Herbert Aptheker, Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion: Including the 1831 "Confessions," preface by Bettina Aptheker (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1996, 2006) (From the back cover: "In the summer of 1831, a band of some forty slaves led by Nat Turner attacked slave-owning residents of Southampton County, Virginia. One of the largest and most violent revolts in the history of the young nation, the rebellion took the lives of some sixty white men, women, and children. An outcry against the South's exploitative slave system, the revolt was suppressed within forty-eight hours, and Turner, who eluded authorities for months, was eventually captured, sentenced to death, and executed." "The impact of Turner's uprising was monumental. Abolitionists looked for ways to encourage and support future insurrections while white Southerners took revenge on both slave and free African-Americans. Nearly 200 blacks, many of whom had nothing to do with the rebellion, were beaten, tortured, and murdered by white mobs." "Herbert Aptheker's account of the bloodiest slave uprising in U.S. history was the first full-length study of its kind. Meticulously researched, it explores the nature of Southern society in the early nineteenth century and the conditions that led to the rebellion. Described by the Journal of American History as 'a thorough and scholarly treatment,' the text includes Turner's Confessions,' recorded before his execution in 1831." QUERY: Does one person have any right to enslave another person? Is a government legitimate if it recognizes a right of one person to enslave another? If the answer to those two questions is no, then does not the enslaved have a right to get themselves free? And if so, what are the limits on what action the enslaved might take to that end (again, given that the government is complicit in the enslavement)? Is violence off limits? And, if the enslaved have a right to get themselves free and violence is not off limit, is it a further injustice to convict and punish (including execute) those enslaved who sought their freedom? Or, to put it another way: Were YOU the legal representative of Nat Turner, how would you plead his case (even knowing, beyond a doubt, that Nat Turner's conviction and death were forgone conclusion before the trial even begins)? Food for thought.).
Herbert Aptheker, Herbert Apther On Race and Democracy: A Reader, edited by Eric Foner & Manning Marable (Urbana & Chicago: U. of Illinois Press, 2006).
Gary Murrell, "The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States: A Biography of Herbert Aptheker, afterword by Bettina Aptheker (Amherst & Boston: U. of Massachusetts Press, 2015).
