathering in the county seat at Jerusalem, unaware that the band's winding course was directed there.

On the way The Preacher's formidable force passed more deserted places, but got its biggest haul at Waller's, a country comer. A children's boarding school was there and a large distillery, a blacksmith shop, and the wheelwright, and it had taken some time to gather all the people in the neighborhood. Before they could start for Jerusalem, the Negroes were on them. Some escaped to the screams of those being chased and butchered. More than ten were killed there, mostly chil­dren.

From the Waller massacre, the band headed directly for Jerusalem. By then eighteen white men had gathered with arms at some distance from the town, where four hundred unarmed people had collected. The Preacher's band of sixty would have reached the town first except that his lieutenants overruled him when they passed the famous brandy cellar at Parker's deserted plantation, three miles from town. They tar­ried there to quench their thirsts.

The eighteen white men came on them in Parker's field and opened fire. In a short, pitched battle the boldest Negroes, leading a charge, fell, and most of the insurrectionists fled. The Preacher escaped with twenty of his most faithful followers, and headed toward the Carolina border.

He was seeking new recruits then. They were slow coming in and victims were getting scarce. Late in the afternoon The Preacher, still supported by the Apollo-like Hark and Will with his broadax, allowed a single armed planter to hold off his band from a lady with two children. That planter's family had already escaped to safety. In that family was a fifteen-year-old boy who, thirty-odd years later, was to duplicate his father's indomitable stand-at Chickamauga-and immortalize the Southampton County name of Thomas among the Union's heroes.

Below the Thomas' fine plantation home, near dusk, the Preacher's faithful score of followers turned back north and at night made camp in the woods. At dawn, The Preacher started for the large and handsome home of Dr. Blunt, one of the county's few plantations of the legend, and on the edge of the district of yesterday's triumph. Not seeking victims then, The Preacher wanted fresh supplies and recruits to put heart and strength back into the insurrection.

His band of twenty reached the Blunts' yard fence just before day­light. Unlike the smaller houses, Dr. Blunt's house was set back in a grove a hundred yards from the front fence-a stout affair, with a locked gate. A precautionary shot was fired to determine if the darkened house was deserted, as expected. Then the powerful Hark broke down the gate, and the group advanced toward the house, looking for slaves to join them. The band was within twenty yards of the house when firing broke out from the front porch.

Hark Travis, one of the original conspirators and one of the bravest of the subleaders, fell wounded in the first volley. When The Preacher, shaken but grown desperate, tried to rally his force for an attack, an­other volley dropped two more. His men broke. At that moment Dr. Blunt's slaves came swarming out of hiding places, armed with grub hoes, and rushed the insurrectionists. The Preacher fled with his men. Dr. Blunt's slaves rounded up several prisoners, including the wounded Hark, crawling toward a cotton patch.

Dr. Blunt, his fifteen-year-old son, and his manager had done the firing, while the women loaded single-shot rilles and shotguns. Before The Preacher's men arrived, Dr. Blunt had given his own slaves the choice of fighting with his family or leaving. They chose unanimously to fight.
The Preacher had been disappointed earlier when other Negroes, more than had joined him, had helped hide their white people or es­caped with them. When his own people fought against him, The Preacher lost faith in his insurrection.

More in desperation than purpose he led the dozen remaining follow­ers to retrace their triumphant steps of the day before. At the first plantation, the Greensville County cavalry militia rode them down. They killed Will, the ax-executioner, and killed or captured all except The Preacher and two others. The insurrection was over then, though the alarmed neighborhood did not know it.

Following the Greensville cavalry, other militia units poured into the county during the next two days, and U. S. Marines from Norfolk. At Fortress Monroe Robert E. Lee, a young army officer, prepared to leave with his company if needed. No more forces were needed. The two men who had escaped with The Preacher were captured. Many who followed the leader during the successful stages of Monday had re­turned to their homes. They were hunted down, some killed and others taken to jail. But The Preacher eluded them until the beginning of October.

While changing hiding places on another Sunday, he encountered a poor farmer in some woods. Like his neighbors, this Mr. Phipps was carrying a gun when he came upon the ragged, emaciated, and wretched-looking Preacher, who immediately surrendered. No demonstration was made against The Preacher when he was brought to jail or when he and fifty-two others were brought to trial. Of these, seventeen were hanged and twelve transported. Of five free Negroes among them, one was acquitted, the others sent to Superior Court, where one more was acquitted and three convicted. All con­victions were based upon cross-evidence given by white people and the Negroes participating. The Preacher confessed fully to his leader­ship and to the details of the murder of more than fifty white people.

With The Preacher's execution. the case was closed and entered the record books as Nat Turner's Rebellion. In history, the unelaborated reference to "Nat Turner's Rebellion" has been made so casually for so long that the tag has no association with the terror and horror of mass murder. Also, to the population of the United States today the slave insurrection in Haiti is a remote thing, part of the inevitable and the just march of events. But to the South, where white refugees had fled-at least one to Southampton County-the Haiti massacre was the dread reminder of what could happen to them. With Nat Turner, it had happened. The deep fear of the blacks' uprising against them had been implanted. It was never to leave.