To this irrefutable fact Turner freely admitted without hesitation in an interview with attorney Thomas R. Gray, who was allowed into Turner’s jail cell after his capture. In Gray’s work, The Confessions of Nat Turner, published soon after Turner’s execution, the accused rebel confessed that “my object [was] to carry terror and devastation wherever we went” and to “strike terror to the inhabitants.”
As Gray wrote of the cold, calculating fanatic before him, “The calm, deliberate composure with which he spoke of his late deed and intentions, the expression of his fiend-like face when excited by enthusiasm, still bearing the stains of the blood of helpless innocence about him; clothed with rags and covered with chains; yet daring to raise his manacled hands to heaven, with a spirit soaring above the attributes of man; I looked on him and my blood curdled in my veins.”
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