Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 5: Nat Turner’s Rebellion and politics in 2024

Slave revolts were very much a part of the slavery system.

The historian Norman Finkelstein has recently provided a reminder of how “past” is a relative term with particular reference to the Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831. Finkelstein is a distinctly left historian and has been a critic of Zionist narratives during his entire career.

This short video recalls the event (1):

Finkelstein more recently discussed the Nat Turner rebellion in the context of the current Gaza war in this video (2):

Since anything at the moment that sounds like a critical evaluation of Israel’s current policy of war and starvation against civilians in Gaza is likely to provoke angry criticism from partisans of those policies being conducted by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, it’s not surprising that Finkelstein has been the object of considerable criticism.

Among other things, Finkelstein has written and spoken about historical parallels between the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023 that initiated the current round of brutal conflict and the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in 1831.

I often refer to Britannica Online as a stodgy but reliable source for facts on historical events, though it goes without saying that it’s far from a complete on infallible source. I heard Finkelstein himself in a recent interview refer to Britannica as a good source for quick basic fact checks. So here is its quick summary of the revolt:

Nat Turner’s rebellion put an end to the white Southern myth that slaves were either contented with their lot or too servile to mount an armed revolt. In Southampton county Black people came to measure time from “Nat’s Fray,” or “Old Nat’s War.” For many years in Black churches throughout the country, the name Jerusalem referred not only to the Bible but also covertly to the place where the rebel slave had met his death. [my emphasis]

Finkelstein used the Nat Turner rebellion as an event which could help understand an event like October 7. Murdering civilian noncombatants was seen as evil then in the US, at least when it came to white people. When perpetrated by white settlers on Native Americans, it wasn’t nearly so generally condemned by white Americans.

Today, there is a substantial body of international law on such matters. In fact, the American Civil War itself gave a major impetus to developing such laws, including laws of conflict relating to such matters as take-no-prisoners (“no quarter”) policies. As had the Crimean War in the previous decade.

Finkelstein puts particular stress on the fact that while contemporary Abolitionists condemned the killing of civilians, they also understood that rebellion was an inherent part of the slavery system:

Turner was demonized by whites after his death, the honorable exception being the White Abolitionists. William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the anti-slavery Liberator, championed moral suasion to win the public over to manumission. Yet, whereas he stated that the “excesses” of Turner’s revolt could not be justified and he was “horror-struck at the late tidings,” Garrison conspicuously did not condemn the slave revolt. Instead, he railed against the hypocrisy of those who sang paeans to the sanguinary struggles for liberty then being fought out in Europe, but who fell deathly silent when it came to the enslaved, lacerated Black population in their midst.

It took uncommon courage to take Garrison’s stand. A $5,000 price was put on his head in North Carolina while Georgia offered the same amount to anybody who would kidnap him and drag him for trial. The “radical” podcasting universe of our day wouldn’t risk two “likes” and one “share.”

Even as none contested the gruesome facts of the rebellion, Southern Blacks did not recoil in horror at Turner’s name. On the contrary: “He became a legendary Black hero … enshrined in an oral tradition that still flourishes today. They regard Nat’s rebellion as the ‘First War’ against slavery and the Civil War as the second. So in death Nat achieved a kind of victory denied him in life – he became a martyred soldier of slave liberation who broke his chains and murdered whites because slavery had murdered Negroes.”

The above words were written by [Stephen] Oates in 1973. In 1988, a book on Turner’s life (introduced by Coretta Scott King) was selected for inclusion in the “Black Americans of Achievement” biography series for children. By now, Nat Turner occupies an honored place in American history. [my emphasis in bold]

I’ve been writing a lot here about the current conflict in Gaza, which of course has already spread to other countries including Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. So I won’t go into that any further here. Other than to mention it’s on a whole different scale. The number killed by Turner’s rebels was exceeded already by the deaths on October 7, which has been multiplied many times over since.

Finkelstein’s reflections on the Turner rebellion in this context are a reminder that early 1800s in some ways is far away from us today. But in other ways, it’s like yesterday.

Notes:

(1) Looking at Nat Turner's Legacy. National Geographic YouTube channel 05/14/2017. <https://youtu.be/ZrRBGGVTM38?si=_3pa52jju7eZW3H9> (Accessed: 2024-30-03).

(2) Norman Finkelstein and Chris Hedges discuss Israel, Gaza, Oct. 7 at Princeton. The Real News Network YouTube channel 05/28/2024. <https://youtu.be/0eEz22kyukY?si=BtwzA42qHZBdtTkh> (Accessed: 2024-30-03).

(3) Finkelstein, Norman (2023): Nat Turner in Gaza. San Francisco Bay View 12/13/2023. <https://sfbayview.com/2023/12/nat-turner-in-gaza/> (Accessed: 2024-30-03).

(4) Editors (2023): Nat Turner. Britannica Online 11/07/2023., 7 Nov. 2023. <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nat-Turner> (Accessed: 2024-30-03).

(5) Editors (2024): Crimean War. Britannica Online 03/28/2024. <https://www.britannica.com/event/Crimean-War> (Accessed: 2024-30-03).