A previous culture war: Turner and Styron

Submitted by AWL on 11 January, 2022 - 2:48 Author: Dan Katz
Painting of Nat Turner

Nat Turner planning the rebellion


In 1967, 136 years after Nat Turner led a slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, the white US novelist William Styron published a book, The Confessions of Nat Turner. The book was written in the first person, Styron giving words to Turner and his story.

Prior to the publication of Styron’s book the history of the Turner insurrection was not widely known.

For several months Styron’s book received great reviews and grandiose praise. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1968.

But within a few months universal acclaim had turned into a very serious, bitter controversy during which Styron was violently denounced. In his own words, Styron was accused by radical black intellectuals of producing, “one long hysterical polemic from beginning to end: I’m a racist, a distorter of history, a defamer of black people, a traducer of the heroic image of ‘our’ Nat Turner.”

James Baldwin had prophesised, “Bill’s going to catch it from black and white.” And indeed he did; black radicals had a set of criticisms and, later, white racists objected too to Styron’s portrayal of the South and its disgusting, racist, violent slave owners.

At stake in the discussions that followed publication was: Who could and should write about American slavery? What was it permissible for a novelist to write?

The Turner rebellion

Nat Turner was born into slavery in October 1800 and lived all his life on plantations in Southampton County, Virginia. Southampton County is south of Richmond and west of Norfolk, a port on the US’s Atlantic coast. The rural area had a black majority population.

The rebellion began on Sunday 21 August 1831 and probably, eventually, involved up to one hundred black insurgents — mainly slaves, but including a smaller number of free black people - over a two or three day period. A small core group, led by Nat Turner, began the insurrection, moving from plantation to plantation, killing most of the white people they found with knives and axes. About 60 people were stabbed or hacked to death. Almost all the deaths during the uprising were of white people, and mainly women and children.

The movement was eventually stopped and crushed by the state militia. The local forces were quickly joined by vigilante groups and militias from outside the state, three companies of artillery soldiers, and sailors from two US navy ships who had arrived from the harbour in Norfolk. Over the next few weeks white mobs tortured and killed black people in a wave of hysterical terror that drew in very many who had no connection with the uprising. Over 100 black people, and perhaps as many as 200, were murdered.

Black rebels were killed and their heads displayed on poles.

Nat Turner escaped the immediate clampdown and remained in hiding for six weeks, until finally captured. While awaiting his trial Turner was extensively interviewed by a local lawyer, Thomas Ruffin Gray. Gray produced a pamphlet, his Confessions of Nat Turner, which was published shortly after the events.

Gray was a slave-owner from a rich family and had been part of the white militia which was formed on the first morning of the rebellion. Although Gray had also represented some of the accused slaves in the trials that had been held after the revolt was supressed his words in his Confessions of Nat Turner must be treated with real caution. That is problematic because much that is documented about Nat Turner, his views and motivations, comes from Gray.

Nat Turner was put on trial on 5 November, sentenced to death, and hung on Friday 11 November 1831 in Jerusalem (now renamed Courtland), Virginia. His skin was used to make a souvenir purse.

Following the rebellion the state held a series of show trials, acquitting a few but executing a further 55 black people and expelling others.

The fall-out from the most important slave revolt in America in the 60 years prior to the Civil War was enormous. News of alleged risings and slave conspiracies were reported all over the American South. Guilty and on-edge, white slave-owning society moved to protect itself.

Turner had been a highly intelligent, literate, religious zealot who believed God had told him to rise up. Southern slave states now passed legislation to prevent slaves learning to read and write; unsupervised religious worship became a serious offence.

Mississippi banned free black people from the state and outlawed teaching the Bible to slaves without the presence of slave-owners. The penalty was 39 lashes.

Alabama set a penalty of $250-500 for teaching a free black person to read or write. Free black people were prevented from meeting slaves without written permission from the slave owners; the penalty was flogging.

In Virginia all meetings of free black people designed to teach reading or writing were banned and magistrates were permitted to have offenders given 20 lashes. Whites could be fined $10-100 for teaching slaves to read. A similar law had been passed in 1819, but this new legislation from 1832 was strictly enforced.

As the historian David M Potter remarks (in The Impending Crisis): “By 1832 the southern anti-slavery movement had vanished and the South had begun to formulate a doctrine that slavery was permanent, morally right and socially desirable.”

Later in his book Potter discusses how the South became increasingly obsessed with racial control. “The blacks should live on plantations not only because plantations were efficient units for cotton production, but because in an era prior to electronic and bureaucratic surveillance, the plantation was a notably effective unit of supervision and control…

“Slaves should be illiterate unskilled, rural workers not only because the cotton economy needed unskilled rural workers… but also because unskilled rural workers were limited in their access to unsupervised contacts with strangers, and because the illiterate could neither read seditious literature nor exchange surreptitious written communication.”

Styron’s book

William Styron was a privileged white southerner who is better known now for writing Sophie’s Choice. His neighbours in Roxbury, Connecticut, included Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. Norman Mailer, Philip Roth and Frank Sinatra came round for dinner.

Styron was a liberal and a Democrat. The Kennedys invited him to lunch; after JFK’s assassination he contributed to writing Lyndon Johnson’s speech as the new President signed-off the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Johnson’s speech writer lived nearby.

Styron’sThe Confessions of Nat Turner is a novel, not a history book. He describes it in an author’s note as, “less a ‘historical novel [by which he meant, dismissively, “costume drama”] in conventional terms than a meditation on history.” He writes, “I have rarely departed from the known facts [about Turner and the revolt]. However, in those areas where there is little knowledge with regards to Nat, his early life, and the motivations for the revolt (and such knowledge is lacking most of the time), I have allowed myself the utmost freedom of imagination in reconstructing events.”

The book had taken four and a half years to write. During that time the non-violent civil rights movement had spread from the South. Protests had become extensive, confrontations could become extremely violent and Black Power was now a force.

As review copies of Styron’s book came off the presses in June 1967 the book immediately began to get ecstatic praise. One reviewer could only “compare it to reading the Bible.” Another gushed that it was a “work of genius”. Another that it set a “template for a new type of novel.” Alex Haley, the African-American author who had produced the Autobiography of Malcolm X, in 1965, wrote, “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen captured so succinctly what I, too, feel are the essences of our ethnic condition, and the true motivations of the social tragedies recently.”

By early November the book was top of the New York Times best seller list, where it remained for five months. The producer David Wolper — later the producer of the television mini-series, Roots - paid $600,000 for the film rights. The book was eventually to earn Styron a million dollars.

The case against Styron

On 28 May 1968 Styron debated the black actor Ossie Davis on Pacifica Radio. The debate, chaired by their mutual friend, James Baldwin, doubled as a fundraiser for the leftish Democrat, Eugene McCarthy, who was looking to run for the US Presidency and to end the war in Vietnam.

Baldwin, who had spent nine months as the guest of Styron, in 1962, while writing his book, Another Country, refused to join in the condemnation of Styron. Baldwin praised Styron’s attempt to produce a “common history” for all Americans, but he was also worried about the possible divisive effect the book — and the forthcoming film of the book — might have.

Martin Luther King had been murdered in April 1968. One week after the Styron-Davis debate Robert Kennedy would be assassinated. US inner cities were burning and there would be rioting outside the Chicago Democratic National Convention in the summer. America was fighting in Vietnam and the society was divided and in crisis. So Baldwin’s concerns - that the controversy over the book would feed, negatively, into a contemporary political polarisation between black and white - were not unreal.

Davis made four points during the discussion. Firstly he said he believed Styron had the right to write the book and that no subject matter should be out of bounds to any author.

Secondly, Davis objected to Styron’s portrayal of Turner as a man who was sexually fixated on a young, white woman, Margaret Whitehead. At the end of his book Styron has Turner killing Whitehead with a sword and fencepost. Davis said Styron was reproducing a dangerous racist myth.

Thirdly, Davis argues that Black youth need heroes, and that by making Turner less than perfect Styron damages that need.

And, finally (and to some degree contradicting his first point) Davis demanded that the black community get “cultural control” over black affairs.

Styron, the white patrician, seemed baffled and shocked by the condemnation.

Building on Davis’s critique, a few weeks later, William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black writers respond was published. The various charges in this book are summarised in the Yale Literary Magazine (Fall 1968):

• Historical falsification. Styron’s Turner is portrayed as being unmarried, whereas he was, in fact, married to a black slave on another plantation. Turner was raised by black parents, rather than Styron’s Turner, who was raised by a white master.

• Styron paints a benign picture of slavery and his book constitutes an apology for slavery.

• Styron portrays Turner as an Uncle Tom who hates himself and wants to be white. But Turner was an exceptional person, so why assume that? Why not assume self-love made him an insurrectionist and a revolutionary?

• Styron’s portrayal of armed black slaves helping the slave-owners to put down the rebellion is a falsification.

• Styron downplays black manhood and heroism. Vincent Harding claimed, “[Styron is unable to] eat and digest… the blackness of the man.” And Harding concludes “The whitened appropriation of our history goes on, tragic because it is not recognised for what it is: a total negation of our power and our truth.”

Meanwhile a campaign, the Black Anti-Defamation Association (BADA), had been launched to prevent a Hollywood film being made of the book. Sponsors included Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell and activists Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown. BADA met the director, Norman Jewison, and stated in a press release that Jewison told them that he envisioned Nat Turner as a revolutionary fighting for his freedom and that the screenplay did not include rape, homosexuality, Black lust after white women, nor the participation of enslaved men in crushing the uprising. BADA claimed an “overwhelming victory.” The film went into production, but was eventually cancelled.

A case for the defence

The argument that Styron is racist or a defender of slavery is not sustainable. The book is 300 pages of indictment of slavery. Styron’s critics’ strongest argument is really this: several significant choices Styron makes amount to sneaking-in, perhaps unconsciously, racist stereotypes.

At one point Styron defends himself from the charge of distortions of history by stating that his detractors have only objected to certain suppositions and “distortions” he has made. He writes that he has invented a strategic plan for Turner (an insurrection, the over-running of the town of Jerusalem and a retreat to a nearby swamp area), for which there is no evidence. Styron complains that his critics do not object when he “improves” Turner.

The problem with Styron’s rebuttal, here, is that he is acknowledging an issue and then ignoring it. The black radical critics had pointed to enough examples of the portrayal of black male stereotypes to require a reply to this exact point. Why the stereotypes, he is asked?

One issue here is the historical record. Much is made by Styron’s opponents of a long article by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, published on the 30th anniversary of the Turner rising in August 1861, during the first stages of the American Civil War.

Higginson’s testimony is worth noting carefully because Higginson is a serious and even a heroic figure. He was a militant white abolitionist, one of the “Secret Six” backers of the John Brown and the attack on Harpers Ferry, in 1859, in the lead-up to the Civil War. He was also the Colonel of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, the first Federal-backed Black regiment to fight in the Civil War (his book,Army Life in a Black Regiment, tells this history).

Higginson’s long article, published in The Atlantic, claims that, “We know that Nat Turner’s young wife was a slave; we know that she belonged to a different master from himself… Virginia newspapers state that she was tortured under the lash, after her husband’s execution, to make her produce his papers.” Higginson states that his sources for the article were mainly from contemporary newspapers (rather than Gray’s text). But no exact source is stated by Higginson, nor by anyone else that I am aware of.

So, perhaps Higginson was right and Turner had a black slave wife, perhaps his claim is inaccurate. But does it impact much or at all on the controversy? Well, yes, it does. The nationalist critics of Styron want Turner happily in love and married to a black woman (in which case, it was implied or argued, why would he need to fantasise about a white woman?) Styron emphasises otherwise. As the discussion continues Styron becomes frustrated and incredulous.

One opponent states that “There is no evidence Nat was troubled by sexual desire.” Styron comments that this is, “tantamount to saying Nat wasn’t human.” And, of course, this is true. And having a black wife would not prevent Nat Turner having fantasies about other women.

Into the debate

One prominent white leftist, and a well-known historian of slavery, Eugene Genovese, came to Styron’s defence. Genovese took aim, in particular, at the source of many of the black radical writers’ claims of historical inaccuracy, the work of the white historian Herbert Aptheker and, in particular, his book American Negro Slave Revolts. Aptheker lists over 200 instances of rebellions against slavery in the US.

The picture Aptheker paints or wants is of a continual, bubbling black rebellion against slavery, although as David Potter comments, “some [revolts] were wholly imaginary, and many others did not amount to much.” The Nat Turner rising was, by some distance, the most significant rebellion against slavery in the run-up to the US Civil War.

And the Turner-led rising itself was small in comparison with the insurrections on Saint Domingue, under Toussaint L’Ouverture and others after 1791, or the December 1831 revolution in North-West Jamaica which involved many thousands of slaves.

In fact one of the interesting points about US slavery in the 19th century is how few, open, mass, slave revolts there were. That is a measure of the efficiency of the slave-owners’ racist repression and control, and does not imply that black slaves were happy, or did not want to rebel. But it is not what the black radicals of the late 1960s wanted to hear.

Similar points could be made about Styron’s portrayal of black slaves being used to help the slave owners put down the revolt. At one point Aptheker says this is “inconceivable” or at least did not happen. Since there were instances of, for example, colonial troops under British control being used to put down rebellions in India and elsewhere, and free black men and some slaves being used by the British army to put down the 1831-2 rebellion in Jamaica, is this so impossible to imagine? And, more to the point, does it amount to a major problem with Styron’s book? Well, only if a critic is concerned to preserve a picture of unwavering black solidarity with Turner’s uprising.

Genovese and Aptheker

It is important to understand where Genovese and Aptheker stood on broader, political matters. Aptheker was a Stalinist and had joined the Communist Party in September 1939, the month that Hitler and Stalin carved-up Poland. He was a CP National Committee member from the late 1950s until 1991.

Genovese, on the other hand, was an ex-Communist Party member. He had joined in 1945 and been expelled in 1950. He explained that his expulsion was, “for having zigged when I was supposed to zag.” In the 1960s Genovese was on the left, although much later he moved to the right.

Genovese makes two arguments that are very much to the point.

Firstly he states, “The political affinities [of the black intelligentsia] lie with the Black Power movement which increasingly demands conformity, myth-making and historical fabrication.” He objects to the demand for the creation of politically acceptable myths about heroes. Here Genovese is critically connecting the desperate search for unblemished black role models (seen in Davis and others) with the socialist realist artistic ethics of the Stalinists, which demanded workers be portrayed as honest, resolute, pure, virile and muscular.

And secondly he takes the debate head on: Styron’s use of stereotypes, such as “benign masters” might well have some validity. Some masters were somewhat less ruthless and tyrannical than others, and some actually believed their own ideological rhetoric about slave owners’ patriarchal about obligations. He argues that the degradation of the black slaves’ lives and personalities under the slave system was real and recognition of that fact was not to denigrate the slaves, but to condemn the system of slavery.

TheYale Lit issue which quotes Genovese also carries an interview with Styron. The interviewer is clearly sympathetic and states, interestingly, I think, “[Your nationalist critics] want a social myth, a political tract, a call to action, and this is totally at odds to writing a novel.” Styron responds, “I don’t think that the sort of art which is being demanded by the black militants will ever serve any kind of purpose, because it is not art, it’s propaganda… the drive here is towards immediate revolution, and a book like mine is showing a person too complex ever to be a proper model for revolt… showing a man filled with weaknesses, self-doubts.”

More recently

In the late 1990s the admirable black scholar, Henry Louis Gates, attempted to get the filmmaker Spike Lee to make the unmade film of Styron’s book. The project failed due to lack of funding.

A film of the Nat Turner rising, Birth of a Nation, directed by Nate Parker, who also plays a heroic Turner in the film, was made in 2016. Parker’s portrayal is in line with the most extreme of Styron’s radical critics of the late 60s. Parker commented: “Styron’s novel ignited much-deserved criticism as he annihilated Turner’s character, painting him to be both a sexually disturbed lunatic whose sole motivation hinged on his uncontrollable lusts for white women, and a rebel who lacked any real purpose or intelligence.”

Gates disagrees. Gates describes how as an undergraduate he saw Styron in a corridor at Yale University, following a debate on the novel. Styron had emerged from the debate “ashen faced”. The young black activists at Yale were outraged that a white southerner should attempt to write about Nat Turner. Gates believed this treatment of Styron turned on the fact that he was white, and that this was unfair. Gates remarks that, by extension, “any white racist could have used the same argument to prevent me from writing about [say] Shakespeare.”

Gates ends, “I thought Bill Styron did a brilliant job.”

This website uses cookies, you can find out more and set your preferences here.
By continuing to use this website, you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.