The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron

By the year 1860, the number of free blacks in the South amounted to nearly 500,000. Free blacksĪlthough slavery was firmly entrenched in the South, not all blacks were slaves. Some slaves managed to learn these skills anyway, and a few managed to secure weapons. Laws were enacted that prohibited slaves from carrying weapons and forbade them from learning to read or write.

As the proportion of blacks increased, white anxiety about possible uprisings grew and more systematic control over slaves became commonplace. By the early 1700s, for instance, slaves outnumbered whites by almost five to one in South Carolina. The growing plantation-based economy in the South meant that the number of slaves brought from Africa rose dramatically.

Unlike white indentured servants, who worked for about seven years, blacks became subject to colonial laws passed in 1660 dictating that slaves would serve white owners for life. Probably as early as 1619, speculators and slave traders brought Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the newly established colonial regions. Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place Early American slavery The book, which focused on the life and rebellion of a black slave in nineteenth-century Virginia, helped shed light on the racial unrest that persisted into the twentieth century. In 1966, during the midst of the growing black civil rights movement, Styron published The Confessions of Nat Turner, one of his most controversial novels. It troubled him deeply that by his own time racial inequalities still had not been set right. The hours spent listening to his grandmother’s stories about owning slaves haunted the young Styron for years. Styron’s grandmother grew up on a North Carolina plantation, where she owned two slave girls. William Styron, a white writer and novelist, was born in 1925 in Newport News, Virginia, the same tidewater region where the real Nat Turner lived one hundred years earlier. Nat Turner recounts his life as a slave and his revolt against Virginia slaveowners.Įvents in History at the Time the Novel Takes PlaceĮvents in History at the Time the Novel Was Written A historical novel set in Southampton County, Virginia, during the years 1800 to 1831 published in 1966.

The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron