“The Great Bandit”
Right off the bat the public’s perspective on Nat Turner is poisoned through the disparaging application of metaphor. In the very first paragraph on the very first page after the very first mention of Turner, he is anointed with a particularly prejudicial title:
“Nat Turner, the leader of this ferocious band, whose name has resounded throughout our widely extended empire, was captured. This “great Bandit” was taken by a single individual, in a cave near the residence of his late owner”
The Vision
At one point, Turner’s confession becomes the description of religious vision. This vision is portrayed with all the vivid imagery and horrifying hallucinations of dread as might be heard in an overzealous evangelical sermon. Like any good sermon-like description of a religious vision, it is fueled by the power of metaphor:
“And about this time I had a vision—and I saw white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened—the thunder rolled in the Heavens, and blood fl owed in streams—and I heard a voice saying, `Such is your luck, such you are called to see, and let it come rough or smooth, you must surely bare it.’”
Signs and Wonders
Indeed, there is much in Turner’s confession that has a sense of the evangelical sermon about it. Shortly after the religious vision, he shares an anecdote about working in the fields when the kind of very strange occurrence meeting the definition of Biblical signs and wonders seemed to appear. This, too, he conveys through metaphorical imagery:
“I wondered greatly at these miracles, and prayed to be informed of a certainty of the meaning thereof— and shortly afterwards, while laboring in the field, I discovered drops of blood on the corn as though it were dew from heaven”
Causation
Thomas R. Gray, the man to whom Turner made his confession and who was charged with recording, adds his own analysis at the end of his introduction in which he concludes and conveys to a fearful public that Turner was not acting in concert with a greater conspiracy. Nor does Gray attribute Turner’s revolt to mere revenge-seeking. Instead, he believes it to grown organically over a long period of time with great deliberation and ultimately frames the motivation itself within an elegant metaphor, declaring Turner’s uprising to be
“The offspring of gloomy fanaticism, acting upon materials but too well prepared for such impressions.”
This is the End
The confession itself ends on a metaphorical image describing the last moments of the official existence of Nat Turner’s rebellion. Following a horrific tale of running and hiding, bullets flying, physical assaults, shrieks and murders, the drama ends with another toast to the evangelical metaphor describing an almost anticlimactic conclusion:
“But fortunate for society, the hand of retributive justice has overtaken them; and not one that was known to be concerned has escaped.”
