Writer-director-star Nate Parker is being provocative by calling his upcoming film about the Nat Turner slave revolt The Birth of a Nation. The title is meant as a rebuke to D.W. Griffith’s notorious 1915 movie of the same name, a production steeped in white supremacy and celebrating the Ku Klux Klan. Slated for release later this year, Parker’s film wades into emotionally charged territory, given that the insurgent slaves in 1831 Virginia slaughtered any white they captured, women and children and all. It’s also a historical minefield of contentious theories and opposing views, as shown in Patrick H. Breen’s book The Land Shall be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt (published by Oxford University Press).
A Providence College history professor, Breen carefully analyzes previous accounts of the uprising, finding some of them guilty of racism and others of wishful thinking. No, the slaves were not happily going about their work, nor were they somehow bound together in a common cause of resistance. “The variety of responses did not simply exist in different people within the black community. Sometimes they existed in the same person,” Breen writes.
Nat Turner emerges from these pages as something other than the Hollywood ideal of a charismatic leader in the fight for freedom. A mystic who claimed visions from the Holy Spirit, Turner was a prophet without much honor at home where his messianic assertions drew skepticism from his fellow slaves. Curiously, he drew one white follower who, however, did not participate in the revolt. Realizing that a wide conspiracy was vulnerable to snitches, Turner launched his uprising with fewer than 10 men, some of them equivocal or reluctant. After the first blows were struck, Turner assembled a force that never reached more than 80 in a county that numbered 2,500 slaves over the age of 12. Turner was easily defeated, and if he had a strategic vision beyond Southampton County, Virginia, it went unrecorded.
The district’s poor whites were prepared not only to lynch Turner and his men but to exterminate all blacks in Southampton County. However, the white slaveholding establishment called out the militia, checked the spread of violence and gave the slaves trials complete with court appointed defense attorneys. The slave owners did not want their property damaged; moreover, some felt paternalistic toward their slaves. (Breen even finds a case or two of slaves fighting with their masters against Turner.) One of the defense attorneys, Thomas R. Gray, published a lengthy statement from the revolt’s leader, The Confessions of Nat Turner. Revealing a literate man with remarkable talents, it has been alleged that the Confessions were Gray’s invention. But weighing the evidence, Breen is convinced that the words are genuine and the Confessions represent Turner’s own account.
