by Noel Rae
One last vision: “And on the 12th of May, 1828, I heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first.” But “until the first sign appeared I should conceal it from the knowledge of men.” This did not happen until early 1831, when there was a solar eclipse. “And immediately on the sign appearing in the heavens, the 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 (Henry, Hark, Nelson, and Sam). It was intended by us to have begun the work of death of the 4th of July,” but then Turner fell sick and the work was postponed until August 20.
They agreed that they would begin at the house belonging to Mr. Travis, Turner’s owner and “a kind master.” When they got there, “Hark went to the door with an axe for the purpose of breaking it open, as we knew we were strong enough to murder the family if they were awaked by the noise; but reflecting that it might create an alarm in the neighborhood, we determined to enter the house secretly and murder them whilst sleeping. Hark got a ladder and set it against the chimney, on which I ascended, and hoisting a window, entered and came down stairs, unbarred the door, and removed the guns from their places. It was then observed that I must spill the first blood, on which, armed with a hatchet and accompanied by Will, I entered my master’s chamber. It being dark I could not give a death blow; the hatchet glanced from his head; he sprang from the bed and called his wife; it was his last word; Will laid him dead with a blow of his axe, and Mrs. Travis shared the same fate as she lay in bed. The murder of this family, five in number, was the work of a moment, not one of them awoke. There was a little infant sleeping in a cradle that was forgotten until we had left the house and gone some distance, when Henry and Will returned and killed it.”
Their next target was the house belonging to Mr. Salathul Francis, “about six hundred yards distant. Sam and Will went to the door and knocked. Mr. Francis asked who was there. Sam replied it was him, and he had a letter for him; on which he got up and came to the door. They immediately seized him, and dragging him out a little from the door, he was dispatched by repeated blows on the head. There was no other white person in the family. We started from there for Mrs. Reese’s, maintaining the most perfect silence on our march, where, finding the door unlocked, we entered and murdered Mrs. Reese in her bed while sleeping. Her son awoke but … he had only time to say Who is that? and he was no more. From Mrs. Reese’s we went to Mrs. Turner’s, a mile distant, which we reached about sunrise on Monday morning. Henry, Austin and Sam went to the still, where, finding Mr. Peebles, Austin shot him, and the rest of us went to the house. As we approached, the family discovered us and shut the door. Vain hope! Will, with one stroke of his axe opened it, and we entered and found Mrs. Turner and Mrs. Newsome in the middle of the room, almost frightened to death. Will immediately killed Mrs. Turner with one blow of his axe. I took Mrs. Newsome by the hand, and with the sword I had when I was apprehended, I struck her several blows over the head, but not being able to kill her, as the sword was dull, Will, turning round and discovering it, despatched her also. A general destruction of property and search for money and ammunition always succeeded the murders.”
Their number having now grown to twenty-four, they divided into two groups and headed for the Whitehead house by different routes. On the way Turner’s group met Mr. Whitehead “standing in the cotton patch near the lane fence. We called him over,” and Will killed him with his axe. By the time they got to the house the others had already arrived and “all the family were already murdered but Mrs. Whitehead and her daughter Margaret. As I came round to the door I saw Will pulling Mrs. Whitehead out of the house, and at the step he nearly severed her head from her body with his broad axe. Miss Margaret, when I discovered her, had concealed herself in the corner formed by the projection of the cellar cap from the house. On my approach she fled, but was soon overtaken, and after repeated blows with the sword, I killed her by a blow on the head with a fence rail.”
It was now after nine o’clock in the morning. From twenty-four their number had grown to about forty “all mounted and armed with guns, axes, swords and clubs,” and carrying “terror and devastation wherever we went … Having murdered Mrs. Waller and ten children, [gathered there for school] we started for Mr. William Williams’, having killed him and two little boys that were there. While engaged in this, Mrs. Williams fled and got some distance from the house, but she was pursued, overtaken, and compelled to get up behind one of the company, who brought her back, and after showing her the mangled body of her lifeless husband, she was told to get down and lay by his side, where she was shot dead. I then started for Mr. Jacob Williams’, where the family was murdered. Here we found a young man named Drury, who had come on business with Mr. Williams; he was pursued, overtaken, and shot. Mrs. Vaughan’s was the next place we visited and, after murdering the family there, I determined on starting for Jerusalem [a nearby town]. Our number now amounted to fifty or sixty.”
By now the militia had turned out and regular troops were on the way. After the first skirmishes Turner’s men went from sixty to forty and then twenty. The next day, “coming in sight of Captain Harris’, where we had been the day before, we discovered a party of white men at the house, on which all deserted me but two.” By Wednesday evening Turner found himself alone in the woods dodging mounted patrols. He then “gave up all hope for the present, and on Thursday night, after having supplied myself with provisions from Mr. Travis’, I scratched a hole under a pile of fence rails in a field, where I concealed myself for six weeks.”
At first he left his hiding place only very briefly and at night to fetch water; then, growing more confident, “I began to go about in the night and eavesdrop the houses in the neighborhood.” This led to his capture, for one night while he was out a dog crawled into his hiding place and stole some meat. “A few nights later, two Negroes having started to go hunting with the same dog, and passed that way, the dog came again to the place, and having just gone out to walk about, discovered me and barked, on which, thinking myself discovered, I spoke to them to beg concealment. On making myself known, they fled from me. Knowing then they would betray me, I immediately left my hiding place, and was pursued almost incessantly until I was taken a fortnight afterwards by Mr. Benjamin Phipps, in a little hole I had dug out with my sword, for the purpose of concealment, under the top of a fallen tree. On Mr. Phipps’ discovering the place of my concealment, he cocked his gun and aimed at me. I requested him not to shoot, and I would give up, upon which he demanded my sword. I delivered it to him and he brought me to prison.”
By the time the rampage ended, some sixty whites, many of them children, had been murdered. The number would have been higher but for some of the domestic slaves. Thus “Miss Whitehead concealed herself between the bed and the mat that supported it, while they murdered her sister in the same room without discovering her. She was afterwards carried off and concealed for protection by a slave of the family, who gave evidence against several of them on their trial.” Also, as the rebels approached the house of John Barrow, he told his wife to make her escape while he held them off. “As directed by him, she attempted to escape through the garden, when she was caught and held by one of her servant girls, but another coming to her rescue, she fled to the woods and concealed herself.”
Turner was hanged on November 11, 1831. Fifty-four others were also executed, and many more were banished. As the panic spread, wrote Henry “Box” Brown, slaves were “whipped, hung, and cut down with swords in the streets [of Richmond], and some that were found away from their quarters after dark were shot. The whole city was in the utmost excitement, and the whites seemed terrified beyond measure. Great numbers of slaves were loaded with irons; some were ‘half-hung,’ as it was termed: th
at is, they were suspended from some tree with a rope around their necks, so adjusted as not quite to strangle them, and then they were pelted by men and boys with rotten eggs.”
Dramatic events such as plots and insurrections, with their court trials and public executions, naturally tended to overshadow acts of individual defiance. Of these some were recorded in the personal narratives of former slaves, such as the Rev. G. W. Offley, who told this story about a slave called Praying Jacob:
“Jacob’s rule was to pray three times a day, at just such an hour of the day; no matter what his work was, or where he might be, he would stop and go and pray. His master has been to him and pointed his gun at him, and told him if he did not cease praying he would blow out his brains. Jacob would finish his prayer and then tell his master to shoot and welcome—your loss will be my gain—I have two masters, one on earth and one in heaven—master Jesus in heaven and master Saunders on earth. This man [Saunders] said in private conversation that several times he went home and drank an unusual quantity of brandy to harden his heart that he might kill him; but he never had power to strike or shoot him.”
At the opposite end of the spiritual spectrum was J. D. Green, who was born in 1813 and as a boy worked as a servant in the household of Judge Charles Earle in Maryland. Green was not one to leave scores unsettled, so when a white boy stole his marbles he fought to get them back. “I had him on the ground when Mr. Burney came up. He kicked me away from the white boy, saying if I belonged to him he would cut off my hands for daring to strike a white boy.”
So now Green had another score to settle, and soon got his chance to do so. “At this time my master’s wife had two lovers, this same Burney and one Rogers. Master’s wife seemed to favor Burney most, who was a great smoker, and she provided him with a large pipe with a German silver bowl, which screwed on the top; this pipe she usually kept on the mantel piece, ready filled with tobacco. One morning I was dusting and sweeping out the dining-room, and saw the pipe on the mantelpiece. I took it down, and went to my young master William’s [gun] powder closet and took out his powder horn, and after taking half the tobacco out of the pipe filled it nearly full with powder, and covered it over with tobacco to make it appear as usual, replaced it, and left. Rogers came in about eight o’clock in the morning, and remained until eleven, when Mr. Burney came, and in about an hour I saw a great number running about from all parts of the plantation. I left the barn where I was thrashing buck-wheat and followed the rest to the house, where I saw Mr. Burney lying back in the arm chair in a state of insensibility, his mouth bleeding profusely, and from particulars given it appeared he took the pipe as usual, and lighted it, and had just got it to his mouth when the powder exploded. The party suspected was Rogers, who had been there immediately preceding; and Burney’s son went to Rogers and they fought about the matter. Law ensued, which cost Rogers $800, Burney $600 and his face disfigured; and my master’s wife came in for a deal of scandal, which caused further proceedings at law, costing the master $1400, and I was never once suspected.”
Many other stories have come down to us orally, most notably those included in the Slave Narratives. Here are a few examples:
ELLEN CRAGIN, OF LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS, told this story about her mother: “She didn’t work in the field, she worked at a loom. She worked so long and so often that once she went to sleep at the loom. Her master’s boy saw her and told his mother. His mother told him to take a whip and wear her out. He took a stick and went to beat her awake. When she woke up she took a pole out of the loom and beat him nearly to death with it. He hollered, ‘Don’t beat me no more, and I won’t let ’em whip you.’ She said, ‘I’m going to kill you. These black titties sucked you, and then you come out here to beat me.’ And when she left him he wasn’t able to walk. And that was the last I seen of her until after freedom. She went out and got on an old cow that she used to milk—Dolly, she called it. She rode away from the plantation because she knew they would kill her if she stayed.”
LEONARD FRANKLIN, OF WARREN, ARKANSAS, recalled this of his mother: “There wasn’t many men could class up with her when it come to working. She could do more work than any two men. There wasn’t no use for no one man to try to do nothing with her. No overseer never downed her … Her boss [a man called Pennington] went off deer hunting once for a few weeks. While he was gone the overseer tried to whip her. She knocked him down and tore his face up so that the doctor had to tend to him. When Pennington came back, he noticed his face all patched up and asked him what was the matter with it. The overseer told him that he went down in the field to whip the hands, and that he just thought he would hit Lucy a few licks to show the slaves that he was impartial, but she jumped on him and like to tore him up. Old Pennington said to him, ‘Well, if that is the best you could do with her, damned if you won’t just have to take it.’”
JOHN HENRY KEMP, OF DAYTONA BEACH, FLORIDA: “One day when an old woman was plowing in the field an overseer came by and reprimanded her for being so slow. She gave him some back talk, he took out a long closely woven whip and lashed her severely. The woman became sore and took her hoe and chopped him right across his head, and, child, you should have seen how she chopped this man to a bloody death.”
WEST TURNER, OF WHALEYVILLE, VIRGINIA, on what happened when Aunt Sallie, who had been nurse to the white children in the “big house,” was put to work in the field as a punishment after her mistress had complained about her: “Aunt Sallie ain’t said nothing but the next morning she ain’t nowhere about. Finally Marsa come down to the quarters and get my pa and ask him where was Aunt Sallie. Pa says he don’t know nothing about her. Marsa didn’t do nothing to pa, but he knowed pa was lying ’cause he done heard that pa had been feeding Aunt Sallie in the night time. Well, pa used to put food in a pan ‘neath the wash bench outside the cabin, and it was so dark Aunt Sallie come on inside to eat it.
“I was lying on the pallet listening to her and pa whispering and just then there came a banging on the door. It was wedged shut and there was old Marsa banging. ‘Come on out there, Sallie,’ he yelled. ‘I know you is in there.’ Didn’t nobody say nothing. Then I heard old Marsa yelling for all the niggers and telling them to come there and catch Sallie else he going to whip them all. They all come, too, and gather round the door. Pa didn’t know what to do. But Aunt Sallie ain’t catched yet. She grabbed up a scythe knife from the corner and she pulled the chock out that door and come out a-swinging. And those niggers was glad ’cause they didn’t want to catch her. And Marsa didn’t dare touch her.
“She cut her way out, then turned round and backed off into the woods, and old Marsa was just screaming and cussing and telling her one minute what he’s gonna do when he catch her, and the next minute saying he gonna take her back in the big house if she stay. I was peeking out of the slip of window, and the last I see was Aunt Sallie going into the bushes still swinging that scythe. Didn’t no one follow her neither.”
AN ANONYMOUS FORMER SLAVE, POSSIBLY CHARLIE CRAWLEY OF VIRGINIA: “Old Saunders was the meanest poor white devil that ever drawed breath. Had beat and beat us till we made up our mind not to stand it no longer. One bright moonlight night Marsa told the overseer to put all the slaves out in the planting patch for to clean it up and get it in order for planting the next day. We had already worked all day so we decided we was gonna fix old Saunders that night.
“Marsa went on in and went to bed and we went out to the field and started raking up the brush. The overseer told some of us to pile the tree limbs and brush in the middle of the patch so’s he could set fire to it. When there was a right big pile that old devil struck a match to it and soon it blazed up. Just then someone yelled, ‘Look, what a big fire we got.’ That was the signal. Old overseer was standing near the blaze with his hands behind him, and some of the slaves crept up behind and all at once pushed him over in the fire. Down he went on his face in the middle of the pile, and all of us just kept piling brush on top of him.
“The next morning there
wasn’t no overseer to call us out at sun up, and everybody stood round making believe they was waiting for him. Bye and bye Marsa come out and ask where Saunders was. For a long time nobody said nothing. At last someone said, ‘Marsa, when I seed him last he was standing out in the middle of the field burning the brush. Didn’t see him no more after we finish clearing up last night.’
“Marsa went out in the field and call and call the overseer, but didn’t get no answer. Then he got some more white men and they went on a hunt, beating through the bushes round the field, but they didn’t find him. Finally someone got to poking round the ashes of the fire with a stick, and poked out something, then yelled for the others. It was the overseer’s heart. You know the heart don’t burn. They talked out there for a long time, and we stood round the edge of the field watching them. Finally, Marsa come and told us to go clear another field. He say he guess Saunders had got sick while standing there and fell over in the brush and got burnt up.”
WILLIAM MOORE, OF DALLAS, TEXAS: “Marse Tom had a fine, big house painted white and a big prairie field in front his house and two, three farms and orchards. He had five hundred head of sheep, and I spent most my time being a shepherd boy. Marse Tom been dead long time now. I believe he’s in hell. Seem like that where he belong. He was a terrible mean man and had a indifferent mean wife. But he had the finest, sweetest chillen the Lord ever let live and breathe on this earth. They’s so kind and sorrowing over us slaves. Some them chillen used to read us little things out of papers and books.