Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1994. [Vol. 2.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 22)

STUDIES - László Dányi: Nat Turner: History that Fiction Makes, or Fiction that History Makes?

Nat Turner's Slave RebellionP The entire book is a refutation of the view held by Louis Filler, who maintains that the rebellion obstructed the emancipation process in the last century. In the main part of the book Aptheker offers an overview of the stereotypical characteristic features attached to black people and Nat Turner. In Aptheker's view Nat Turner is a human being who struggles in order to get something precious to human beings

—"peace, prosperity, liberty, or, in a word, a greater amount of happiness."

2

4 He is convinced that Nat Turner "sought the liberation of the negro people"

2

5, and the "desire for liberty"

2

6 was his motive. After the rebellion slaves were regarded as banditti, blood-thirsty wolves and Frankenstein monsters. A wide-spread view among whites was that God had put blacks on Earth to serve and work for the white man, and this idea of innate inferiority of blacks influenced writers and historians like Sidney Drewry, Robert R. Howison and J. C. Ballagh. However, in their works Nat Turner is labelled "very religious, truthful and honest,"

2

7 "welleducated"

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8. In the works of modern scholars the innate inferiority tends to disappear.

2

9 In the 1940s, Melville J. Herskovits criticizes the view that the tendency to revolt was a sporadic and insignificant phenomenon; however, he devotes only one sentence to the Nat Turner revolt

3

0 Twenty years later Lerone Bennett, Jr. emphasizes that Nat Turner was "a preacher with vengeance on his lips, a dreamer, a fanatic, a terrorist,... a fanatic mixture of gentleness, ruthlessness and piety."

3

1 One of the two drawings provided as 2

3 Herbert Aptheker, Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1966). 2

4 Ibid., 6. 2

5 Ibid., 35. 2

6 Ibid., 45. 2

7 Ibid., 35. 2

8 Ibid., 35. 2

9 Herbert Aptheker, 6. 3

0 Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1941) 98. 3

1 Lerone Bennett, Jr., Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America 1619— 1964 (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co., Inc., 1964) 118. 38