This exceptional contemporary account by Samuel Warner, complete with exceedingly rare woodcut-engraved folding frontispiece, was the first "to come off the press describing the massacre before Nat Turner was even captured" (American Antiquarian Society/AAS). Turner's was not the first American slave rebellion-a large insurrection had occurred in Louisiana in 1811-but the uprising of 1831 was the deadliest" (Kennedy, Strange Nation, 270). "Southerners needed to believe that Turner went beserk, because his rampage threatened the South's myth about itself and the benignity of slavery. "Authorities hanged Turner by the neck until dead, then dismembered his body and dispersed its parts among the living as curios and relics" (French, Rebellious Slave, 278).
#NAT TUNER BOX TRIAL#
Virginian militiamen apprehended him on October 30 and put him on trial in November" (Campbell, Disasters, 67-68). Turner himself managed to escape and eluded capture for nine weeks. "In less than two days, 70 black insurgents killed 59 white Virginians, and whites slaughtered more than 100 blacks in retaliation… They cut off their heads and fixed them on poles to serve as a deterrent… 19 rebels were tried quickly and executed. On AugTurner and his followers began their insurrection by murdering Turner's owner and his family and then continued killing whites throughout Southampton County'" (Finkelman, Encyclopedia, 109). Nat Turner, an intelligent, literate slave highly motivated by religious belief and mysticism, thought it was his fate to bring enslaved blacks out of bondage.
history took place in Southampton County, Virginia. Housed in a custom clamshell box.įirst edition of the dramatic contemporary account of the Nat Turner rebellion, the first book "to come off the press… before Turner was even captured," with author Warner describing Turner and his rebels as "blood-thirsty monsters" who left behind a "spectacle of horror," this exceptional work complete with rarely found woodcut-engraved folding frontispiece including caption descriptions such as, "A Mother intreating for the lives of her children" and "Travis, cruelly murdered by his own slaves." Slim octavo, contemporary three-quarter brown calf and marbled boards pp. Authentic and Impartial Narrative of the Tragical Scene Which Was Witnessed in Southampton County (Virginia) on Monday the 22nd of August Last, When Fifty-Five of its Inhabitants (mostly women and children) were inhumanly Massacred by the Blacks! (New York): Warner & West, 1831. (SLAVERY) (TURNER, Nat) (WARNER, Samuel). HISTORY": A GREAT RARITY, FIRST EDITION OF THE FIRST BOOK ACCOUNT OF THE NAT TURNER REBELLION, WARNER'S AUTHENTIC AND IMPARTIAL NARRATIVE, 1831, PUBLISHED BEFORE TURNER'S CAPTURE, COMPLETE WITH RARELY FOUND WOODCUT-ENGRAVED FOLDING FRONTISPIECE DEPICTING THE "HORRID MASSACRE IN VIRGINIA"
0 kommentar(er)
