Book Review: Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History

Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History. By Anthony E. Kaye with Gregory P. Downs. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024. Hardcover, 352 pp. $30.00. 

Reviewed by Tim Talbott

Few if any individuals who were born, lived, and died enslaved have become the subject of as much historical scholarship as Nat Turner. However, historians are still examining Turner’s life and place in American history through new and important lenses. In Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History, Anthony E. Kaye with Gregory P. Downs look at how religion—specifically the Methodism that Turner grew up with—influenced his eventual self-realization and reluctant acceptance as the God-chosen warrior in an attempt to end slavery.

But before getting into the meat of this significant new interpretation of Turner’s life, a word or two is in order about the study’s unique authorship. As Downs explains at the end of the book’s introduction, “This is, however, a story with its own complicated history.” The book was originally the brainchild of Kaye, but due to his unfortunate esophageal cancer diagnosis in 2016, which resulted in his death a year later, Kaye made previous arrangements with Downs to see it completed and reach publication. As Downs explains, “The book . . . remains Tony’s work, even though I have written or rewritten almost every word of it.” Before Kaye’s passing, the two historians agreed that “this book would consist of [Kaye’s] arguments and research but [Downs’s] words.” Kaye and Downs felt that the “by Kaye with Downs” as the authorship designation the most appropriate. (xxiii)

An important point that the book makes, which in some ways is a break from some earlier histories about Nat Turner, is to view his rebellion as an act of war rather than as a criminal act. As Downs explains, in doing so, we avoid getting bogged down in motives. Downs continues: “What requires more historical analysis are Nat’s strategies, tactics, and timing—all things that military historians study and that historians of slavery have increasingly sought to analyze in their accounts of rebellion. Once we move past the why, we can more clearly examine the how.” (xxii) Such a perspective is not as much of a departure from how many whites saw Turner’s 1831 rebellion as one might first think.

As mentioned above, at the heart of Nat Turner, Black Prophet is a thorough look at Turner’s personal religious instruction from childhood in the Methodist church, his understanding of the Bible, and its teachings as it applied to one’s life. To do so, like other historians, Kaye and Downs rely heavily on the recorded “confession” that Turner made in jail to attorney Thomas Gray. In that published pamphlet, Turner made it clear that he received instructions from “The Spirit” through signs that he often encountered in nature. Additionally important, Turner was born and grew to adulthood during an age of tremendous religious revivalism—the Second Great Awakening—that produced numerous individuals claiming to be prophets.

Starting as far back as 1822, Turner began receiving these visual signs and auditory instructions from “the Spirit.” Turner, who was born in 1800, had entered adulthood not long before his first sign, yet he remained enslaved and saw slavery as a lifelong condition that required action to see its demise and thus realize the fulfillment of one’s God-given potential. The oppressive and limiting conditions in slavery that Turner experienced and observed synced with what he read in his Bible, both in the Old Testament and New Testament. Kaye and Downs provide example after example of situations that arose in Turner’s life and in his preparation and execution of his rebellion that match well with instances experienced by individuals in the Bible or that appeared in hymns commonly sung in period churches. For instance, Turner’s choice to carry a sword as a symbol of his leadership has strong connections with several Old Testament references.

Due to the paucity of supplemental primary sources outside of Turner’s confession to Gray to get Turner’s thoughts on his actions, Kaye and Downs are in a number of instances required to make inferences—as historians often do—based upon context and period legal, social, and cultural conditions. However, the 35 pages of endnotes shows Kaye’s and Downs’s width and depth of research.

Organized into nine chapters, the book takes readers through Nat’s early life, his planning of the rebellion, the gathering of lieutenants, and the brutal details of the execution of the rebellion, all connecting Turner’s thoughts and actions to the Bible’s prophetic influences. A helpful map of Southampton County appears early in the book to provide place references to the actions described in the text. In addition, a center section shares a number of period images and late nineteenth century photographs of the farmhouses and other places that Turner and his small army encountered during the rebellion.

Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History makes a valuable contribution to the historiography surrounding this important individual and key moment in history. Downs’s prose is a pleasure to read and the points that he and Kaye make are sure to have students of slavery and Southern antebellum history thinking in new and exciting directions.