![]() ![]() Historians are not shy of writing about religion, but when they do they usually seek to secularize it. The intellectual orthodoxy of modernity, says Robert Orsi, turns religion into a social construction that “underwrites the hierarchies of power, reinforces group solidarity, and also, if more rarely, functions as a medium of rebellion and resistance.” In the Matter of Nat Turner rejects this orthodoxy. For both, ideation that social circumstance is unable to explain is insanity. For both, ideas are explained by social circumstance. The most influential discounter was the late William Styron, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning fictionalized autobiography, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), whose repulsion for Turner’s “religious mania” induced him to look for “subtler motives, springing from social and behavioral roots.” Ironically, though he detested the slavery that Gray defended, Styron is just like the Virginia lawyer. Both are modern, rational, and secular. Notwithstanding this rare opportunity to read the speech of a slave, readers have tended to discount what the slave actually said. But this is a very basic error. Turner describes his painful struggle for spiritual maturity and his search for his calling, both of which become utterly central in his life long before he turns to any clear intimation of interracial violence. The sequence of spiritual experiences, visions and revelations he recounts exhibits a coherent and sophisticated eschatological hermeneutics that moves, as his faith matures, from acceptance of God’s call to discipleship, through visions of the crucifixion and Revelation’s promise of Christ’s second coming, to Turner’s own transfiguration and his assumption of the burden of redemption. His account is of a life of preparation: a precocious infant gifted with uncanny knowledge an adult tested in the wilderness, come to grace and baptism, confronted in his maturity by an immense task given to him by God that nearly breaks him, on the outcome of which rides the salvation of all. Throughout, Turner employs forms of typological reasoning familiar in evangelical texts for the messianic purpose of re-creating himself as the Redeemer returned. Turner’s narrative is almost invariably read as Gray designed it, as a single linear account in which the life’s final events appear as an outcome ordained virtually from infancy. It tells of the ascent of a deeply religious personality to a state of grace (“made perfect”) and the consequences attending that outcome. Circumstance suggests that much of the pamphlet’s account of the rebellion existed in draft prior to Gray’s conversations with Turner. The first part of Turner’s account, however, dwells on his life from his birth until the rebellion, matters of which Gray could have had little detailed knowledge. Most of what is known of Nat Turner is to be found in a 24 page pamphlet, The Confessions of Nat Turner, written by a Southampton County attorney named Thomas Ruffin Gray who gained access to Turner in jail awaiting trial and over three days heard Turner’s account of himself and his rebellion. In the Matter of Nat Turner is an attempt to recover Turner, and his way of thinking. I call it “a speculative history” because it is a work of conjecture, of wondering about the connections between events and causes, between origins and outcomes. To put flesh on the bones of wondering my book inspects the fragments of text in which Turner is materialized and interleaves them with other texts – biblical, theological, philosophical, literary, sociological and anthropological – to tell his story. Nat Turner is known to history as a thirty-year-old Virginia slave who led a bloody rebellion that resulted in the death of fifty-five whites, mostly women and children. Beyond that, he is famous for being well-nigh unknowable. He has no gravesite, no remains there is no likeness of him. To the historian Kenneth Greenberg, Nat Turner is “the most famous, least-known person in American history.” ![]()
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