Nat Turner: The Melancholy of Resistance
Renaissance Motives in an American Slave Rebellion

Paul Richard Blum (Loyola University Maryland, Baltimore)

 

Abstract:

One would think rebellion and melancholy are unrelated if not contradictory. But as a matter of fact, Nat Turner the instigator of a slave rebellion in North America in 1831, described himself as going through psychic states that in Early Modernity would be classified as melancholic. On a close look at his statements to a lawyer, the source of our knowledge of his troubles, we discover his autobiography and melancholy go together, both being rooted in self-reflection. And so is resistance by slaves a symptom of their self-relatedness that made them conscious of their toil and fueled their rebellion. Nat Turner and his interviewer lacked the terminology to describe such passions, but Turner reveals to be imbued with ideas and thought patterns that have their origin in early modern spirituality like Jacob Boehme, alchemy, and other occult sciences of the Renaissance. Although Turner’s revolt has enjoyed much attention from historians of African American slavery, so far it has never occurred that his is also a case of the afterlife of early modern thought.

 Let me first explain the title of my presentation. In 1989, László Krasznahorkai published the novel The Melancholy of Resistance (in Hungarian: Az ellenállás melankóliája). We notice the year 1989, so it must have to do with the Velvet Revolution, as it was called in then Czechoslovakia. Among many other things, this is a story of boredom soaked with alcohol and provincial inertia. I was reminded of this novel when I read the Confessions of Nat Turner, and the reason was again the apparent contrast between rebellion and idleness that goes along with melancholy. So, my overall aim is to show that in modernity hyperactivity and resignation are the symptoms of traditional melancholy. Particularly I want to show that the medieval and early modern tradition of the theory of the complexions plays out in a non-specialist environment. However, my most immediate agenda is to show that philosophical strains are present even in the most non-theoretical texts.[1]

I will briefly explain the affair of Nat Turner, then I will show that his confession reveals him as imbued with esoteric or occultist knowledge and motives, and finally I will show the presence of melancholy in his narrative.

 

1. The Nat Turner Rebellion: literary issues

In 1831, Nat Turner, a black slave in Southampton County, Virginia, instigated a slave revolt that lasted for two days, during which he and his followers systematically killed scores of white people in cold blood. The rebellion was easily struck down by militias and white mobs. A huge number of rebels were killed or executed after trials. The principal source of this event is the transcript of an interview given by Turner[2] to the lawyer Thomas Gray who published it as The Confessions of Nat Turner.[3]

The story was retold with the identical title The Confessions of Nat Turner in a 1967 novel by William Styron. However, the novelist had no use of the occultist and spiritualist ideas of the rebel and his “divinely ordained retributive mission,” which to Styron came just from “his apocalyptic and deranged visions.” Most of the passages I will interpret below are not quoted in the novel, whenever it makes use of the original Confessions. “There was no shaking the fact that on the record Nat Turner was a dangerous rebellious lunatic.”[4] Instead, he intended to portray Turner as “a living human being of great power and great potential who somewhere, in his struggle for freedom and for immortality, lost his way.”[5] It is surprising that Styron did not mention Nat Turner in his later essay on depression, Darkness Visible, that connects medical facts with a wide range of literary and philosophical models. However, in the same way as he does not mention John Milton, from whom he borrowed the title of his essay, he might actually have been implicitly commenting on Turner while eluding the name.[6] Given the fact that Styron’s novel is written in first person, we may surmise that his main motivation was his identifying with the slave rebel, although not pertaining to religious and spiritual motives but rather the struggle for psychological freedom. In his essay, Styron related clinical depression, melancholy as it was termed in early modernity, to some religious experience, which, “in its extreme form, is madness.” And Styron also diagnoses, appropriately as we will see below, that sometimes a melancholic “will turn to violent thoughts regarding others.”[7] Based on Styron’s novel Nate Parker produced a film on Nat Turner in 2016 that concentrated on the role of slavery in US history, as the title suggests.[8]

Styron befriended Truman Capote whom he met in 1952 and 1953 in Paris and Rome.[9] There were even rumors the two writers “were romantically involved.”[10] While Styron had been planning to write a novel on Turner for many years, Capote’s book In Cold Blood came out in 1966, shortly before Styron’s Turner novel. In a letter, dated February 28, 1966 to James and Gloria Jones, Styron speaks in ambiguous terms about Capote’s book: “I have had to fuck around with the plot quite a bit, and change the setting to Kansas and bring in a quadruple shotgun murder, but basically I’ve kept the integrity of the book intact and it should sell quite a few copies.”[11] As it stands, the remark reads as though Styron was busy changing the plot and location of Capote’s book. At any rate, the close relationship between the two authors opens the possibility that Capote’s story is a narrative re-interpretation or re-enactment of the massacre of 1831 as a horrendous and senseless crime of his present time. It may be a trifle, but the court sentence in Turner’s trial convicted him of “plotting in cold blood.”[12]  If we discard the “quadruple shotgun murder,” what remains is the empty and meaningless life of two young men. Supposing that such a reading is plausible, we may observe that, here, religion and violence are on equal terms. Whereas the historic Nat Turner was driven by religious inspiration (as will be clear in the following) and Styron’s rebel by sexuality and revenge, Capote presented the absurdity of violence without transcendence or any higher aspiration.[13] In this latter regard Capote bases his plot on the same boredom as Krasznahorkai’s “melancholy of resistance.”

 

My interest, in this paper, is the spiritual meaning of the Turner revolt and the philosophical and religious tradition that is manifested in Turner’s confession. In the literature on Turner and other slave insurrections, Turner is often summarily credited for being motivated by religion and quaint ideas. Out of the huge secondary literature on the case, Patrick Breen takes the inspirational language into account as long as he is reporting the events. Unfortunately, in the further analysis, these motives fade away.[14] Donald G. Mathews had already delineated Turner’s “Apocalyptic vision ... as if the anger of every Christian who had ever been a slave had been unleashed.”[15] Typically, Turner’s visions and religious motivations are mentioned nominally, but rarely discussed as to their contents.[16] In the wake of the Southampton insurrection, the slaveholders reconsidered their attitudes towards religious education of slaves, for it appeared to empower them beyond pious obedience. Apparently, the masters had to choose between Christianity and slavery.[17] However, one should not forget that the dominating class constantly drew inspiration and legitimacy from the Bible and Christian ethics, to the effect that their slaves were surrounded by Christian habits and practice. For instance, the administrative center of Southampton County, now the town of Courtland, was then called Jerusalem. Indeed, some churches did re-invite slaves into their communities.[18] To some extent one should assume that the Christianity of the slaveholders was not much different from that of their slaves.

The lawyer Gray’s publication had a juridical and a political purpose, namely to prove to the public of the time that Turner had been rightfully sentenced as a murderer and to warn everyone against the danger of rebellious slaves. That is what historians of American slavery are interested in, and the book is, from that point of view, only one among a large number of publications that discussed slave uprisings of that time.[19] For a historian of literature and philosophy, however, this is a valuable document on how a black slave, and a rebel, saw himself as an agent. Gray’s transcript of the interview is a first person narrative of the life and motives of a slave.

Doubts are frequently raised concerning the authenticity of the transcript. After all, Gray’s political and legal agendas could have tainted whatever he wrote down from Turner’s oral report.[20] To address this objection it may suffice to first point out the difference in tone between the surrounding texts, in which the lawyer addresses the general audience, and the confession itself. In his address to the public, Gray emphasizes the cruelty of the deed and the emotional responses to it. The confession itself keeps the tone of a first person story, and the narrator, Nat Turner, does not at all relish violence and rampage. As Patrick Breen observed, the text of the confession is several times interrupted by Gray’s authorial comments, which clearly set the note taker’s perspective apart from that of the confessor. Gray assures us readers that the confession was made voluntarily and acknowledged by the defendant in the trial, since “without being questioned at all, he commenced his narrative in the following words.”[21] An indication of the authenticity is the fact that the confession contains many elements that Gray could not possibly have invented, and several of the lawyer’s interruptions and comments lead us to those surprising elements that are peculiar to the slave. It is these very components over which the interviewer had stumbled that interest us here, namely, Nat Turner’s esoteric ideas, occult knowledge, and his spiritualist or religious impulses, which he insists to report. Gray observes within parentheses that the slave had “a parcel of excrescences,” which meanwhile “have disappeared,” after Turner had mentioned these as proof of his destiny as a prophet.[22] In a footnote Gray confirms Turner’s skills in “manufacturing.”[23] Then Gray asks for the meaning of “Spirit;” later he questions the confessant’s millenarist mission.[24] A seemingly practical question regarding Turner joining his band rather late is answered with Turner’s role as a solitary prophet.[25] Following the confession proper, Gray asked Turner about a separate insurrection in North Carolina; and when the defendant “denied any knowledge of it” Gray insisted and received Turner’s statement: “I see sir, you doubt my word; but can you not think the same ideas, and strange appearances about this time in the heaven’s [sic] might prompt others, as well as myself, to this undertaking[?]”[26] No, the lawyer cannot fathom esoteric wisdom like astrology. These interventions show clearly that the lawyer was writing down ideas he did not understand – and that confirms the fidelity of his report. As a book, the Confessions contain two parallel discourses, the political-juridical of Gray and the spiritual of Turner; it certainly embodies, as Eric Sundquist analyzed, the master/slave dialectics.[27] In this paper, I am following Turner’s narrative as the authentic testimony as to how he perceived himself and his actions. It is the first person “narrative” – as Gray himself termed it – that prompts us to trace his esoteric ideas, and not out of historical curiosity but as testimony for the understanding of humanity of this individual person.

 

2. The Esoteric Turner

Nat Turner opens his story with going “back to the days of my infancy, and even before I was born.”[28] What does it say about this person’s consciousness if he derives the unity of his self from the pre-history of his existence? It is objectively reflexive and taking a prophetic point of view that is hypothetical and deductive. The death penalty looming, the defendant while resigning to his fate is asked to give an account of his motivations and agency and he reacts with a reflection on his pre-history. Desperation and resignation, melancholy in this sense, is rooted in the reference of the subject to his own self as though it were another person’s history. This self-referentiality is at the same time, and has always been, the driving power of his rebellion. A look at other instances of slave-resistance would show (what I cannot corroborate at this point[29]) that rebellion does not only make slaves self-reliant, but also that self-relatedness, consciousness in the broad sense of the term, is the root of resistance. It is what makes the oppressed conscious of their suffering and fuels rebellion, as we can see in Turner’s story.

Turner’s factual point is that as a child he had knowledge of events before his birth he could not have witnessed, from which his family concluded the child “surely would be a prophet, as the Lord had shewn me things that had happened before my birth.” Turner claims that this confidence carried him through adulthood:

At this time I reverted in my mind to the remarks made of me in my childhood, and the things that had been shewn me – and as it had been said of me in my childhood by those by whom I had been taught to pray, both white and black, and in whom I had the greatest confidence, that I had too much sense to be raised, and if I was, I would never be of any use to any one as a slave.[30]

The slave was predetermined not to be a slave. He realizes it by way of recalling his early omen.

Furthermore, his parents were convinced the boy was “intended for some great purpose” because he had “certain marks” on his “head and breast.”[31] The sign on the head is most likely reminiscent of Cain’s sign, given by God to the murderer of his brother Abel in order to protect him.[32] This sign is evidently to be seen as singling out its bearer for some great purpose, both in the negative and in the positive sense. The signs on the head and the breast may perhaps relate to the tefillin and phylactery-bags to be worn on the forehead and the breast in Jewish tradition, which go back to earlier customs of tattooing or cutting marks in the flesh as signs of covenant.[33] More closely to the Christian environment in Virginia, the marks might allude to the marks on the right hand and forehead, of which the book of Revelation (13:16-17) refers to as the signs of uprising against the empire of God. The prodigious character of young Turner is also remotely reminiscent of Jesus as a child who was sought by his parents and found in the Temple, teaching. In the Gospel it is the child that reminds the parents that he was with his Father and that they should have been aware of that.[34] A further source for young Nat’s parents to interpret the marks on the child could be popular occultist culture.[35] A frequently printed and modified book by Erra Pater, The Book of Knowledge, provides a list of foretelling meanings of such marks:

A mole on the forehead of a man or woman, denotes they will grow rich, and attain to great possessions, being beloved of their friends and neighbours.

 A man or woman having a mole near the heart upon the breast, shews them irregular, wicked and malicious.[36]

A mole on the left corner of the eye, denotes the party subject to melancholy, and diseases that proceed therefrom.[37]

It is obvious that Nat Turner in his narrative ascribed high value to this sort of portent.

A further capability that Turner recounts as forming his personality is the “fertility” of his imagination, which he exercised by “making experiments in casting different things in moulds made of earth, in attempting at making paper, gunpowder, and many other experiments.”[38] Thomas Gray, as mentioned, sensed that there was something unusual about it and commented that he questioned the defendant about it and found him “well informed on the subject.” From a white man’s perspective it was astonishing enough that the black slave was versatile in various crafts. But what evidently escaped his attention was that Turner was – in all innocence – speaking of alchemy. For casting objects (probably of metal) in clay, as well as pottery, and making gunpowder and paper were activities of alchemy, as long as alchemy straddled the realms of manufacturing and magic.[39] In this one statement, the confessant connects imagination, prayer, and alchemy. Through these skills the young slave gained authority among his peers and respect “by white and black,” not the least due to the “austerity” in the conduct of his life.[40] He became religious, was impressed by readings from the Scripture to the effect that the Holy Spirit spoke personally to him regularly, which confirmed his awareness to be “ordained for some great purpose in the hands of the Almighty.”[41] He speaks of his influence on his fellows with an ambiguous parenthesis: “not by the means of conjuring and such like tricks – for to them I always spoke of such things with contempt.” So he knew such tricks, I suppose,[42] but his magic was of a different nature. As a grownup person, Turner explains, he realized that this combination of gifts: prophesy, spirituality, and magic was what made him unfit for being a slave, because he “had too much sense to … be of any use to any one as a slave.”[43] Education in the narrow and in the broad sense of the term, as Frederick Douglass would state later, “would forever unfit him to be a slave.”[44]

At this point let me make an observation regarding potential sources of information available to Nat Turner. We should suppose that Turner and his family probably had only shady knowledge of all sorts of written tradition. We do know that he could read, and we also know that he had access to the Bible, even the one with Adam Clarke’s Commentary.[45] Efforts have been made to relate Turner’s ideas and worldview to African traditions. This would be very important to know, for it might change our understanding of the mind of the slaves. Unfortunately, so far the results remain vague and elusive for lack of documented evidence. Unfortunately, any “particular African cultural antecedents that may have shaped Nat's spiritual beliefs are impossible to discern from this vantage point.”[46]  There certainly were African traditions of conjuring, including those skills that I identify as alchemy like making gunpowder. Yet, again, we have no direct evidence of Turner’s readings or instructions of African origin.[47] It would be particularly helpful to know which of the many cultures that came from Africa were specifically alive and documented in Southampton County. For the early modern Christian tradition, which I am pursuing in this paper, I can at least point to existing prints at the time.

Turner runs away from his overseer and – “to the astonishment of the negroes on the plantation” – he returns after thirty days in the woods. This is the first allusion to his identifying with Christ (although he should have stayed for forty days, as he later did when he stayed for six weeks in his hide out after the massacre). Repeatedly, Turner reports of “the Spirit” speaking to him, for instance with the well-known Bible verse that requires from the servant to obey his master (Luke 12:47). It is at this point in the narrative that Turner mentions a vision: “I saw white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened – the thunder rolled in the Heavens, and blood flowed in streams – and I heard a voice saying, ‘Such is your luck, such you are called to see, and let it come rough or smooth, you must surely bare it.’’’ This is a clear call for rebellion and violence. The symbolism of black and white spirits (demons I suppose) is not easy to trace back as to sources. But the darkened sun may refer to the Crucifixion.[48] The role as the leader of an insurrection is established as a divine and spiritual call, a call not for victory but for suffering, most likely martyrdom. We should notice that Turner is telling this as matters of fact and without reservation, not even in hindsight. Thus he presents himself to the lawyer as the prophetical leader he had been ever since. Consequently, also the uprising itself was prompted, according to Turner, by a vision of “the Spirit” who announced that “the Serpent was loosened” so that he was called to “fight against the Serpent”.[49] Most likely Turner is appropriating Revelation 20:2-3,[50] interpreted as the beginning of an overturn of powers.

Turner’s education is not only spiritual; it includes “the knowledge of the elements, the revolution of the planets, the operation of tides, and changes of the seasons.” In the same breath he alludes to the esoteric wisdom of understanding “the forms of men in different attitudes” and seeing “lights of the Saviour’s hands” related to the “cross on the Calvary for the redemption of sinners.”[51] To him the spiritual calling and the secular knowledge are easily blended. Hence we may assume that he trained himself in natural philosophy, which for wise men of the Renaissance and Early Modernity included what in our time is called science and psychology. As a result of his visions, a white man had “a cutaneous eruption, and blood ozed [sic] from the pores of his skin, and after praying and fasting nine days, he was healed;” that is to say the black slave started miraculous healings, a fact that was even mentioned in the court trial.[52] Then he organized baptisms in open waters on the model of John the Baptist, as Hussites and other spiritual movements had done since the era of Reformation.[53] The vision that is mentioned immediately thereafter consists in the Spirit warning of the Serpent at large and commanding him to take on the joke of Christ and to fight the Serpent. Obviously he is referring to the Devil.

The captive explains that he had to take over Christ’s role because “the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first.” He is evidently referring to the end of the world and the Last Judgment.[54] Turner connects the end of times with the Parable of the Vineyard (Matt. 20:16), which also corroborates his being the chosen one (“for many be called, but few chosen”). This association is valid because in the Gospel reference to ‘the first and the last’ immediately precedes Jesus’ prediction of his betrayal, death and resurrection. Gray interrupts the talk with the question: “Do you not find yourself mistaken now?” This cannot refer to the betrayal nor to Turner’s role in the crime; so it obviously raises the same objection that always comes up after a failed prediction of the end of the world. (‘You see, the end has not come!’) Turner, however, stays within the biblical context and responds: “Was not Christ crucified.”[55] That is to say, the overturning of the order, the great work of the rebellious killers, is as real as Christ’s death, and hence, Turner’s death and the end of times are equally imminent. For our reading of the Confessions it is crucial that Turner has also millenarist ideas that motivate him.

What he is about to start, the violent rebellion, Turner calls twice “the great work.”[56] The Great Work is, among others, a term of the goal of alchemy, and it is likely that the slave had learned this expression in his alchemical training. On the other hand, a text by William Law commenting on Jacob Boehme uses the term in this context:

Here Adam [...] appears […] in Union with Christ, [...] the Second Adam […]; and is to show the absolute Necessity of His Holy Incarnation, and immaculate Sacrifice for all Mankind, without which the great Work of our Regeneration and Reunion with SOPHIA could not have been wrought out to Perfection. [...] And therefore He, and even He alone [the Second Adam], was able and sufficient to go for us and to enter into Death, […], to bruise the Serpent’s Head, and to ascend up on high …[57]

The expression also appears in other texts of Boehme usually meaning the overall government of the world. For instance: “Moreover, I considered the little Spark of Light, Man, what he should be esteemed for with God, in Comparison of this great Work and Fabrick of Heaven and Earth.” And: “And though this great Work in Man has remained hidden till this very Day, yet God be praised, it will now once be Day, for the Day-spring or Morning-redness breaks forth.”[58] It is clear that, whatever the slave might have had in mind, when he calls it the “great work” or also “the work of death”[59] he shows the metaphysical framework with an emotional underpinning. In the following, I will make more comparisons with the ideas of the mystic Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) because one of the earliest biographers of Nat Turner, the abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, mentioned in 1861 that the confession “reads quite like Jacob Behmen.”[60] He obviously knew that Boehme’s ideas had spread through America via the English Quakers, as the edition quoted above testifies.

We are no longer surprised that an eclipse of the sun triggered his actions, Turner narrates, as though a “seal was removed from my lips, and I communicated the great work laid out for me to do, to four in whom I had the greatest confidence.”[61] However, when he recapitulates the events of the uprising he is sparing with esoteric or spiritualist allusions, they appear – as the court sentence stated – a cold-blooded rampage. The only moment that is remarkable is the comrades urging their leader to “spill the first blood” – whereby it remains open whether that was a psychological, mythical, or ritual motif.[62] Yet Turner’s narrative closes with the words: “I am here loaded with chains, and willing to suffer the fate that awaits me.”[63] In themselves these words are indifferent, but in the context of Turner’s identifying himself with Christ, we see him in front of Pilate.

The calm, deliberate composure with which he spoke of his late deeds 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.[64]

Thus the lawyer describes him and he projects his disgust while at the same time observing the composure of the captive. We may notice that Turner’s imitation of Christ has two sides: the one is that of the redeemer sent to the fellow humans, the other is that of the victim of earthly justice or injustice - a victim who bears his fate with composure and conscience of the atrocity. When the lawyer further examines his connections with contemporary uprisings Turner insists on the astrological condition of his acts by suggesting that “strange appearances about this time in the heaven’s [sic] might prompt others, as well as myself, to this undertaking.”[65]

3. Turner and Melancholy

After having collected evidence that Nat Turner represents the mindset of spiritualist and esoteric thought in a class of people who are supposed to be uneducated, it is now worth finding out whether he also represents versions of melancholy as a state of soul or mind as it is known since the Renaissance. Of course, I cannot give any specific source because I still do not know which were potential readings available to Turner or those who might have instructed him. Therefore, my selection is guided by ideas that match his attitude in his confession. And I am primarily looking at sources close to him in time and culture.

Let me start with a verse that captures the nature of a melancholic person:

God has given me unduly
In my nature melancholy.
Like the earth both cold and dry,
Black of skin with gait awry,
Hostile mean, ambitious, sly,
No love for fame or woman have I;
In Saturn and autumn the fault doth lie.[66]

This comes from a widely quoted verse in German. What is important to note is that a person who identifies himself as of melancholic temper also ascribes to himself to be of violent and ambitious temperament. Of course we should not think too much of the black skin mentioned, we cannot know which version of melancholic typology was close to Turner. However, I would not be surprised if I could find an English version of this verse circulating among slaves and slaveholders. If Turner thought that black skin is one of the signs in an analogous way as melancholy is the medical symptom of black bile (the internal humor, influenced by Saturn, that causes a brooding mood), he must have seen his fate as a rebel confirmed by nature.

Nicholas of Cusa taught that “covetous melancholy […] gives rise to the most varied pestilences in the body – usury, fraud, deceit, theft, pillage, and all the arts by which great riches are won not by work but only by a certain deceitful craftiness, which can never exist without doing harm to the State […]”[67] This is not the philosophical kind of melancholy, elaborated by Marsilio Ficino,[68] but a curse that makes a person an enemy of state. Agrippa of Nettesheim,[69] in his handbook of occult sciences classified Saturnine people in three groups: those with imagination, the first group, are prone to mechanical arts and can predict natural events; the second sort is those with rational thinking who have an understanding for human things, including medicine and politics and they tend to be revolutionaries; and finally those with intellect who know divine secrets, angels, demons, and God: they have religious prophetic gifts. We easily see that Turner fits all three categories, he might have grown from the boy plagued with imagination being trained in mechanical/magical crafts, including alchemy, to the leader of people and rebel who believed in fulfilling the law and commandment of God while taking on the yoke of Christ. We should not forget that ever since Aristotle’s Problemata, melancholy is tied with malice and manic bouts, and that melancholy is one of the characteristics of the political leader.[70] At the same time this sort of melancholic person is painfully and “darkly aware of the inadequacy of his powers of knowledge,”[71] and this would be the explanation of his surrender after the revolt. It is the most generic connection between melancholy and rebellion: a confluence of rage and the sense of inadequacy.

When Turner narrates the aftermath of the insurrection and massacre he is surprisingly unemotional as to his hiding and being captured. The lawyer Thomas Gray wonders about the fact that Turner did not make any attempt to escape but surrendered peacefully. (And as I said, this sort of comments of the note taker usually raises a red flag as to its peculiar meaning for Turner.) Gray depicts a contradictory character of the defendant:

As to his being a coward, his reason as given for not resisting Mr. Phipps, shews the decision of his character. When he saw Mr. Phipps present his gun, he […] thought it was better to surrender, and trust to fortune for his escape. He is a complete fanatic, or plays his part most admirably. On other subjects he possesses an uncommon share of intelligence, with a mind capable of attaining any thing; but warped and perverted by the influence of early impressions. […] The calm, deliberate composure with which he spoke of his late deeds and intentions, the expression of his fiend-like face when excited by enthusiasm […].[72]

In the eyes of the lawyer, Turner is a coward and a realist, a fanatic or maybe only a feigned fanatic; he is intelligent but misinformed since his youth, calm and excited by enthusiasm. For Turner there was no need for further explanation: he had lost, that is, his fate was such. He actually may have been a fanatic, but of the melancholic brand.

When his interlocutor speaks about bodily properties, like the marks on the head and the breast, to Gray these cannot have any impact on the thought and action. What Thomas Gray could not have known is that the quasi-mechanical connection of bodily functions and states of the mind, in which he certainly was educated in a world dominated by Locke’s and Hume’s epistemology, does not exist for esoteric people. On the other hand, people living in the world of complexions, of which melancholy is one, and in the world of demons and spirits, perceive themselves as agents within a larger context of agency: fate, providence, stars, humors, etc. Therefore physical properties and divine signs all contribute to ‘who one is as a person’ and create the logic of their agency.

Jacob Boehme was one of the thinkers who systematized this natural and supernatural world, and he was well known in many circles of the English speaking regions of America. A collection of texts, partly by Jacob Boehme and partly from other sources, was printed in 1688; all of them put together for the spiritual education of common people. The compiler and probably translator was Daniel Leeds (1651-1720).[73] He, like most promoters of Jacob Boehme's ideas and books was connected with the Quakers. In this book, The Temple of Wisdom, we find a number of ideas that might have trickled down to the slaves in Virginia. There we read, for instance,

All War and Contention arises from the dominion of God's anger; the Warrior is a Servant of God's anger; he is the Ax wherewith the angry Husband-man cuts up the Thorns and Bryars from off his Ground: ... And he that suffers himself to be made use of thereto, he serveth the anger of God ... [74]

This sounds like Turner’s understanding of his mission. On the one hand, Turner was confident to execute God’s will and to take up Christ’s yoke. On the other hand, he was also fully conscious that this entailed martyrdom, and not such that brings to heaven but such that takes on guilt for the sake of the political cause. He might well have been confirmed reading the following considerations of Jacob Boehme on the temperament of melancholy, also contained in Leed’s book:

If the Soul once turn aside from God, and give it self over to the obedience of the Complexion, then all whatsoever the Stars work in the Complexion, is put in execution, and the Devil mixeth his Imagination therewith. ... [T]here is none among all the four Complexions, whereinto less Wickedness is introduced; for it is always in combat against the Devil, knowing him to be very near Neighbour; for the Darkness in his Habitation.[75]

In the melancholic temper, there is an ongoing fight between God and Satan.

The Devil is ever objecting to the Melancholy man, the haniousness [sic] of his Sins; and thereupon seeks to perswade him there's no possibility of attaining God's grace and favour: Therefore that it only remains, be disappearing, stab, drown or hang himself, or murder another, so that he may gain an approach to his Soul, otherwise neither dare, nor can touch it.[76]

Of course, I cannot prove that Nat Turner knew this sort of text. Nobody has ever investigated what he might have read, besides the Bible. But the allusions he makes in his narrative are clear indications that he knew much of spiritual writings. As I mentioned earlier, Thomas Higginson suggested as early as 1861 that Nat Turner’s mind was germane with Jacob Boehme; but no researcher followed this lead. I hope I made plausible that there is research ahead of us that promises more results. The sources I have used are as obscure to a modern reader as they were already to Thomas Gray. We cannot hold that against the slave. On the contrary, a closer look at the life of Nat Turner’s mind will unmask the cultural dissonance between the world of the slaves and that of the slaveholders. As Wendell Berry stated decades ago, the wounds of the slaves inflicted wounds on their oppressors.[77] For our understanding of American slavery, or at least this specific case, we are called not to see slaves are mere objects of political disasters and present-day compassion but, rather, as subjects with intellectual and political agency. For the history of ideas, and specifically the tradition of the temperaments and occult sciences, we see in Nat Turner the rudiments of Renaissance ideas, which survived in a sort of trickle down culture.

 

Paul Richard Blum

T.J. Higgins, S.J., Chair in Philosopy

Loyola University Maryland

Department of Philosophy

prblum@loyola.edu

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[1] Cf. Paul Richard Blum, “American Slave Narratives as Sources of Philosophical Anthropology. Turning First Person Stories into Philosophy,” in Working Papers in Philosophy: Registers of Philosophy (Budapest, 2016), http://fi.btk.mta.hu/images/Esem%C3%A9nyek/2016/Registers_of_Philosophy_2016/2016_07_paul_richard_blum_american_slave_narratives_as_sources_of_philosophical_anthropology.pdf. - This study is a result of research funded by the Czech Science Foundation as the project GA ČR 14-37038G “Between Renaissance and Baroque: Philosophy and Knowledge in the Czech Lands within the Wider European Context”. – Thanks to Brittany Brock for help with research.

[2] M. Cooper Harriss, “‘Where Is the Voice Coming From?’ Rhetoric, Religion, and Violence in ‘The Confessions of Nat Turner,’” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 89, no. 1/2 (2006), p. 166, n. 1,. suggested to refer to the first name Nat, rather than Turner, because that was the slaveholder’s name. At court, the defendant was recorded as “Nat alias Nat Turner”: Henry Irving Tragle, The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831. A Compilation of Source Material, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1971, p. 221. For the sake of convenience, I will use the better-known name, Turner, keeping in mind the ambiguity of slaves’ names.

[3] Nat Turner, The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the late insurrection in Southampton, Va. As fully and voluntarily made to Thomas R. Gray, In the prison where he was confined, and acknowledged by him to be such, when read before the Court of Southampton; with the certificate, under seal of the court convened at Jerusalem, Nov. 5, 1831, for his trial. Also an authentic account of the whole insurrection, with lists of the whites who were murdered, and of the negroes brought before the Court of Southampton, and there sentenced, &c., ed. Thomas R. Gray, Thomas R. Gray, Baltimore, 1831. Online accessible: Nat Turner, “The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va.,” Documenting the American South, Beginnings to 1920, accessed April 4, 2016, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/turner/turner.html. – Details of the riot and the person in Herbert Aptheker, “The Event” in Kenneth S. Greenberg (ed.), Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, pp. 45–57; Herbert Aptheker, Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion: Including the 1831 “Confessions”, Dover Publications, Mineola, 2012; David F. Allmendinger, Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2014.

[4] William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner, Vintage Books, New York, 1993, Afterword to the Vintage edition, p. 441.

[5] William Styron, Letters to My Father, ed. James L. W. West, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 2009, p. 132. On Styron’s psychological approach see Alfred Kazin, “The Imagination of Fact: Capote to Mailer,” in Harold Bloom (ed.), Truman Capote, Bloom’s Literary Criticism, New York, 2009, pp. 23–41; pp. 32-34. On Styron and other appropriations of the Turner story see Albert E. Stone, The Return of Nat Turner: History, Literature, and Cultural Politics in Sixties America, University of Georgia Press, Athens, 1992; and Mary Kemp Davis, Nat Turner before the Bar of Judgment: Fictional Treatments of the Southampton Slave Insurrection, Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1999.

[6] William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, Random House, New York 1990. Cf. John Milton, Paradise Lost, I 63.

[7] Ibid., p. 17 and pp. 44-47. On Darkness Visible and melancholy in Styron’s fiction cf. Samuel Coale, William Styron Revisited, Twayne, Boston, 1991, p. 5.

[8] Nate Parker, The Birth of a Nation, 2016, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4196450/. Cf. Sam Tanenhaus and Nate Parker, “Nate Parker on The Confessions of Nat Turner,” Vanity Fair HWD, accessed December 15, 2016, http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/08/nate-parker-on-the-confessions-of-nat-turner.

[9] William Styron, Selected Letters of William Styron, ed. Rose Styron and R. Blakeslee Gilpin, Random House, New York, 2012, pp. 127, 142, 154, 163.

[10] Ibid., p. 164n.

[11] Ibid., p. 384n.

[12] Turner, Confessions, p. 21.

[13] See the remark that Perry Smith, one of the killers, early in life terminated his “never earnest spiritual quest”: Truman Capote, In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences, Vintage Books, New York 1994, pp. 42f.

[14] Patrick H. Breen, The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015, especially in chapter 1: “Signs”, pp. 19-30, from the eclipse of 12 February 1831, biblical references, prophesy, to the skeptical response of the fellow slaves.

[15] Donald G. Mathews, Religion in the Old South, University of Chicago Press, Chicago: 1977, pp. 231–36; 235.

[16] Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South, updated edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, pp. 163f.

[17]  Charles F. Irons, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2008, pp. 135–168.

[18] Patrick H. Breen, “Contested Communion: The Limits of White Solidarity in Nat Turner’s Virginia,” Journal of the Early Republic 27, no. 4 (2007), pp. 685–703.

[19] Brian Ray Gabrial, “‘The Melancholy Effect of Popular Excitement’. Discourse about Slavery and the Social Construction of the Slave Rebel and Conspirator in Newspapers” (PhD Dissertation, University of Minnesota, 2004); Brian Gabrial, The Press and Slavery in America, 1791-1859: The Melancholy Effect of Popular Excitement, University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, SC, 2016.

[20] A comprehensive treatment of the question in Harriss, “‘Where Is the Voice Coming From?’” Cf. Breen, The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood, pp. 169–179 (Afterword).

[21] Turner, Confessions, title page and p. 7.

[22] Ibid., p. 7.

[23] Ibid., p. 8.

[24] Ibid., pp. 9 and 11.

[25] Ibid., p. 12: “The same reason that had caused me not to mix with them for years before.”

[26] Ibid., p. 18.

[27] Stephen Howard Browne, “‘This Unparalleled and Inhuman Massacre’: The Gothic, the Sacred, and the Meaning of Nat Turner,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 3, no. 3 (2000), pp. 309–332; Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature, Belknap, Cambridge, Mass., 1993, pp. 36–83: “Nat Turner, Thomas Gray, and the Phenomenology of Slavery.”

[28] Turner, Confessions, p. 7.

[29] Cf. Paul Richard Blum, “‘I Felt So Tall Within’: Anthropology in Slave Narratives,” Annals of Cultural Studies (Roczniki Kulturoznawcze) 4, no. 2 (2013), 21–39.

[30] Turner, Confessions, p. 9.

[31] Ibid., p. 7. The “excrescences” Gray missed.

[32] “CAIN - JewishEncyclopedia.com,” accessed April 4, 2016, http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/3904-cain.

[33] “PHYLACTERIES - JewishEncyclopedia.com,” accessed April 4, 2016, http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/12125-phylacteries.

[34] Luke 2:40-52. In Harriss’s terminology, this would be a case of biblical embodiment: Harriss, “‘Where Is the Voice Coming From?’”

[35] Marks on the forehead no. 22014 and 25062 in Newbell Niles Puckett et al., Popular Beliefs and Superstitions: A Compendium of American Folklore. From the Ohio Collection of Newbell Niles Puckett, 3 vols., G.K. Hall, Boston, Mass., 1981. Cf. Newbell Niles Puckett, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1926, p. 204.

[36] Erra Pater, The Book of Knowledge, Treating of the Wisdom of the Ancients, Printed and sold by Peter Stewart, Philadelphia, 1801, pp. 49 and 50.

[37] Erra Pater, The Book of Knowledge, Treating of the Wisdom of the Ancients, Evert Duyckinck, New York, 1806, p. 77. The various editions deviate in details. Erra Pater was a pseudonym of William Lilly (1602-1681); see Derek Parker, Familiar to All: William Lilly and Astrology in the Seventeenth Century, J. Cape, London, 1975), p. 88.

[38] Turner, Confessions, p. 8.

[39]  Cf. William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2010; H. Stanley Redgrove, Alchemy, Ancient and Modern, 2nd ed., William Rider & Son, London, 1922; David A. Katz, “An Illustrated History of Alchemy and Early Chemistry,” 2008, http://www.chymist.com/History%20Alchemy.pdf; T. Padmanabhan, “Dawn of Science: 6. The Arab Legacy,” Resonance – Journal of Science Education (Indian Academy of Sciences) 15, no. 11 (November 2010), pp. 1009–1015; also the classic Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch, Routledge, London, 1968, pp. 1–35, ch. 1 on mechanical arts, magic, and science.

[40] Turner, Confessions, p. 8.

[41] Ibid., p. 9.

[42] On Turner as a conjurer cf. Walter C. Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America, LSU Press, Baton Rouge, 2006, pp. 182–198.

[43] Turner, Confessions, p. 9.

[44] Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, ed. William Lloyd Garrison, At the Anti-Slavery Office, Boston, 1847, p. 33.

[45] Adam Clarke, The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments (...) With a Commentary and Critical Notes, 8 vols., Butterworth, London, 1810. Friendly information from Rick Francis (a descendant of victims of the massacre) in Courtland, Va., via email, August 30, 2016: “As to what writings Nat Turner might have had access.... Sally Francis’ brother, Nathaniel Francis, who died in 1849, inventory notes Clark’s [sic] Commentary ($12) and ‘books’ ($5). Otherwise the estate inventories of Salathiel Francis, Joseph Travis and Putnam Moore do not mention books.” A photo of Turner’s Bible is at http://ead.lib.virginia.edu/vivaxtf/view?docId=uva-sc/viu01760.xml#subseries51 .

[46] Rucker, The River Flows On, p. 197. On the merger of Christian and African religious traditions see Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past, Beacon Press, Boston, 1958, ch. 7, pp. 207-206. Jakobi Williams, “Nat Turner: The Complexity and Dynamic of His Religious Background,” Journal of Pan African Studies, no. 9 (2012): pp. 113–47; 132: relates the marks on Turner’s body to African traditions, but it turns out to be a mere claim without any source, not even a summary reference to Puckett or Herskovits.

[47] Makungu M. Akinyela, “Battling the Serpent: Nat Turner, Africanized Christianity, and a Black Ethos,” Journal of Black Studies 33, no. 3 (2003), pp. 255–280; 272. Vincent Harding, “Symptoms of Liberty and Blackhead Signposts: David Walker and Nat Turner,” in Kenneth S. Greenberg (ed.), Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, pp. 79–102; 82: “experiments in the ancient crafts of Africa and Asia: pottery, paper-making, and the making of gunpowder.”

[48] Turner, Confessions, p. 10. According to Harriss, “‘Where Is the Voice Coming From?’” p. 155, this is an example of embodied, or pseudo-biblical language in the Confessions.

[49] Turner, Confessions, p. 11.

[50] “(2) And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, (3) And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season.” (King James Version.) Cf. Revelation 12:9.

[51] Turner, Confessions, p. 10.

[52] Tragle, The Southampton Slave Revolt, p. 222: “That his comrades and even he were impressed with a belief that he could by the imposition of his hands cure disease […].” Eric Foner, ed., Nat Turner, Great Lives Observed, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1971, p. 35.

[53] Turner, Confessions, p. 11. The fact that “the white people” did not allow them to baptize in a church is important for the church/race relation of the time.

[54] Ibid.

[55] Ibid.

[56] Ibid.

[57] Jakob Böhme, The Works of Jacob Behmen, the Teutonic Theosopher.  Volume II, ed. William Law, Richardson, London, 1764, http://archive.org/details/worksofjacobbehm02beohuoft, figure XI, with explanation p. 31 (separate pagination). The illustration is also available at http://jacobboehmeonline.com/illustrations/diagram_11. On the reception of Boehme’s magic, alchemy, etc. see Cecilia Muratori, The First German Philosopher: The Mysticism of Jakob Böhme as Interpreted by Hegel, Springer, Heidelberg, 2016, pp. 1–66.

[58] Jakob Böhme, The Works of Jacob Behmen, The Teutonic Theosopher. Volume I, ed. William Law, Richardson, London, 1764, pp. 184 and 192, http://archive.org/details/worksofjacobbehm01beohuoft. Emphasis in the original.

[59] Turner, Confessions, pp. 11, 13, 14.

[60] Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Nat Turner’s Insurrection,” The Atlantic, August 1861, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1861/08/nat-turners-insurrection/308736/. Foner’s reprint of this article omits the reference to Boehme and the spirits: Foner, Nat Turner, p. 132.

[61] Turner, Confessions, p. 11.

[62] Ibid., p. 12.

[63] Ibid., p. 18.

[64] Ibid., p. 19. Cf. “But my chill blood is curdled in my veins:” Virgil, Aeneis V 395 f., John Dryden’s translation.

[65] Turner, Confessions, p. 18.

[66] Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy. Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art, Reprint Kraus, Nendeln, 1979 (Nelson, London, 1964), p. 117.

[67] Ibid., p. 120.

[68] Ibid., pp. 217–274.

[69] Ibid., p. 359.

[70] Aristotle, Problemata 30, 953 a 11 ff. and 954 b 2. Greek and English text in Ibid., 18–29.

[71] Ibid., p, 360.

[72] Turner, Confessions, pp. 18f.

[73] On Leeds see Brian Regal, “The Jersey Devil: The Real Story (Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 37.6, November/December 2013),” CSI Center for Inquiry, accessed April 5, 2016, http://www.csicop.org/si/show/the_jersey_devil_the_real_story.

[74] Daniel Leeds, The Temple of Wisdom for the Little World, in Two Parts. The First Philosophically Divine, Treating of the Being of All Beeings [Sic], and Whence Everything Hath Its Original, as Heaven, Hell, Angels, Men and Devils, Earth, Stars and Elements. And Particularly of All Mysteries Concerning the Soul; and of Adam before and after the Fall. Also, a Treatise of the Four Complexions, with the Causes of Spiritual Sadness, &c. To Which Is Added, a Postscript to All Students in Arts and Sciences. The Second Part, Morally Divine, Contains First, Abuses Stript and Whipt, by Geo. Wither, with His Discription of Fair Virtue. Secondly. A Collection of Divine Poems from Fr. Quarles. Lastly, Essayes and Religious Meditations of Sir Francis Bacon, Knight. Collected, Published and Intended for a General Good, by D.L., Bradford, Philadelphia, 1688, pp. 80 f.

[75] Ibid., p. 101.

[76] Ibid., p. 103.

[77] Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1970, p. 2.