The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion

by Stephen B. Oates

The true story behind the new motion picture Birth of a Nation

“A penetrating reconstruction of the most disturbing and crucial slave uprising in America’s history.” —New York Times

The bloody slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831 and the savage reprisals that followed shattered beyond repair the myth of the contented slave and the benign master, and intensified the forces of change that would plunge America into the bloodbath of the Civil War.

Stephen B. Oates, the celebrated biographer of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., presents a gripping and insightful narrative of the rebellion—the complex, gifted, and driven man who led it, the social conditions that produced it, and the legacy it left. A classic now newly reissued to include the text of the original 1831 court document “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” here is the dramatic re-creation of the turbulent period that marked a crucial turning point in America's history.

 

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Biography, Civil War, African American, American Civil War

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

An expert on 18th century U.S. history, Stephen B. Oates was professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he taught from 1969 until his retirement in 1997. Oates received his BA (1958), MA (1960), and Ph.D. (1969) from the University of Texas.

Oates wrote 16 books during his career, including biographies of Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Clara Barton, and John Brown, and an account of Nat Turner's slave rebellion. His Portrait of America, a compilation of essays about United States history, is widely used in advanced high school and undergraduate university American history courses. His two "Voices of the Storm" books are compilations of monologues of key individuals in events leading up to and during the American Civil War. He also appeared in the well-known Ken Burns PBS documentary on the war.

Oates received the Nevins-Freeman Award of the Chicago Civil War Round Table for his historical work on the American Civil War.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

“They spread inside without a sound. The others wanted Nat...to strike the first blow and kill Joseph Travis. With [fellow slave] Will close behind, Nat entered the master bedroom where Joseph and [his wife] Sally lay sleeping. Now. Nat swung his hatchet in the darkness - a wild blow that glanced off Travis's head. Instantly Joseph bolted upright and screamed for his wife in deranged, incomprehensible terror. But Will moved in and hacked Joseph and Sally to pieces, bringing his ax down again, and again, and again. In minutes Will and the others had slaughtered the four whites they found in the house, including Joel Westbrook and Putnam Moore. With the deaths of Putnam and Joseph Travis, Nat had no earthly masters left. After thirty years in bondage, he was free at last. Yes, free at last…”
- Stephen B. Oates, The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion

The deadliest slave revolt in U.S. history took place in the early morning hours of August 21, 1831, in Southampton County, Virginia. It was led by a slave-turned-mystic named Nat Turner, who claimed to have received his orders from God. The fury unleashed by Turner killed approximately 60 white people, including women and children.

By August 23, the rebellion had been suppressed by local militia units. Eventually, Virginia executed 56 black people for taking part in the short-lived uprising. As many as 200 more were killed in spasms of violence perpetrated by vengeful militiamen. Nat was captured, placed on trial, convicted, and sentenced to death. On November 11, 1831, he was hanged from “a gnarled old tree” northeast of the town of Jerusalem. The body was given to surgeons for dissection. “They skinned it,” wrote 19th century historian William Sidney Drewry, “And made grease of the flesh.”

It is hard to measure the actual effects, be they large or small, that Turner’s Rebellion had on the course of history, given that the Civil War took another 30 years – and another failed uprising – to begin. Still, there’s no question as to the insurrection’s emotive power. Nearly two centuries later, it still resonates with people. Like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, it has become a vivid symbol of defiance in the face of oppression.

***

Turner’s Rebellion is also exceedingly controversial.

From William Styron’s novel The Confession of Nat Turner to Nate Parker’s film The Birth of a Nation, artists have wrestled with Turner’s legacy, and his meaning.

Thus, perhaps the most surprising thing about Stephen B. Oates’s The Fires of Jubilee is how non-controversially it is presented. Oates plays this one straight down the middle, delivering a short (154 pages of text) narrative that delivers the facts – as they are documented – without any additional commentary, steering clear of any interpretations of the tale he’s just delivered.

This results in a book that satisfyingly delivers the history, without any argument as to why it matters or endures.

***

Oates begins The Fires of Jubilee with a prologue that sets the scene of Southampton County in 1831. From there, he takes us through what is known of Nat Turner’s life before he attained his historical immortality. The bulk of this book is devoted to a painstaking recreation of Turner’s brief, vicious killing spree. The slaves who took part in the uprising used the tools at hand for weapons, making for unavoidably gruesome assaults that played into white fears and propaganda forever after.

***

Turner’s path is related in narrative fashion by Oats, which makes for gripping, white-knuckled reading, especially during the rebellion itself.

I am not convinced, however, that this is the best way to tell the story. There is a lot about Turner’s short rebellion to unpack, and Oates doesn’t even bother.

To take just one example, we have the issue of Nat Turner hearing voices from God. This – at least to me – seems like something worth exploring.

Obviously, I understand why Oates would steer clear of this tricky issue. Turner is a hero who took the freedom that belonged to him by natural law. It would be wrong – given his circumstances – to simply reduce him to a mental health diagnosis. Yet he also displayed the kind of hyper-religiosity that modern psychiatrists or psychologists would question.

Other moral complexities of the rebellion stem from Turner’s conduct, especially with regard to the killing of non-combatants. Again, a person attempting to secure their freedom in a world that does not recognize him as human exists in an ethical universe very different from the one that we move through every day. Nevertheless, Oates should have at least aired these issues, even if answers cannot be provided.

***

Oates's choice to write in a novelistic fashion also obscures the dearth of hard historical fact underlying Turner’s Rebellion.

The bulk of Turner’s story comes from his alleged “confession” to a local attorney named Thomas R. Gray. Gray later published his interview with Turner in book form. To Oates’s credit, he does include a quick analysis as to why he feels that Gray’s The Confessions of Nat Turner is a credible source, though other historians disagree. My edition of the book even includes Gray’s work in its entirety.

That said, I wanted more discussion of the various sources included within the text. Given the explosive atmosphere, and the way that whites used the rebellion for their own ends, it’s important to know where the evidence came from, and what credibility it deserves. Oates relies heavily on trial records, for instance, yet never explains whether the testimony adduced during those trials came as the product of coercion or force.

Narratives are seamless by their nature. They give you the illusion of something generally agreed upon. General agreement certainly does not define the Turner legacy.

***

Oates concludes The Fires of Jubilee with an epilogue set in Southampton County in 1973, two years before the original publication date. For the only time in the book, Oates writes in the first-person. He describes doing research in the Southampton County Courthouse. He details a road trip that followed in Turner’s path, visiting the few sites that still exist.

It adds up to a fascinating essay, a vision of the South in the midst of the Civil Rights movement, where blacks and whites shared an uneasy existence. Oates astutely observes a region of superficial politeness and gentility that acted as a veneer for simmering racial tension. I think The Fires of Jubilee would have been far more effective and memorable if Oates used this style throughout. We may be through with the past – as the saying goes – but the past is not through with us.

***

If you study the American Civil War long enough, you start to hear people questioning – under their breaths – why more enslaved persons did not rebel. The same kind of mutterings come from the dark corners of Second World War historiography, directed at Jewish people who were sent to the camps.

The answer – for both the black enslaved and the Jewish people of Europe – is that they were part of a vast system designed to blunt that very thing. This is why state laws in the South worked to prevent literacy, kept abolitionist materials from filtering down from the North, and reacted with extreme severity to any signs of revolt. This is why the severed heads of those who rebelled decorated the roadsides in Southampton County.

Nat Turner tried to overcome all that. In so doing, he is a resonant reminder of generations of people whose lives were lived for the profits of others. Ultimately, the Turner Rebellion is one of those historical moments where deriving a symbolic meaning seems far more important than a strict chronological retelling.

Good as it is, The Fires of Jubilee is not quite up to the task of capturing the elusive spirit of Nat Turner. Indeed, the gaps in the historical record mean that Turner’s story belongs more naturally to the fiction writer and the filmmaker. Tethered to sources that are too few in number, and subject to numerous biases, Oates simply cannot harness the underlying power of Nat Turner’s saga.

[Eric Byrd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Benjamin and Elizabeth Turner, Nat’s original owners in Southampton County, Virginia, were Methodists. Methodism had spread wildly across America in the late eighteenth century; and like many zealous divines before they become institutionalized, the missionary Methodist preachers pounding over the young republic’s backcountry roads brought rather uncomfortable news to the converts who gathered to hear them—namely that God did not approve of their owning other people. That didn’t play in the South, however, and rather than lose congregants, the Methodist elders promulgated tepid half measures: like, Methodist clergy couldn’t own slaves; or, Methodist converts could own slaves, but couldn’t trade in them; finally, they gave even that up, and contented themselves with encouraging Methodist slaveholders to Christianize their slaves and so prepare their souls for the Kingdom of Heaven, where the raw deal they were getting here on earth would be recompensed, sort of.

This Benjamin and Elizabeth Turner duly did, and their slaves, like those of many others, were fed a steady diet of the submission- and obedience-counseling passages from the Old Testament, along with the quietist, turn-the-other-cheek stuff from the New. Problem was, their slave boy Nat, son of a runaway father and pure-blood African mother, was something of a genius—Benjamin Turner even said Nat would be of no use to anyone as a slave. Nat somehow learned to read (no one ever figured out how), and got a hold of a Bible. Therein he found all the crazy shit his owners probably wouldn’t have wanted him to know about, like the eschatological visions of the exiled Hebrew prophets—you know, the captive Israelites must smite down their oppressor—and the apocalyptic phantasmagoria of the book of Revelations. Nat Turner—brilliant, prideful, and increasingly bitter about being a slave, especially after being broken to field hand, and sold away from his wife and children—“grew to manhood with the words of the prophets roaring in his ears.” Uh-oh!

Nat Turner among his fellow slaves was a lot like Crazy Horse among the Sioux—aloof, austere, given to bouts of broody introspection and solitary rambles during which he fasted himself into visions. He was an outsider, but all the more impressive for his abstention from group amusements like apple brandy and dancing; and the other slaves felt that because he had magically taught himself to read, and bore cranial bumps and birthmarks that in African tradition mark the warrior-prophet, he must represent a mystic potential worth respecting. So when he began to hear the Spirit talking to him in the fields, and discovered blood droplets on the corn (“as though it were dew from Heaven”), and find leaves marked with runic symbols, and see black spirits and white spirits battling in the sky, they believed him. To whites Turner was the object of at times uneasy curiosity—this “smart nigger” who even dared baptize and pronounce born again a white man, a neighborhood ne’er-do-well by the name of Etheldred P. Brantley—but generally they felt reassured by his obvious piety and abstemiousness, as well as by his mask of “Yessuh!” In hindsight, it seems incredible that they could have thought innocuous a man who preferred to spend his scant free time exhorting hellfire, or fasting and praying alone in the woods. Don’t fear the drunken slave, he’ll be asleep soon enough, fear the slave who believes alcohol incompatible with his holy mission.

So during the late 1820s Nat was allowed considerable freedom of movement among the county’s farms, to preach at Sunday slave “praise meetings.” These rambles not only allowed him to sow dissension among his fellow slaves and identify which of them seemed suited to his plan, but also to gain a tactical knowledge of the county’s topography, and, ominously, to note the cruel and kind among the masters and overseers. On Saturday, August 13, 1831, there occurred some sort of atmospheric disturbance that dimmed the sun and produced a visible black spot on its surface. This event caused consternation up and down the eastern seaboard, from South Carolina to New York, and many in the religious young republic feared the end was nigh…such fears were complete nonsense everywhere but in Southampton County, where Nat Turner saw the sun spot as the “black hand of Jehovah,” an unambiguous sign that it was time to launch the backwoods Judgment Day he had been preparing: “It was plain to me that the Saviour was about to lay down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and the great Day of Judgment was at band.”

The next Sunday night, with the whites gorged and drowsy from a day of convivial barbeque, Nat and his followers burst from the woods. At first they eschewed firearms in the interest of stealth; with windmilling axe blows, jugular daggers and, later, musket volleys, they destroyed some 60 whites—men, women, babes in cradle, a schoolyardful of children decapitated and left in “one bloody heap.” As Turner’s men neared the uprising’s vague objective, the town of Jerusalem, Virginia (Holy Land place-names add what is perhaps a gratuitous touch to this already Boschian tale), they acquired guns, horses, plentiful liquor, and a semblance of tactical disposition:

Nat placed his twenty most dependable fighters in front and sent them galloping down on the homesteads before anybody could escape. The rest of his troops moved helter-skelter behind the advance cavalry, some guarding Negro hostages, others drinking brandy. For some unknown reason, Nat stationed himself in the rear of his strung-out forces, riding alone again, lost in his thoughts and his prayers.

After personally claiming but a single victim—a teenage girl he chased across a field, overtook, then brained with a fence rail—Turner rode apart, probably to look for further signs and direction from the Almighty, but usually caught up his men, “sometimes got in sight in time to see the work of death completed,” he later said, and “viewed the mangled bodies as they lay, in silent satisfaction, and immediately started in quest of other victims.” He had the idea that his massacres were prelude to the apocalypse, but obliterating several families only served to instigate the well-armed militia company that attacked and scattered his band on its second day of marauding. Turner fled back into the woods, where he hid out for two months before his discovery, trial, and hanging. He went to the gallows unrepentant and self-commanding, confident in Christ-parallels, ready for that hereafter.

Before his execution, as he languished, “loaded with chains,” in the pit of the gaol, Turner was approached by a local lawyer who wanted to secure an avowal that the killing spree was not part of a coordinated interstate uprising, the specter of which was causing many summary massacres of slaves and free blacks by cagey white mobs in Virginia and North Carolina. Turner went on record to make such an avowal, and in the process dictated his famous Confessions—autobiographical essay, delusive religious testament, and a powerful contribution to the debate, already then in progress, about the uprising’s political meaning and consequences, and the future, at least in Virginia, of the South’s peculiar domestic institution.

The ferocious rage, the absolutely ruthless nature and extent of Turner’s murders shattered forever the Upper South slaveholders’ pretentions to a benevolent, mildly paternal slavery—the whole propaganda of happy darkies strumming banjos in the sweet summer dusk, contented after a day of honest Christian toil redemptive of their ancestral heathenhood. Violence like Turner’s is the resort of the desperate and the vengeful, not the contended. It was therefore imperative that the proslavery authorities, in defending the institution from Virginians who in Turner’s wake pointed out its great danger, to label Turner an aberrant slave (which he was, of course, but not exclusively so—he had disciples after all, and many spontaneous joiners) and a religious fanatic…and a religious fanatic he surely is by our lights, but not by the standards of his time. Set next to the behavior of his owners, Turner’s actually looks quite normal, an idea he makes plain in his unrepentant confessions; where they found biblical justification of slavery, he found biblical justification of the murder of slaveholders. As Lincoln would write in his Second Inaugural Address, Americans on both sides of the great slavery war read the same Bible, invoked the same God while spilling each other’s blood.

I would place Nat Turner among the singular black men whose powers, Du Bois wrote, are seen, “throughout history,” to “flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.” The tale of Turner’s intellectual life is obviously one of isolation, impoverishment, and grotesque warping; nonetheless, in it we see powers equal to the attainment of literacy with a only a smuggled grammar—to the assimilation of classical rhetoric while being worked and whipped like a mule—to a revelation of the radicalism of the slaveholders’ cherished Bible, and the winnowing of murderous propaganda from the text meant to pacify and humble him. In his confession he says God told him to slay his enemies “with their own weapons.”


Poised against the Mayflower is the slave ship—manned by Yankees and Englishmen—bringing another race to try against the New World, that will prove its tenacity and ability to thrive by seizing upon the Christian religion…—William Carlos Williams

And about this time I had a vision—and I saw white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened—the thunder rolled in the Heavens, and blood flowed in the streams…—Nat Turner


Stephen B. Oates shows up in Ken Burns’ The Civil War looking and sounding like Ned Flanders with a southern accent and fire in his belly—mustachioed, bespectacled and be-sweatered, righteously arraigning command decisions of the Gettysburg campaign (“Lee had come by Gettysburg to believe in his invincibility and that of his men, and it was his doom”). His is a smoothly integrated, Cattonesque narrative style (Catton supplies an epigraph), the authorial emphases and particulars of presentation defended in the extensive essayistic endnotes. I found it went down all too easy at times. I for one like it when historians work through interpretations before the reader, make a performance of the sifting and assembly of atrocious fragments, with lots of bewildered shrugs and rueful sighing; as an archivist—bored sentry over page-turning patrons—maybe I like to see the documentary grunt work show up in the prose. But Oates is still quite effective—even gives a nod to modernistic meta-history with an epilogic first-person account of a visit to Southampton County, to the farms still standing—and this book will make your hair stand up. There’s a graphic novel based on Turner’s revolt that is considered one of the most violent ever published, and all despite never straying from the historical record. Not sure why Oates didn’t append Turner’s Confessions, they’re not that long:

http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/turner/tu...

[Stewart Home · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Fires of Jubilee is an easy to read but rather unsatisfactory account of the extraordinary slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831. While the author is clearly attempting to be objective he nonetheless suffers from all the usual blind spots and prejudices you'd expect from a liberal academic historian. For all his faults, Oates is honest within his own limitations - but then 'honesty' within such limitations simply isn't good enough. For example, this is Oates providing an account of his trip (with his wife Ruth) to the site of the Nat Turner's slave rebellion: "...a dark blue sedan bore down on us... and the dread rose in us again. It turned out to be two blacks... who forced us to pull over... Though I did not want to I got out of the car and went over to talk... The woman was glowering... This was black property. Evidently her family had lived in the area a long time and that was their tractor and plows up at the Vaughn house; and I guess they thought that I, a white boy, had come here to syphon gas or steal something else. I explained that I was a writer down here doing a book on Nat Turner... and had simply wanted to have a look at the old Vaughan place. "You doin' a book on Nat Turner?" The woman asked. And her hostility subsided into ordinary suspicion. She checked out my car plates - asked me a few questions... and then relaxed a little... She knew about Nat Turner, a lot about him. Her mother had a magazine down at the house with an article - pictures - on the rebellion... She said I could come to the house and see the magazine if I wanted. But I was too shaken to go, made some wretched excuse, said good-bye... 'Jesus,' Ruth sighed, 'Let's go back to the motel.'..." All of which makes me think the white liberal is four parts bullshit to one part hesitation (and vice versa).... Two stars because the book is properly researched - but I'm being very generous here.

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nat Turner is a name unlikely to stir the imagination of most Americans. Unless one is coming fresh from a US History course, Turner tends to get lost in the muddle of early America. I find only some of my students have heard of him; seldom can any of them tell me what he did.

Turner was a slave in Southampton County, Virginia, inland from the Chesapeake Bay but still swampy and hot. The slaveholders of the area prided themselves on governing their slaves with a gentle hand, unlike the fearsome reputation of large-scale plantation life in faraway Georgia or Mississippi. Turner’s masters--he had several, and by the time of his revolt in 1831 had been inherited by a nine-year old boy--were indulgent farmers below the planter class line, and under them Turner became a Baptist slave preacher and renowned local mystic.

In The Fires of Jubilee, Stephen Oates describes Turner as a precocious child, supposedly knowing how to read and write without having to learn and having knowledge of events that took place before he was even born. Over time, he came to have a keen sense of purpose and had visions and communications from the Holy Ghost, telling him to prepare to take up Christ’s yoke and end slavery for all time. He built a conspiracy slowly, relying on a small core of trusted confidants, and in August of 1831 he struck.

Turner and his small army spent most of a day roving across the Virginia countryside, assaulting whites of all ages and sexes. Turner’s rebels killed around sixty people, including ten children fleeing a schoolhouse, a number of toddlers, and an infant in a cradle. Turner himself murdered only one person, a woman whom he beat to death with a fencepost. Oates’s descriptions of the attacks are frank and unembellished and all the more disturbing as a result. Most of the killing occurred in the early hours of the revolt, before word got out and Turner’s forces began arriving at abandoned farmsteads. Local militia offered resistance and Turner’s rebellion began to fall apart even before the US Army arrived from the coast. The slave army disintegrated, resulting in a series of reprisals and vigilante attacks that actually worsened the conditions of slaves not just in southeast Virginia, but throughout the South. Turner himself managed to hide for a month and a half until captured by a poor white hunting in the woods. He then faced the fate of his fellow rebels and many more slaves and free blacks besides, and was hanged.

Oates tells Turner’s story in a dramatic, engaging narrative perfect for the general reader or student. It’s well researched and situates Turner’s life in its broader historical context, the tidewater South of the Second Great Awakening and the Nullification Controversy. Oates has a particularly good eye for the telling detail and the character sketch, and the narrative he constructs from his sources deftly portrays the complexities of life in a slave society. He also, to his great credit, does not downplay the violence of Turner’s rebellion, forcing the reader to question his sympathies and the proper lengths to go in resisting a wicked system.

The book has some minor weaknesses. Oates tends to root Turner’s visions and violence in personal resentment at his lowly station. This is an interpretation that seems to downplay the religious dimension of Turner’s revolt. Not being familiar with the primary sources on the topic, I can’t say whether there’s anything to this interpretation, but it seems that religion, an apocalyptic sense of divine purpose, was Turner’s motivation. Oates doesn’t make much of this, but it muddies his presentation of Turner’s character and actions.

Second, Oates relies rather too heavily on intuitions and “undoubtedlys” in some passages. For example:

On December 3 . . . the Vice-President [John C. Calhoun] stopped over in Richmond on his way back to the national capital, dined and chatted with [Virginia Governor] Floyd, and told him that South Carolina would nullify the tariff ‘unless it is greatly modified.’ Floyd recorded nothing else about their conversations, but Calhoun undoubtedly explained that South Carolinians too were upset about Nat Turner and blamed abolitionists like [William Lloyd] Garrison for inciting slave revolts (137).

Given that the source for Calhoun and Floyd’s dinnertime conversation is Floyd’s diary and he “recorded nothing else” beyond their nullification talk, this is rather a lot to hang on the word “undoubtedly.” Calhoun may have said this; the problem is we can’t know. Better to leave things like this in the dark rather than drift into speculative fiction. Fortunately, like Oates’s iffy interpretation of Turner’s motivations, this is a problem that only occasionally pops up.

The only part of the book I had real problems with was the epilogue, in which which Oates recounts visiting Southampton County to walk the path of Turner’s rebels. Oates presents himself as trepidatious and cowed by dangerous locals of both races, as a pilgrim traveling in a hostile country. He congratulates himself on his bravery and on finding a likeminded soul to help him past the antagonistic gatekeeper of the county’s historical society. “Being a liberal in the rural south,” Oates sagely reminds us, “is not an easy life” (149). He also heavily insinuates that The Man is trying to suppress the memory of Turner’s rebellion. It rapidly becomes insufferable. Fortunately the epilogue is short and does contain some evocative passages about stumbling out of the woods and into the yards of the now-gone houses of 1831.

I’ve dwelt on the one or two misgivings I have with the book, but again--these are minor quibbles, issues to be aware of but that don’t detract from the overall value of the book. The Fires of Jubilee justifies its position as a classic biography and a well-told narrative of a tragic turning point in American history.

Highly recommended.

[Miles Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are quite a few redeeming qualities of this book. Its well-written and provides a good primer on Nat Turner's insurrection in Southhampton County, VA. Its fairly even-handed, and Oates took care to not glorify violence even in the name of liberation. His moral ambivalence is a strength in many ways.

The more distracting elements of the book are Oates' patronizing tone towards rural southerners he encountered, both black and white, as well as the allegations of plagiarism regarding later works made against Oates by respected historians.

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. Oates does a brilliant job showing the effects of plantation slavery on 1800 Southern Society. One note, you can really see why the 2nd Amendment was inserted into the U.S. Constitution. The South wanted an assurance that it could retain an armed militia large enough to quell any slave uprisings.

[lifelongreader · Rating 3 out of 5]

A must read to truly understand American History and its relationship with race.
(3.7/4)

[Gary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had never read detailed account of Nat Turner’s rebellion. This is a very interesting and tragic story and paints a good picture of the country 30 years before the Civil War. The massacre of men, women, and children with axes is difficult to read and cannot be be justified. Both neither can the system of slavery that drove Turner and his insurgents to murder and rebellion. Many innocent blacks were also massacred in the aftermath along with the guilty. Plenty of tragedy and evil to go around in this story. I much prefer Underground Railroad stories. The author’s visit to Southhampton county while writing this was a good finale to this book.

[Kristen Carson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book Information:
The genre of this book is historical non-fiction and the reading level is tenth-twelveth grade.
Summary:
Nat Turner was born into slavery on October 2, 1800 (Fires of Jubilee, p. 11). As he grew older, he began to exhibit great knowledge of events that had happened before he was born (Fires of Jubilee, p. 11). To everyone on the plantation where he was born they viewed him as a prophet and said that he would not be used as a slave because he was too smart. But once he was old enough to be used as a field hand, he was put into the field and was treated as a slave. Nat became frustrated with the fact that he had the hopes of being free one day, and now that was no longer a possibility (Fires of Jubilee, p. 21). He focused his free time on learning the Bible inside and out. Nat also began to attend the Methodist Church on his master’s property. He learned so much about the Bible that he began to preach his own sermon. Nat Turner’s master, Joseph Travis, allowed him to lead unsupervised church meetings and through that he was able to form a group of slaves to help with the rebellion. In August of 1831, Nat Turner and a group of slaves went house-to-house killing white men, women and children in Southampton County, Virginia. Once Nat Turner and the rest of his group were turned over to the authorities they were tried and their bodies were put on display as examples, to show that defiance would not be tolerated. Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831 is known as the bloodiest slave revolt in American history. Not only did he use manipulation, but he also used his religion to persuade others to follow him in the rebellion.
Prior to the Civil War, slaves in Southampton County were not treated as harshly as their counterparts in the Deep South. But once Nat Turner’s rebellion occurred in 1831, rules in Southampton County became more strict. There were more severe punishments for slaves that did not follow the rules and slaves were no longer allowed to learn how to read or write. In addition to these new rules, slaves were also not allowed to attend church with out a white person present. Nat Turner’s rebellion put fear in the white people of what will happen if slaves were educated. To make sure slaves did not planned another revolt, legislation encouraged harsher treatments and punishments of slaves. This proved ironic, since originally Nat Turner’s rebellion was against punishments that were more lenient, and now legislation forced masters to be harsher on their slaves.
Instructional Information:
This book would be a good book to read as a whole class when you are focusing on slavery in your classroom. You could get the book on tape along with kids could popcorn read the book. This is a good book to use for a lesson on slavery because this book is based on true events, so students can get a feel for what life was like during slavery.
Contextual Information:
The themes of this book are slavery and rebellion. The African-American ethnicity is addressed since the book is about slavery in the south before the civil war. This book is written in an informational style and I do not think it is written for one gender or the other. What I enjoyed most about this book is how the author uses great description to show the reader exactly what was happening during this time period.

Oates, S. (1975). The fires of jubilee: Nat Turner's fierce rebellion. New York: Harper & Row.

[Hotavio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oates goes on a tour of Southampton County in an effort to recapture the Nat Turner slave rebellion of 1831. There are several things I liked about the book.
I liked that the book wasn't overly long or detailed, which made it a good book to read for my history class. I was drawn to efforts that Oates went through to supply the reader with the North/South and State/Federal politics of the time, which really amplified the effects of the small and otherwise unsuccessful act. I found Oates reflections on the present day sout to be especially believable.
I have to admit that I was particularly shocked with the barbarity relayed in the slaughter of the slavemasters, but in no way did I feel that the author was attempting to sway his audience. The bottomline was that slavery was a losing prospect for both whites and blacks, an institution of which all are negatively impacted today.

[Gary Slavens · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Fires of Jubilee” is very well-written, with wonderful, lyrical prose - until the murders begin. Nat Turner was the antebellum South’s greatest nightmare. By the time he was finished, more than 60 white men, women and children were killed: many were hacked to death in their sleep. Then the retribution killings started, with around 200 slaves and free blacks paying the price. The nation was never the same after this.
When people say history is boring, give them this book. I highly recommend it!

[gnarlyhiker · Rating 1 out of 5]

Heads up:

1) Read The Confessions of Nat Turner 1831 (found online)
2) Read The Confessions of Nat Turner: and Related Documents—Kenneth Greenberg
3) If you still want to give this book a go: read Part Three Judgment Day

good luck

[Bethany Whetstone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written and engaging. I felt I was looking in on Nat Turner rebellion and his struggles. I saw the horrific things that happened to the African-Americans.
Overall a 5 star rating.

[Paul Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed the book, maybe a great look into part of history that would otherwise be lost except threw word of mouth. Research notes in appendix.

[Alyssa Richmond · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 ⭐️ did not think i would like this book but they said many things that were very much “😱” or “😞”. but i was actually invested in this book so much… and ik it’s a school book but yeah…

[William Fuller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Between the foreword and the prologue of The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion, author Stephen Oates inserts a couple of quotations, one by Bruce Catton, which well describes the nature and the quality of this book: For a history book to have any final value, it must be written “not only with the historian's competence but also with the skill, the insight and the demanding conscience of the literary artist.” In this slim volume (154 pages not counting reference notes, index, and appendices), Oates shows himself not only a competent and accomplished historian but also a writer of consummate skill.

I found the book of considerable interest both because of the history within it and because of the page-turning narrative with which the author relates that history. Certainly, I had read of Nat Turner's 1831 slave uprising in more general American history books, but none had the detailed recounting of the insurrection that Oates' book contains. Beyond the bloody and methodical massacre of around sixty white slave owners, their wives, children and infants in Southampton County, Virginia, The Fires of Jubilee draws readers a clear picture of the social, cultural, and political milieu of the nation three decades before outbreak of the Civil War. It also covers some of the aftermath of the rebellion, including the deaths of about two hundred Blacks, some following legal trials and hangings and many others at the hands of vigilante groups bent on revenge.

The impact on subsequent state laws of Turner's short-lived but exceptionally lethal war against whites gets a mention in the book, too, with draconian legislation designed to prevent any repetition of the uprising, blame for its occurrence ranging widely from Black preachers to Northern abolitionists. Perhaps, however, it occurred because of one man's charisma and messianic complex, and Turner's psyche and unusual abilities are frequently in Oates' spotlight.

On the larger stage, the national debate between states' rights versus authority of the Federal government was still in full swing when Turner made his violent entrance only 55 years after the Declaration of Independence was written and 48 years after the American Revolution ended. Remembering that the Constitution was rampant with compromises necessary to achieve ratification, the extent of state versus Federal authority was still far from settled, with states claiming the right to nullify Federally-imposed tariffs which they feared would limit their economic development. The impact of such contentious debates and economic factors on Southern attitudes toward slavery also makes an appearance in the book.

In short, Oates presents a complete and encompassing picture of American culture and the place of slavery within it in surprisingly few pages. The explosion of Nat Turner's rebellion shocked not only Virginian but all of Southern white society and generated a reaction that reverberates to this day even among some who are ignorant of the events of 1831. Stephen Oates has produced a book important in its history and highly readable in its presentation. It is surely nothing less than a five-star read.

[Hank Hoeft · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion is a concise but dense account of the bloodiest (I hesitate to call it the "most successful," as it didn't succeed at much) slave rebellion in the United States. Besides giving almost a minute-by-minute chronology of Turner's movements from the first killings to the falling apart of the "rebellion" scarcely two days later, Oates also discusses Turner's life up to that point, and the social and political climate in that part of the South, both before and after the uprising. Ironically (or perhaps not ironically at all), Nat Turner's attempt to rouse black slaves to violence ultimately led to more blacks--most of them innocent--being killed by hysterical and enraged white reaction; by all accounts, Turner's band murdered about 60 white men, women, and children, but the white backlash killed an estimated 200 black people, and led to even more repressive and brutal treatment of blacks--throughout the South, not just in Virginia--in the aftermath of the events of August 1831.

This was the first book I'd ever read about Nat Turner, so I don't have anything which to compare it, but Oates' account strikes me as very balanced. Instead of portraying Turner as a homicidal fanatic or a righteous martyr, Oates presents the events--much of the time in the words of the participants, particularly Turner himself--and lets the reader reach his or her own conclusions.

[Gil Hamel · Rating 3 out of 5]

[3.5 stars]
A good, but limited, summation of the Nat Turner Rebellion. It’s only about 150 pages, and I found myself often wishing I was reading a longer, more thorough, and maybe more recent take on the same events. Within its limitations, I think it’s pretty decent, and I respect the author’s willingness to say when there isn’t much to say: it feels like he’s working from pretty limited sources, and I’m not really in a position to assess whether that’s the result of poor documentation or shoddy research. Given the short length I’m also appreciative of the time Oates spends talking about the political context and fallout of the uprising. The stuff about the governor and the various angles of anti-slavery rhetoric (some of them economic, self-interested, and deeply racist) was particularly interesting.
Recommended to those interested in the history of American slavery, with the caveat that there's almost certainly a better book on this topic. This is just the one I happened to find on a table at The Strand for $8.
P.S. Because it comes up in the political context I ended up spending like an hour of a train ride reading and r
re-reading the Wikipedia page for the Tariff of Abominations trying to coach myself into grasping what the fuck it meant. I think I understand it like, 80%.

[J. Alfred · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the most pleasant book to read, but kind of an instructive one, in a few ways. First, in a general Frederick Douglass sense: there is no system of oppression so benign as to not corrode everyone involved. And that moral and social corruption can lead to what looks like senseless tragedy, except that the tragedy is directly predictable. And second, in terms of group psychology: Oates shows how slave owners used the Bible to keep the slaves submissive, in ways that are familiar to us from Marx and Nietzsche (the 'Christianity is a slave religion' trope), but he also shows how it doesn't take a big hermeneutic leap for the biblically literate Turner to see himself as a Judge, shedding the blood of the guilty in order that the innocent can be free. The Bible is a big book. You can get to a lot of places from it. And the people who get there aren't necessarily, or merely, hypocrites.

[Mr. Book · Rating 5 out of 5]

You can also see this review, along with others I have written, at my blog, Mr. Book's Book Reviews.

Mr. Book just finished The Fires Of Jubilee: Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion, by Stephen B. Oates.

Nat Turner’s slave revolt was the most famous slave revolt in US history. But, I had never read a complete book devoted to that topic until now.

The book did a great job covering all aspects of the story: background information on Turner, the rebellion and the aftermath. The book also did a good job covering the political climate of the day. There were good tidbits in the book, such as the fact that Turner was allowed to be just a child until the age of 12, before being put to work. I am assuming that had to be a rarity for the day.

I have already given Oates an A+ for With Malice Toward None: A Biography Of Abraham Lincoln and an A for Abraham Lincoln: The Man Behind The Myths. This one joins the latter in getting an A. I will also be getting the audio edition.

Goodreads requires grades on a 1-5 star system. In my personal conversion system, an A equates to 5 stars. (A or A+: 5 stars, B+: 4 stars, B: 3 stars, C: 2 stars, D or F: 1 star).

This review has been posted at my blog, Mr. Book’s Book Reviews, and Goodreads.

Mr. Book originally finished reading this on July 21, 2024.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was on the suggested reading list for my son’s American History class, and this reading list has always been excellent, so I went for it. Glad I did. Excellent writing and gripping story, despite the fact that we all know the outcome. The writer does a great job of conveying the personal hopes and ultimate despair of Nat Turner (and all slaves). Oates goes even further and describes the personal and political reaction to the rebellion, and the impact it had on the south. This is a short, easy, engaging read and should be required reading for all Americans.

[Grayson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I audiobooked this book for my DC US History class a couple weeks ago and did not like it. This book, The Fires of Jubiliee by stephen Oates, is an easy read but just hard to stay focused. The book is truly like a minute to minute play by play of Turners life, it is slow and just boring. This book is just brutally honest alot of the time, it doesn’t have any comedy or much to relate to. Going into the story i was thinking i would enjoy it, after reading this i wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, unless you truly adore history!!

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book lays out the detailed context of Turner's rebellion, using primary sources throughout while also acknowledging the weakness such sources may have considering they were written and kept by whites whose bias would have influenced them considerably.

As other reviewers have noted, there is consistent use of the n-word throughout the book in the quoting of historical texts.

[McKinley]

I remember reading this almost ten years ago for a history class. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It would be interesting to re-read to see if I still feel the same way. I couldn’t remember the name of this book, I’m so happy that I’ve found it again.

[Gav Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ordered this a while back because Norman Finkelstein had mentioned it in an interview. Very solid read, Nat Turner has always fascinated me even since middle school and this only made me more
interested in him.

[Maya R · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stephen Oates telling of Nat Turners rebellion is vivid and immersive. He is able to paint a picture with his words really, make you feel like you’re living it. The very thing that makes you want to keep turning the page. You could tell he is quite researched on the matter.

[Tim · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author has done some research and what actual data and facts the book includes seems accurate, but the author’s style was amateurish and distracting.

[Dejanira Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

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[Gary Schantz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the book but it read more like a novel than a book about history.

[Jack]

That's a lot of N-words for a book about black liberation written by a white historian