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Nat Turner was born in Virginia in 1800, the son of slaves and the property of plantation owners.

His rebellion, which was launched August 21, 1831, and lasted two days and two nights, saw the killing of some fifty-five white men, women, and children, some (including the family of the man who owned him) in their sleep. To begin with, the rebels numbered just six besides Turner, but by the end they had recruited sixty to their cause. The plan was to go from plantation to plantation, house to house, blazing a trail of terror on their way to the county seat, where Turner aimed to raid the armory for weapons and ammunition. Today the seat of Southampton County is known as Courtland, but back then it was called — what else? — Jerusalem.

Turner's rebels never reached Jerusalem. They were met by white militias just a few miles away and either captured or killed. In the frenzy that followed, some three dozen Black people were slain in extrajudicial killings. Thirty were tried before a panel of slaveholding judges and condemned to death, though twelve later had their sentences commuted. Turner remained a fugitive for almost two months before he was caught and hanged on November 11, 1831.

A day before the first convicted rebel was executed, William Lloyd Garrison, the publisher of the abolitionist paper The Liberator, wrote:

True, the rebellion is quelled. Yet laugh not in your carnival of crime Too proudly, ye oppressors! You have seen, it is to be feared, but the beginning of sorrows.

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