"This Unparalleled and Inhuman Massacre": The Gothic, the Sacred, and the Meaning of Nat Turner

Naf Turner's rebellion was the largest and most consequential act of slave resistance in American history. For critics and historians of rhetoric, it poses important questions as to how violence on such a scale gets represented and what kinds of cultural work such representations are made to do. This essay examines Thomas Gray's "The Confessions of Nat Turner" as instantiating two fundamental logics for the interpretation of violence—the Gothic and the Sacred—and suggests how each devolves on conceptions of human agency that defined antebellum efforts to comprehend a violent world.