He was at this time nearly thirty-one years old, having been born on the second of October, 1800.  He had belonged originally to Benjamin Turner,—­whence his last name, slaves having usually no patronymic,—­had then been transferred to Putnam Moore, and then to his present owner.  He had, by his own account, felt himself singled out from childhood for some great work; and he had some peculiar marks on his person, which, joined to his great mental precocity, were enough to occasion, among his youthful companions, a superstitious faith in his gifts and destiny.  He had great mechanical ingenuity also, experimentalized very early in making paper, gunpowder, pottery, and in other arts which in later life he was found thoroughly to understand.  His moral faculties were very strong, so that white witnesses admitted that he had never been known to swear an oath, to drink a drop of spirits, or to commit a theft.  And in general, so marked were his early peculiarities, that people said “he had too much sense to be raised, and if he was, he would never be of any use as a slave.”  This impression of personal destiny grew with his growth;—­he fasted, prayed, preached, read the Bible, heard voices when he walked behind his plough, and communicated his revelations to the awe-struck slaves.  They told him in return, that, “if they had his sense, they would not serve any master in the world.”

The biographies of slaves can hardly be individualized; they belong to the class.  We know bare facts; it is only the general experience of human beings in like condition which can clothe them with life.  The outlines are certain, the details are inferential.  Thus, for instance, we know that Nat Turner’s young wife was a slave; we know that she belonged to a different master from himself; we know little more than this, but this is much.  For this is equivalent to saying that by day or by night that husband had no more power to protect her than the man who lies bound upon a plundered vessel’s deck has power to protect his wife on board the pirate-schooner disappearing in the horizon; she may be reverenced, she may be outraged; it is in the powerlessness that the agony lies.  There is, indeed, one thing more which we do know of this young woman:  the Virginia newspapers state that she was tortured under the lash, after her husband’s execution, to make her produce his papers:  this is all.

What his private experiences and special privileges or wrongs may have been, it is therefore now impossible to say.  Travis was declared to be “more humane and fatherly to his slaves than any man in the county”; but it is astonishing how often this phenomenon occurs in the contemporary annals of slave insurrections.  The chairman of the county court also stated, in pronouncing sentence, that Nat Turner had spoken of his master as “only too indulgent”; but this, for some reason, does not appear in his printed Confession, which only says, “He was a kind master, and placed the greatest confidence