The Confessions of Nat Turner
Throughout history people have published articles and books in order
to sway the public to their side. Rulers such as Stalin and Mao used
propaganda to keep themselves in power; people such as Thomas Paine
used articles in order to start revolution. Thomas R. Gray, author of
The Confessions of Nat Turner, had that power when he interviewed
Turner. Although The Confessions of Nat Turner is supposedly the words
of Turner himself, we have no way to confirm that Gray did not show
the information in order to gain greater benefit from it. It is known
that the interviewer, Thomas R. Gray, was struggling financially. It
is possible that he embellished the story in order to make the reading
more dramatic; or it is also possible that Gray harbored feelings
against Turner because of racial hatred of the time or because of the
murders themselves, and that this hatred influenced the way he
portrayed Turner's confession.
Thomas R. Gray, during the time of the interview, was a man of
thirty-one years of age and was not very successful in his practice as
a lawyer and a farmer. Gradually having to sell off his land bit by
bit and many of his slaves, Gray tried to find other occupations that
might pay higher than his current job. When the Nat Turner rebellion
occurred, Gray had to have realized how big this story was. Not only
had one of the biggest slave rebellions in American history just
occurred, but also the authorities had the main instigator alive in a
prison cell. Gray probably realized controversy would erupt over what
Turner had to say, and so he left for Jerusalem, Virginia right away
to interview Turn...
... middle of paper ...
...acts of the
number dead are hard to change. One cannot just make up a dead person;
someone is bound to find out. Gray even informs the audience before
they read the book that although some of the words might not exactly
be Turner's, they were basically what he said. "I determined for the
gratification of public curiosity to commit his statements to writing,
and publish them, with little or no variation, from his own words."[4]
Gray freely admits that he may have changed the wording of some of
what Turner said, but the real meat of the story is still unchanged.
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[1] A Bedford Series, The Confessions of Nat Turner (Boston:
Bedford/St. Martin's, 1996), 50
[2] A Bedford Series, 54
[3] A Bedford Series, 50
[4] A Bedford Series, 40
Greenberg, Kenneth S. ed., The Confessions of Nat Turner and Related Documents. New York: Bedford Books, 1996.
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