The Resurrection of Nat Turner, Part 2: The Testimonial (4 page)

“A man of two continents,” she would repeat. “One foot firmly planted in mercy and the other in judgment.”

Nat Turner followed the trees—the oaks, the pines, the
cypresses, and the slumbering fruit trees—to a small cabin on a far patch of Nathaniel Francis's land. Smoke curled from the chimney. He heard people inside talking and laughing. He felt in his pocket again for the gunpowder. He knocked and then stepped inside.

He looked around the room.

They were all heroes.

Nat Turner had heard the word of God: This would be his last Christmas.

Andover, Massachusetts

Spring 1856

B
ack from Philadelphia, upstairs in her Andover home, Harriet Beecher Stowe sat at her writing desk. She looked around the room, then toward the streetside window that gave the room light. She imagined all the many people who had been welcomed in her home—pastors; professors and friends of her husband, Calvin; their families and his students. Among the visitors were some of the most well-known and notorious names in America—her brother, pastor and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, abolitionists Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass.

Like the home of her childhood, the Stowe household was a meeting place of sundry people, a home of hospitality and vigorous debate. Harriet smiled, then grimaced to think of the scandal her guest list might cause. Those who championed slavery—or even those who simply limited themselves to living bland monotone lives—would balk at the idea of blacks and whites mingling, conversing, breaking bread, or sharing in healthy debate as equals. Sometimes it amazed her.

Calvin, her professor husband, had encouraged her writing. “It is your fate,” he told her. She could never have imagined, years ago, that her writing would take her before royalty like young Queen Victoria and the Duchess of Argyle, would have her name on the lips of politicians, would send her on national and international speaking tours, or would lead her to conversations and even friendships with fugitive slaves—friendships that others found shocking.

If the Beecher home, her childhood home, was a hearty meal, then the Stowe home was a feast, a banquet.

Her new life had its challenges, but she could not imagine going back to a more ordinary life—a life where she only read books written by women or by whites, a life where she attended church with members of only one hue. It would be as bland as a self-imposed diet of only one kind of food, or limiting oneself to see and smell only one kind of flower.

God had created and invited us to a banquet hall, to a wedding—full of sights and smells, of exotics and domestics. It was the worst kind of ingratitude to refuse His invitation, the worst kind of meanness to snub or belittle His creation, to refuse the feast, to refuse the bouquet.

Now, having tasted the richness of a life full of people like Sojourner Truth, Henry Bibb, Frederick Douglass, and Josiah Henson, it was hard to remember what might have kept her locked into a less colorful world. Proximity? Complacency? Fear? Laziness? Dullness? Now that she had participated in the feast, she would never turn back. And perhaps there was more to do—to add shades of brown, yellow, and gold, autumn colors, to her life.

Harriet looked at the papers on her desk, notes from her Boston meeting with William, a runaway slave, and her Philadelphia meeting with Benjamin Phipps, a resident of Virginia's Southampton County. Both of the meetings focused on Nat Turner, a slave from that same county. Among the notes was an anonymous letter.

Labeled a murderer, a fanatic, and an insurrectionist by his own confession to his attorney Thomas Gray, Turner had led an 1831 insurrection that killed more than fifty white people and resulted in his hanging.

Now, her brother Henry and Frederick Douglass insisted that she give Nat Turner's story a new telling. They had insisted that she meet with William and Phipps. Her own handwritten notes of those meetings covered her desktop—though it was difficult sometimes to tell where recollections from her dreams, still dreams of resurrection, left off and their stories began.

Before her were the witnesses of Sallie, Nancie, and Easter, provided by Will. Phipps had provided her the witnesses of Nathaniel Francis and William Parker.

The notes and the names swirled in her mind—Francis, Trezvant, Waller, Turner, Gray. The published confession penned by Thomas Gray had been in existence for twenty-five years and had been accepted as the gospel by abolitionists, refugee slaves, slavery men, politicians, newspapermen, and even historians. Francis, Trezvant, Waller, Turner, Gray. If Phipps and Will were to be believed, then
The Confessions of Nat Turner
was a lie. If they were to be believed, then Waller lied… and he lied for Nathaniel Francis.

Harriet removed the anonymous letter from the envelope, rereading the first two hand-copied entries:

On Saturday the 12th and the Monday following and also on Wednesday, the sun shown
[sic] quite blue, fully as blue as indigo.

The indigo sun—it was the same blue sun Harriet and her brother Henry had witnessed twenty-five years ago, in 1831.

Twenty-third day—This will be a very noted day in Virginia. At daylight this morning the Mayor of the City put into my hands a notice to the public, written by James Trezvant of Southampton County, stating that an insurrection of the slaves in that county had taken place, that several families had been massacred and that it would take a considerable military force to put them down.

More than a quarter of a century ago, Harriet and Henry were young people living in Boston, the place where she had first heard the name “Nat Turner.”

She rubbed a finger over the writing and stared at the mysterious letter in her hands. She would share them with Calvin. The professor would help her decide what she must do.

H
arriet poured tea for Calvin and smiled at him, really at the top of his head, his nose buried in his books. She placed jam and butter on the table, rearranged the purple crocuses in the small centerpiece, and then sat down at the table with him. Calmness and morning sunlight crowned the top of his head. She nodded; she could have been born into a different life.

Captivity was not as she had imagined. Though she had looked into the face of slavery in Cincinnati—speaking with and befriending fugitive slaves, attending a Kentucky slave auction—and heard many stories, she had still held on to a gentrified notion of slavery. A slavery of large, flourishing, romantic plantations, gallant men sauntering among the fields, and of women dancing the reel in great ballroom gowns. The slavery in her mind, despite what she had seen, was one of well-meaning slave masters, friends to their slaves, a benevolent though misguided aristocratic institution led by elderly well-mannered gentlemen with charming Southern accents. In her mind, though she knew slavery was wrong, she saw Kentucky bluegrass, mint juleps, and grace-filled slaves, faithful despite their occasional mistreatment.

The stories that the refugee slave William and the poor farmer from Southampton County Benjamin Phipps had shared with her forced her to confront a viler, more brutal kind of slavery. Now what filled her head instead of lace and the mellow aroma of cured tobacco smoke was the foul stink of slave ships, the screams of people chained onboard, the cries of women being raped at sea. Now, instead of kindly, elderly slave masters, she saw cruel men, boys really, given too much power—absolute power and with no
respect for life. Now she saw starving people, poor people holding others captive to have status and power.

It made her ashamed that her people, white people, were the captors. Sometimes she thought it best to cover her people's shame rather than continue to write about it, to drag it out into the open. Then she reminded herself of history: Whites were not the only slave masters, the only ones tempted to think themselves superior—each race had wallowed in the wickedness. That truth did not excuse what was happening in her own time, in her own country, but it did make it easier to stare it in the face. It made it easier to believe that, like intemperance, it was a weakness that could be overcome.
There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it.

No wrong could be righted that was hidden and unacknowledged. Without light, it would grow—a creeping, hidden, moldy thing that dragged its shadow with it.

Now Harriet saw the United States, the nation she loved, lend the force of law—judicial rulings against Dred Scott, congressional passage of the Fugitive Slave Acts signed into law by Presidents Washington and Fillmore, and wording in the nation's Constitution—to legitimize one brother's horror against another. A horror where people were stolen and others murdered all for the sake of profit, where families around the world were decimated. A horror that the purveyors said was justified by God's law, a horror that flipped His law end over end.

The Constitution asserted:
“No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.”

God's law commanded: “
For the L
ORD
thy God walketh in the midst of thy camp, to deliver thee, and to give up thine enemies
before thee; therefore shall thy camp be holy: that he see no unclean thing in thee, and turn away from thee. Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee: He shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place which he shall choose in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best: thou shalt not oppress him.”

The horror kept creeping, drawing all manner of people, so that even the elect, the best and the brightest, surrendered and gave their efforts to aiding it. Neither education nor intellect offered any inoculation against infection. The words of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 were further proof. The horror leered over the shoulder of noble President George Washington, the defender of freedom and owner of hundreds of slaves, as he signed the act into law.

And be it also enacted, That when a person held to labor in any of the United States, or in either of the Territories on the Northwest or South of the river Ohio, under the laws thereof, shall escape into any other part of the said States or Territory, the person to whom such labor or service may be due, his agent or attorney, is hereby empowered to seize or arrest such fugitive from labor, and to take him or her before any Judge of the Circuit or District Courts of the United States, residing or being within the State, or before any magistrate of a county, city, or town corporate, wherein such seizure or arrest shall be made, and upon proof to the satisfaction of such Judge or magistrate, either by oral testimony or affidavit taken before and certified by a magistrate of any such State or Territory.

She did not seek out public debate; she did not want to be pointed out as one of “those people”; and she tried to conduct herself as a proper woman, but left to shadow and silence, the horror grew bolder and greedier. Heroes were not immune; neither was clergy. Neither status, nor title, nor wealth protected
one from greed, from selfishness, from the temptation to consider oneself above others. Instead, privilege seemed to exacerbate the temptation.

And be it further enacted, That it shall be the duty of all marshals and deputy marshals to obey and execute all warrants and precepts issued under the provisions of this act, when to them directed; and should any marshal or deputy marshal refuse to receive such warrant, or other process, when tendered, or to use all proper means diligently to execute the same, he shall, on conviction thereof, be fined in the sum of one thousand dollars.

It grew stronger, forcing others to comply at threat of jail, poverty, or worse. It muted innocents so they could speak no words in their own defense.

In no trial or hearing under this act shall the testimony of such alleged fugitive be admitted in evidence; and the certificates in this and the first [fourth] section mentioned, shall be conclusive of the right of the person or persons in whose favor granted, to remove such fugitive to the State or Territory from which he escaped, and shall prevent all molestation of such person or persons by any process issued by any court, judge, magistrate, or other person whomsoever.

The horror grew stronger, hobbling those who might speak against it, those who might not believe—forcing itself on them.

§7. And be it further enacted, That any person who shall knowingly and willingly obstruct, hinder, or prevent such claimant, his agent or attorney, or any person or persons lawfully assisting him, her, or them, from arresting such a fugitive from service or labor, either with or without process as aforesaid, or shall rescue, or attempt to rescue, such fugitive from service or labor, from the
custody of such claimant, his or her agent or attorney, or other person or persons lawfully assisting as aforesaid, when so arrested, pursuant to the authority herein given and declared; or shall aid, abet, or assist such person so owing service or labor as aforesaid, directly or indirectly, to escape from such claimant, his agent or attorney, or other person or persons legally authorized as aforesaid; or shall harbor or conceal such fugitive, so as to prevent the discovery and arrest of such person, after notice or knowledge of the fact that such person was a fugitive from service or labor as aforesaid, shall, for either of said offences, be subject to a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars, and imprisonment not exceeding six months, by indictment and conviction.