Turner’s rebellion killed sixty enslavers and a hundred rebels died in reprisal

Evidence

And then, about a decade later, on August 21, 1831, Nat Turner, an enslaved man in Virginia who believed that slavery violated God’s law and that God had selected him to lead his people to freedom, unleashed a bloody rebellion. Over the next two days, he and his followers, which included several free Black people, attacked farms and killed some sixty white enslavers throughout Southampton County. The local militia, joined by troops from the United States Navy, which was anchored nearby, murdered at least a hundred Black rebels in an effort to suppress the uprising. Turner himself remained at large for six weeks, but he was eventually captured, hung, skinned, and brutally dismembered. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 376

Categorization

• XREF: Nat Turner as a figure connects to the reader’s broader interest in how rebellion figures become contested historical symbols.