Circumstance suggests that much of the pamphlet’s account of the rebellion existed in draft prior to Gray’s conversations with Turner. The first part of Turner’s account, however, dwells on his life from his birth until the rebellion, matters of which Gray could have had little detailed knowledge. Most of what is known of Nat Turner is to be found in a 24 page pamphlet, The Confessions of Nat Turner, written by a Southampton County attorney named Thomas Ruffin Gray who gained access to Turner in jail awaiting trial and over three days heard Turner’s account of himself and his rebellion. In the Matter of Nat Turner is an attempt to recover Turner, and his way of thinking. I call it “a speculative history” because it is a work of conjecture, of wondering about the connections between events and causes, between origins and outcomes. To put flesh on the bones of wondering my book inspects the fragments of text in which Turner is materialized and interleaves them with other texts – biblical, theological, philosophical, literary, sociological and anthropological – to tell his story. Nat Turner is known to history as a thirty-year-old Virginia slave who led a bloody rebellion that resulted in the death of fifty-five whites, mostly women and children. Beyond that, he is famous for being well-nigh unknowable. He has no gravesite, no remains there is no likeness of him. To the historian Kenneth Greenberg, Nat Turner is “the most famous, least-known person in American history.”
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