1. Thomas Gray, The Confessions of Nat Turner, in The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents, ed. Kenneth S. Greenberg (Boston, MA: Bedford, 1996), 54. All subsequent citations of the Confessions in this chapter will be from Greenberg’s excellent documentary collection. There are numerous copies of the “Confessions” available on the Internet. The copy of Nat Turner’s “Confessions” provided by the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill is perhaps the most authoritative. It can be accessed at,
http://docsouth.unc.edu
turner/turner.html.
2. For the importance of Nat Turner in black history, see Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981). For a discussion on the legacy of Nat Turner, see Kenneth S. Greenberg, “Introduction,” in Confessions, ed. Greenberg, 1–35. For a much more controversial reading of Nat Turner’s rebellion, see William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner (New York: Random House, 1967). For a critical response to Styron’s book, see John Henrik Clarke, ed., William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1968). For a recent exploration, see Kenneth S. Greenberg, ed., Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
3. Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage Books, 1999); David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
4. Harding, River; Herbert Aptheker, Nat Turner’s Rebellion (New York: Humanities Press, 1966); Stephen Oates, The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion (New York: New American Library, 1975).
5. William Lloyd Garrison, The Liberator, September 3, 1831.