Nat Turner led a slave uprising in 1831 in which some sixty white Virginians were killed. Gray was a young lawyer who interviewed Turner, his exact contemporary, while Turner was awaiting trial. It is impossible to determine the accuracy of the resulting pamphlet, “The Confessions of Nat Turner” (1832). There has been much critical discussion over the degree to which Turner's authentic voice can be heard in Gray's retelling.

Gray's pamphlet is the basis for William Styron's controversial novel by the same name, which won the Pulitzer Prize for 1967.

Text: Thomas Ruffin Gray, The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southhampton, Va. as Fully and Voluntarily Made to Thomas R. Gray (Baltimore, MD: Thomas Ruffin Gray, 1831). Downloaded from DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska-Lincoln. A small number of obvious spelling errors have been silently corrected.

“THE CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER”

CONFESSION. Agreeable to his own appointment, on the evening he was committed to prison, with permission of the jailer, I visited NAT on Tuesday the 1st November, when, without being questioned at all, he commenced his narrative in the following words:—Sir,—You have asked me to give a history of the motives which induced me to undertake the late insurrection, as you call it—To do so I must go back to the days of my infancy, and even before I was born. I was thirty-one years of age the 2d of October last, and born the property of Benj. Turner, of this county. In my childhood a circumstance occurred which made an indelible impression on my mind, and laid the ground work of that enthusiasm, which has terminated so fatally to many, both white and black, and for which I am about to atone at the gallows. It is here necessary to relate this circumstance—trifling as it may seem, it was the commencement of that belief which has grown with time, and even now, sir, in this dungeon, helpless and forsaken as I am, I cannot divest myself of.