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Nat Turner – Murderer of Innocents or Freedom Fighter?

Nat Turner was born in 1800 in Virginia in America. He was a slave and so we do not know his family name. ‘Turner’ was the name of the man who owned him.

Nat’s father ran away from the farm where he worked when his son was small. Nat never heard of him again. We know that Nat’s grandmother was born in Ghana. White men took her to America when she was thirteen years old and sold her as a slave.

Nat was very clever and learnt to read and write. This was unusual for a slave. He was also very religious and believed that God sent him special messages. Sometimes he saw messengers from heaven that other people could not see. Nowadays, we might call these hallucinations, rather than visions but those were very different times. When he was twenty-two, he ran away from Mr. Turner’s farm but he returned after a month because God told him to. He was sure that God had a very special job for him to do.

We don’t know anything more about Nat until he was thirty-one. Then, one day, he started to kill the white people where he lived. He went from farm to farm and told the slaves that they were free. He killed the white people – but only the rich. He said the poor whites did not have anything more than the slaves and the escaped slaves should not kill them.

Nat went from one village to the next. More and more slaves followed him. After a few hours, sixty white people were dead. This was the first time in America that slaves killed whites.

The next day, a white farmer caught Nat. They hanged him from a tree, as well as fifty-eight other slaves that killed white farmers. Nat was only thirty-one years old.

In Virginia, angry white people killed two hundred more slaves and free black men. They stopped black people meeting together and were harder on them than ever before. They were no longer allowed to learn to read or write and got no education.

Many people see Nat Turner as a hero. He showed white people that slavery was not only wrong, it was dangerous too. But others do not understand why he killed white children – some of them were only three or four years old. So, was Nat Turner a criminal or a freedom fighter? We must all make up our own minds.

If you want to watch some videos on this topic, you can click on the links to YouTube videos below.

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