Nat Turner and the Affective Power of Religious Fanaticism

ABSTRACT

This article draws on insights from scholarship on religion, race, and affect to understand the affective power of Nat Turner’s prophetic religion and critiques of Turner that dismissed him as a “fanatic.” It does so through a close reading of The Confessions of Nat Turner and an analysis of diverse newspaper and governmental reports responding to Turner’s religious narrative performance. It situates these sources within an antebellum affective economy in which Turner and his detractors sparred over the meaning and morality of the Southampton Rebellion. They did so through diverse appeals to powerful feelings, divine forces, and religious “truth.” The language of fanaticism was at the center of this sparring.

KEYWORDS:

• Nat Turner
• fanaticism
• affect
• race
• Southampton Rebellion
• United States
• slavery

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For classic treatments of what scholar of US religion Jon Butler called the “antebellum spiritual hothouse,” see Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith; Raboteau, Slave Religion; and Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America. For a survey of scholarship on religion, race, and violence, see Graber, “Religion and Racial Violence in the Nineteenth Century,” 387–402.

2 Literature on Turner is vast. For work that emphasizes Turner and Africana religion see Akinyela, “Battling the Serpent,” 255–80; Chireau, Black Magic, 68. For work on Turner’s religion in relation to black radicalism see Harding, There is a River; Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism. For work that situates Turner in broader antebellum supernaturalism and apocalypticism see Durrill, “Nat Turner and Signs of the Apocalypse,” 77–93. For work on Turner, Christianity, and exegesis, see Lampley, A Theological Account of Nat Turner; Tomlins, In the Matter of Nat Turner, xii–xiii. Historian Patrick Breen provides a general historical account of Turner that is attentive to religion. See Breen, The Land Shall Be Deluged in Blood.

3 Gray and Turner, The Confessions of Nat Turner.

4 For more expansive explorations of the meanings of fanaticism, see Toscano, Fanaticism; Lerner, Unknowing Fanaticism; and Colas, Civil Society and Fanaticism.

5 As my broader project demonstrates, this sense of fanaticism as distinct from enthusiasm and based on heated imagination and negative emotions was synthesized by little-known British minister Isaac Taylor in Fanaticism (New York: Jonathan Leavitt, 1834).

6 Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” 117–39. For work on religion and affect in particular, see Corrigan, “Introduction,” 1–21; Hazard, “Evangelical Encounters,” 200–34; Hamner, “Theorizing Religion and the Public Sphere,” 1008–49.

7 Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race.

8 Schuller, The Biopolitics of Feeling.

9 Orsi, History and Presence, 41.

10 For the concept of “religio-racial,” see Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming.

11 Egerton, “Nat Turner in a Hemispheric Context,” 136.

12 Harding, There is a River, 76. See also Durrill, “Nat Turner and Signs of the Apocalypse,” 77–93. Adam Joseph Jortner has examined the prevalence of supernaturalism of visions, prophecies, and miracles across the United States. See Jortner, Blood from the Sky.

13 Tomlins, In the Matter of Nat Turner.

14 Gray and Turner, Confessions, 19.

15 An American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828 ed., s.v. “fanatical.”

16 An American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828 ed., s.v. “affect.”

17 Gray and Turner, Confessions, 20.

18 Ibid., 19.

19 Ibid., 8.

20 Ibid., 8.

21 Ibid., 7.

22 Ibid., 10.

23 Ibid., 10.

24 Ibid., 10.

25 The idea that Turner had the ability to heal is only briefly mentioned in Confessions. Turner in Confessions mentions that he got a white man to cease his “wickedness,” and that after days of fasting and praying the man was healed. In early newspaper reports and in the record of Turner’s trial in the Southampton County Court Turner was represented as having a more direct role as a healer. Jeremiah Cobb, “Trial of Nat,” November 5, 1831 in The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation of Source Material, comp. Henry Irving Tragle (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 90.

26 Gray and Turner, Confessions, 10.

27 Ibid., 11.

28 Ibid., 11.

29 Ibid., 11.

30 Ibid., 11.

31 Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, esp. 210–3.

32 Harding, There is a River, 103.

33 As scholars have noted, the spectacular violence of anti-slavery uprisings should not distract from the other forms of resistance. For an account that focuses on anti-slavery resistance among women in Southampton, Virginia, see Holden, Surviving Southampton.

34 Dew, An Essay on Slavery, 4.

35 Miscellaneous, Niles Register, September 10, 1831 in Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831, 76.

36 Gray and Turner, Confessions, 4.

37 Ibid., 22.

38 Ibid., 19.

39 Ibid., 19.

40 Harding, There is a River, 99.

41 “Extract of a Letter Received in Richmond Dated Southampton, Nov. 1,” Alexandria Gazette, November 8, 1831.

42 Gray and Turner, Confessions, 4.

43 Ibid., 5.

44 American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), s.v. “gloomy.”

45 Letter to the Editor, Constitutional Whig, September 26, 1831, in Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831, 93.

46 Gray and Turner, Confessions, 9.

47 McDowell, Speech of James M’Dowell, Jr. of Rockbridge, in the House of Delegates of Virginia, on the Slave Question.

48 Such threats were reported in Daily Advertiser, September 1831 in Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831, 83; “Slave Insurrection,” Worcester Spy, September 1831, in Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831, 84. McDowell, Speech of James M’Dowell, Jr. of Rockbridge, in the House of Delegates of Virginia, on the Slave Question.

49 “Nat Turner Certainly Taken,” Enquirer, November 8, 1831. Originally published in the Norfolk Herald.

50 “Extract of a Letter from Jerusalem,” Richmond Enquirer, August 30, 1831 in Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831.

51 Raboteau, Slave Religion, 152–210.

52 Dew, “Abolition of Slavery”.

53 Brown, Regulating Aversion, 152.

54 Letter to the Editor, Lynchburg Virginian, September 15, 1831 in Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831, 80.

55 Letter from Senior Editor, August 27, Constitutional Whig in Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831, 55.

56 Gray and Turner, Confessions, 22.

57 Evans, The Burden of Black Religion, 17–63.

58 Letter to the Editor, Constitutional Whig, September 26, 1831, in Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831, 92.

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Jeffrey Wheatley

Jeffrey Wheatley is an assistant professor at Iowa State University in Religious Studies. He is an interdisciplinary teacher and researcher who studies religion, culture, and politics with a historical focus on the United States. His current project is on religious fanaticism as an object of secular policing.