The insurrectionist Nat Turner lives on in popular imagination as the fiery Black abolitionist who led a band of enslaved rebels on a rampage through Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831, murdering 55 whites — including women and children — and striking terror throughout Southside Virginia and beyond.

The backlash was swift and violent, as white residents and area militias converged to seek and impose vigilante justice on those believed to have joined the rebellion, and even on those who hadn’t. Only the proper burghers — the most elite, educated large landowners and slaveholders — intervened to prevent a worse rendering of lynch law. Even while upholding their right to “own” humans, they backed the rule of law over the reign of anarchy.

Thus, Turner and 50 of his compatriots stood trial in the biblically named county seat of Jerusalem. Of these, 13 were released and 43 were convicted; 18 were sentenced to hang, and 10 actually did. In the last category was Turner, who’d eluded capture for weeks and then, while in jail, told his story in great detail to Thomas R. Gray, a local lawyer who rushed to publish The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va. for personal profit and for the sake of history.

Gray’s Confessions (not to be confused with William Styron’s 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Confessions of Nat Turner, a novelized account) is the primary source for Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History by Anthony E. Kaye with Gregory P. Downs. The unusual joint byline is intentional: Kaye, a history professor at Penn State, died before the book was finished. His colleague Downs, a professor of history at UC Davis, completed it from the notes and drafts Kaye left behind.

The book is just the latest in a large canon of Turner biographies. Kaye and Downs assert that those others, written by both academics and popular historians, have failed to take seriously Turner’s motivation not as a fanatic determined to commit mass murder against oppressive whites but as a self-proclaimed Old Testament prophet whose many “visions” were heavenly instructions from “the Spirit” grounded in Scripture.

There is, Kaye believed, “something new to say about Nat.” Turner, the authors claim, saw himself as a 19th-century embodiment of prophets like Joshua, who were commanded not merely to conquer the enemy but to slaughter them. In their view, Turner’s “rebellion” was more a religious revival on steroids.

Turner found spiritual reinforcement for his beliefs in the Gospels: According to the Book of Revelation, the return of Christ would foreshadow an apocalyptic battle against Satan. Jesus, we are told, saw “drops of blood on the corn” and “on the leaves.” Thus, should Turner die for his beliefs, no matter. His own response to that possibility: “Was not Christ crucified?”

Turner, an enslaved, literate preacher, was born in 1800, the same year as fiery white abolitionist John Brown, who also invoked the Bible in his often-violent campaign to eradicate slavery, likened himself to Moses (who sought to “deliver Israel out of the hand of the Philistines”), and compared his death to the fate “of prophets and apostles and Christians of former days.” But Turner’s religious upbringing held out the possibility at least of manumission, common in the Southern Methodist Church at a time when the enslaved and their enslavers often worshiped together.

But white Methodists in Southampton County largely abandoned the practice of freeing their slaves, dashing Turner’s hopes as he was passed from one white household to another like a piece of borrowed furniture. A Virginia constitutional convention in 1829-1830 also held out some hope, as anti-slavery Western interests tried — and failed — to wrest political power from the slaveholders in the East, another disappointment. Even without his visions, Turner’s rebellion could’ve been as much personal as political. The authors do not dismiss this possibility, but neither do they embrace it as his main motivation.

There is much to consider in this latest treatment of the elusive Turner, and the authors leave no inference to the imagination. Indeed, the key words “perhaps,” “probably,” and “maybe” appear frequently as Kaye and Downs seek to fill in the gaps in Gray’s recounting of Turner’s confessions. Thus, much of what they ascribe to Turner is speculation buttressed by their own citations of Biblical text. They might be onto something with this approach, but definitive they are not.

They also allude repeatedly to the observations of other Turner biographers, especially (in 23 places) to David Allmendinger, who is nowhere fully identified but is, according to an internet search, David F. Allmendinger Jr., a professor emeritus of history at the University of Delaware. Nat Turner, Black Prophet includes 36 pages of endnotes but regrettably no bibliography.

The challenge of retelling the Nat Turner story is one facing all historians in search of the truth: How much to depend on supposition as opposed to documented testimony? In Turner’s case, there is not only his confession but also the courtroom testimony of others associated with him. The trial itself — during which Turner mostly referred to his previous statements to Gray — offered little additional information. It’s striking, however, to learn that although he ordered his insurrectionist band to murder whole families — including an infant in its cradle, who was beheaded and thrown into a fireplace — Turner himself killed just one of the 55 slain.

Despite this book’s efforts, many questions remain. Was Turner a heroic revolutionary, a wild-eyed radical, a commander above the fray, a visionary, or a coward? Whatever the answer, efforts to contain the fallout from his rebellion — by observing such subsequent legal niceties as trials — did not stem the backlash. Following Turner’s execution, Southern states enacted even stricter laws regulating the conduct of free Black persons as well as of the enslaved, and Black preachers were outlawed.

Those measures, of course, failed to quell — and may have accelerated — the nation’s inevitable march to the conflict that freed the slaves at the cost of some 750,000 deaths. Whatever his motives or character, Nat Turner helped set the stage for the apocalyptic Civil War to come.

Eugene L. Meyer, a member of the board of the Independent, is a journalist and author of, among others, Five for Freedom: The African American Soldiers in John Brown’s Army and Hidden Maryland: In Search of America in Miniature. Meyer has been featured in the Biographers International Organization’s podcast series.

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