The Confessions of Nat Turner

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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. --------------------------------------------------------------------- [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

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