Chapter 30: Nat Turner’s rebellion sharply intensifies racial fears.

Two years after Walker’s Appeal, his apocalyptic vision of black slaves murdering white owners to win freedom becomes reality on the farm of Joseph Travis near Jerusalem, Virginia. There, in the night, a band of seven slaves use axes to hack Travis, his wife, Sally, and their two children (one a newborn infant) to death in their beds.

They are led by one Nat Turner, who reads and preaches the Bible on his plantation, and has a vision calling upon him to act. The band of some 40 rebels, head toward the town of Jerusalem, where church bells are already ringing out word of the Insurrection. At the Waller homestead, they pause to decapitate ten terror-stricken children and also murder their mother. As they depart, their strength reaches its zenith of 60-70 men, all eager to push onward.

The have sacked 15 homesteads and killed about 60 Whites by the time they encounter a series of town posses who break their momentum and forces them to retreat. While they try to re-group and add new recruits, this fails, and most are captured or killed on the spot.

Nat Turner escapes and hides for almost two months in the vicinity of the Travis farm, before he too is caught and jailed. At his trial he is nothing but defiant:

“I am not guilty, because I do not feel so…I’m not sorry for killing all those white people. I alone conceived the idea of insurrection, which has been evolving in my mind for several years. And, no I didn’t fail. Our names are now written in blood across the map of this county, nor will we be the last.”

Retribution is savage and fast. Turner himself is flayed, beheaded, quartered and ultimately skinned to make “memento purses,” which show up years later in estate sales. But lynchings also follow for any of the enslaved suspected of treasonous intents.