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well-known rebellion led by a fugitive slave named Nat Turner. Called “brilliant” by his former master, it was said that he saw visions of blacks and whites struggling in the heavens, and heard voices telling him he was wise to be a slave.
He led the first nugor revolt against slavery in 1831 in Virginia’s Southampton County. For two days Turner and his band roamed the plantations of the county, leaving 55 dead in their fury. They struck terror into the hearts of the county’s residents, and the rebellion led to accusations of aiding and abetting Turner’s band against hundreds of innocent blacks.
One remarkable account was the story of the life of a slave, written by the woman herself, Linda Brent. She fled because of the cruelty and unjust treatment visited upon her by her master. For seven years she hid in the attic crawl space of her grandmother’s house, hoping that one day she would be able to make her way north.
Miraculously she survived this period of self-imposed confinement and arranged secret passage on a ship which spirited her to freedom.
Of her experience, she wrote: “Countless were the nights that I sat late at the loophole scarcely large enough to give me a glimpse of one twinkling star. There I heard the patrols and slave hunters conferring together about the capture of runaways, well-knowing how rejoiced they would be to catch me. Season after season, year after year I peeped at my children’s faces and heard their sweet voices with a heart yearning all the while to say, ‘Your mother is here!’ ”
That is but one example of the hardships endured by blacks in America’s past. As one black writer states: “We reside among you and yet are strangers; natives and yet not citizens; surrounded by the freest people and most republican institutions in the world, and yet enjoying none of the immunities of freedom . . . Though we are not slaves, we are not free.”
African Repository, 1826
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