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John Brown was the First “Domestic Terrorist”
“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.
