1831 Nat Turner is arrested
Nat Turner was a slave born in a plantation area of Virginia in 1800. As a youth he was recognized to be of high intelligence and piety, acquiring literacy and a love of reading the Bible. By his early 20s he had begun to experience religious visions which he spoke of as he preached and conducted Baptist services among his fellow slaves. He acquired the nickname of “the Prophet”. One vision in 1828 convinced him that he was destined for great things and he came to believe that he would lead an army against the forces of darkness; Turner began to speak with his enslaved friends about a rebellion against their white masters. Solar eclipses he interpreted as a sign to begin the violence in the summer of 1831.
On August 21, Turner and a gang of perhaps as many as 70 blacks, slave and free, rose up and embarked on an attack on neighbouring plantations. Slaves were freed, weapons were gathered, and whites — men, women and children — were indiscriminately murdered. Their ambition seems to have been to provoke a larger rising, terrorize the white inhabitants, and bring the evils of slavery before the world. But after only two days, local militias were able to crush the rebellion. Turner fled into hiding but on October 30 he was captured.
In the days after the rising, hundreds of blacks died at the hands of vengeful white mobs; Turner and 19 others were executed after trials. The failure of the rebellion led to both harsher legal restrictions on slaves and attempts by some owners to ameliorate the condition of their human chattels.