The Nat Turner Project (review)

The Nat Turner Project digital archive makes available for the first time in a single location most of the major documents students need to consult in order to write about the Nat Turner rebellion of enslaved people in 1831 Virginia. The best available printed source, Henry Irving Tragle’s edited The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831, failed to include many key documents. Kenneth S. Greenberg’s edited The Confessions of Nat Turner with Related Documents offered an even more limited collection of sources targeted for use in classrooms at the college level.¹ The Nat Turner Project includes nearly all the material contained in these volumes and much more. It offers a striking illustration of the power of digital online publication compared with print publication. All students of the rebellion owe a debt of gratitude to the creators of this website.

The digital archive presents the standard newspaper articles reporting the rebellion, diary entries, letters, maps, trial transcripts, census records, and pamphlets. However, it also includes many documents and features not contained in any print publication. Here, students have access to the petitions to the state legislature filed by masters requesting monetary compensation for the loss of people they owned who had been killed during the rebellion. These documents include chilling details of the indiscriminate slaughter of African Americans during the repression of the uprising. The site also includes photographs of major sites associated with the rebellion. Although these images have been published before and they date from a period nearly seventy years after the rebellion, here they are linked for the first time to documents of the period that discuss what happened at each site. This presentation offers students a sense of “place” not available in print publications. Another useful feature of the site is a section on neighborhoods that is rooted in the census. Since census takers moved from house to house in a neighborhood, it is possible for students to look at the census materials presented here and to get a sense of the connections between households that linked masters and enslaved people. The website also includes material on free blacks, a group comparatively neglected in other publications. Moreover, the site contains trial transcripts for rebels accused in neighboring Sussex County, a body of material not readily available in print publications. It also helpfully includes an extremely useful section that links passages in Nat Turner’s Confessions to closely paraphrased selections from the Bible. Finally, the section on “Memory” contains documents that date from the period after the rebellion and reveal much about American society from 1831 to the present.

Of course, the reproduction and linking of so much material is a difficult undertaking and the project is not without problems. The page that introduces the navigation is confusing. Readers can click on six major links listed at the top of the page; four of these links are repeated immediately below along with subcategories; and these are followed by five links. But the logic of this arrangement is not evident. This could be clarified and simplified. In addition, a noticeable number of links are broken or they misdirect a reader. The section that could use the most work is the one devoted to FAQs (frequently asked questions). Only two of the ten questions link readers to the appropriate documents. Actually, the project director should consider eliminating this section entirely. Any attempt to direct a student’s attention to a limited number of documents to answer some of these questions may close down creative insights gained from a broader approach. For example, Nat Turner’s motives may not just be contained in what he said, but also in what he did and how he did it. This might require links to a majority of the documents on the site. It might be better to have...