"There had been slave uprisings before but nothing as large, as well organized and as bloody as this, both in terms of the killings and the reprisals," historian John V.
Had they reached nearby Jerusalem, now Courtland, they might have added to the 57 lives they ended.īut even after the militia arrived to blunt and disperse them, the blood still flowed, with more than 200 blacks savagely killed - and some beheaded - in a merciless riot of retribution. That attack was just the first, however, in a serpentine rampage that coursed from farm to farm, slaying white slave owners and recruiting new slaves, many of whom then shed the loathed rags of bondage for the garb of their masters.ĭipping cloth in their victims' blood, the horde of nearly 60 slaves fashioned grisly sashes, too, marking themselves as an army of vengeance and liberation. So filled with Old Testament ferocity was their determination to smite and exact revenge that - when they realized they'd left an infant behind - they went back to kill the child in its cradle.
Stirred up by a charismatic black preacher named Nat Turner, a small band carried out the first killings in a brutal yet methodical manner, sneaking into the house of Turner's master and hacking the life out of five sleeping people with hatchets and axes. 21, 1831, and lasting nearly two days, these same sandy roads led to scene after horrific scene of blood, mayhem and death spawned by a landmark slave insurrection.
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