ROSAMOND C.

RODMAN

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Which Killest

the Prophets”
Nat Turner’s Revolt and the Renaming of Jerusalem,
Virginia

[I]t cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem,

which killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee . . .
- Luke 13:33b–13:34a

Names are the turning point of who will be master.

- Walt Whitman, An American Primer

I
n 1888, the residents of Jerusalem, Virginia, changed the name of their
town to Courtland. Two explanations have been forwarded. One,
Jerusalemites suffered humiliation at being greeted with the racial slur,
“Here come those Arabs from Jerusalem!” when they disembarked the train
in Norfolk, the Chesapeake Bay terminus of the newly completed Atlantic
and Danville Railway line. Two, they simply changed the name when the
village was incorporated as a town. This essay explores a third possibility: jet-
tisoning Jerusalem rid the town of its association with the deadliest slave
uprising in the United States, the Nat Turner revolt, replacing it with a
name evocative of the tangible and ideological institutions that mete out the
dominant, white supremacist terms of legality and justice.
This alternative possibility for changing the name Jerusalem to
Courtland showcases place naming as a strategy in the politics of public

Rosamond C. Rodman is an assistant professor of humanities and religious studies at Georgia State
University.

VIRGINIA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY & BIOGRAPHY VOL. 131 NO. 1

4 • Virginia Magazine

memory work. Place name origins often lie beneath the murky waters of
anecdote, lacking definitive proof of adoption. This case is not the excep-
tion. What makes jettisoning Jerusalem worth reconsidering is that place
names (toponyms) do not change often or easily. “Normally only a socio-
political revolution would bring about a change of name,” according to
cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, because people recognize that a new name
“has the power to wipe out the past and call forth the new.” Perhaps that was
the intention. If the collective memory of the revolt could not be disassoci-
ated from Jerusalem, then getting rid of Jerusalem might have been a more
effective mode of contending with the ways that Nat Turner continued to
haunt Southampton County. In other words, the name may have been
changed owing to a long-standing frustration that the Turner revolt was not
forgotten and likely never would be.1
Anthropologists have long noted the rich cultural ore that place names
and place naming taps into. Keith Basso, whose work among the western
Apache in Arizona revived and reinvigorated place name studies in the field,
wrote that because of “their role as spatial anchors in traditional Apache nar-
ratives, place-names can be made to represent the narratives themselves . . .
condensing into compact form their essential moral truths.” In other words,
place names mediate cultural knowledge not just about where people live,
but how they live. They convey “covert cultural logics.”2
Historians have shown that place names can silence associations just as
effectively as they can summon them. Michel-Rolph Trouillot began his
study of history-making with the Haitian palace named Sans Souci. How it
came to be named that has several possibilities. If, Trouillot argued, the
palace was named for Colonel Jean-Baptiste San Souci, an important figure
in the Haitian Revolution, and not the palace of Frederick the Great, then
it erases and replaces one kind of history for another. “Sans Souci, the palace
. . . effectively silences Sans Souci, the man, his political goals, his military
genius.” For Trouillot, place naming reflects the “active and transitive”
process of silencing even as, or especially when, it seems to be doing the
opposite. Historian Jean O’Brien, who studies nineteenth-century New
England histories, finds a similar outcome. “Local narrators in New England
simultaneously embraced and replaced Indian peoples in shaping their story
about New England.” In crafting these “replacement narratives,” O’Brien
 Nat Turner’s Revolt and the Renaming of Jerusalem, Virginia • 5

reveals how place naming, among other strategies, was used in service of rel-
egating Indians to the past, making them already erased or readily replaced.3
Yet, place names (toponyms) often go unnoticed, appearing to be
“ideologically innocent” rather than “power-charged semiotic dynamos for
making meaning about places.” This essay considers the case of renaming
Jerusalem to Courtland. Both by considering the valence of the name
Jerusalem with respect to Nat Turner and the revolt he led, and by consid-
ering the name Courtland within a series of attempts to erase Nat Turner
and the revolt from memory, the essay intends to shed new light on an old
puzzle: why was Jerusalem changed to Courtland? This exploration proceeds
in roughly reverse chronological order; first by contextualizing the decision
to change Jerusalem to Courtland within a series of events and efforts, before
turning to the striking associations between the name Jerusalem and Nat
Turner.4

THE ONLY OFFICIAL REFERENCE to changing Jerusalem to Courtland occurs

in the 1888 town charter:
1. Be it enacted by the general assembly of Virginia, That the village of Jerusalem in
the county of Southampton, as the same has been or may be laid off into streets and
alleys, shall be, and the same is hereby made a town corporate by the name of
Courtland, and by that name shall have and exercise all the powers, rights, privileges,
and immunities . . .
But the more popular and widely held belief as to why Jerusalem was
renamed dates back to 1888 when the Atlantic and Danville railroad
was completed and residents could ride the train to Norfolk to shop, accord-
ing to Southampton County Historical Society Vice President Kitty Futrell.
“They would go into the shops and people would say ‘here come those Arabs
from Jerusalem,’” Futrell said. “They got tired of it and petitioned for a new
name.” The newly established Atlantic and Danville rail line did indeed
chug residents of Southampton County eastward to the Chesapeake Bay
town of Norfolk. More pertinent is the other terminus in Danville, Virginia,
about 150 miles west of Jerusalem.5
Danville had been the site of “a dispute over street etiquette” in 1885.
The Danville Riot, as historians refer to it, broke out when a white man
accused a Black man of deliberately tripping him. Guns were drawn. When
6 • Virginia Magazine

A detail from a map showing the location of the Virginias Railway across the grand divisions of
West Virginia and Virginia from the Ohio River to Hampton Roads. See Danville in the lower left,
just above “Carolina,” and Jerusalem above the “d” in Railroad. (Library of Congress)

the smoke cleared, five people had been shot and killed, four of them African
Americans. Coming just a few days before “an important Virginia state elec-
tion, the violence in Danville and Democratic stories about it contributed to
the downfall of the Readjuster party, a biracial third party that had governed
Virginia since 1879.” Local newspapers covering the event stoked rumors of
planned “uprisings of the Negroes of Southampton County.” Eventually,
The New York Times ran a story that tamped down the rumors as unsubstan-
tiated, pointing out the obvious: that rumors of an insurrection and race-
baiting could have an immediate effect “in the coming national election.” As
indeed they did. Many Black Virginians who could vote stayed home; the
election went to the Democrats.6
The Danville Riot may well have evoked the “unhealed cultural memo-
ries” of Nat Turner and the revolt; the rumors make it difficult to imagine
it did not. Admittedly, it is impossible to know whether the memory of
the 1831 Nat Turner slave revolt affected journalistic narrations about the
racialized violence in Danville fifty years later; whether Nat Turner and
the slave revolt were unconsciously lurking in the minds of Danville
residents. Clearly, though, the “mind reconstructs its memories under the
pressures of society.” Racialized violence in Danville occurred in a region
that had experienced a violent slave uprising and retaliatory violence just
fifty years earlier. The reenactment of traumatizing episodes, together with
“denial . . . of the effects of past and present injustices, maintains the condi-
tions that keep trauma resilient.” In 1888, just three years after the Danville
Riot, the new standard-gauge rail line connecting Danville with Norfolk via
Jerusalem was completed. In that same year, Jerusalem’s postmistress, Miss
Fannie Barnett (or Barrett), purportedly petitioned the Jerusalem town
 Nat Turner’s Revolt and the Renaming of Jerusalem, Virginia • 7

council for a change of name, citing residents’ dismay at being greeted with
a racial slur when they disembarked from the train in Norfolk. The town
council did decide to change the name to Courtland, whether in response to
the petition or for other reasons. It should be said, though, that this expla-
nation seems odd. How did residents in Norfolk distinguish the disembark-
ing passengers from Jerusalem from those who began their journey in
Danville or other stops on the line?7
Even if the Danville Riot had not evoked memories of Nat Turner and
the revolt, others were trying hard to do so. To wit, the subject of Nat
Turner had recently received fresh intellectual attention. By the 1880s,
Black intelligentsia had published several important works on Black history
and key figures (men). Nat Turner featured prominently among them. In
these depictions, he was variously “a martyr to the freedom of his race,” a
prophet who foretold his own death, “one of the greatest emancipators of
the nineteenth century,” and the instigator of the first key strike against slav-
ery that had paved the way for the Civil War. Black newspapers founded
during Reconstruction reappropriated Turner as well. T. Thomas Fortune,
editor of The New York Age, published a eulogistic poem to Turner that led
to a heated debate with Frederick Douglass over whether Nat Turner or
John Brown was more deserving of a memorial. The figure of “Nat Turner”
would in fact be revived many times over the decades. During the increas-
ingly polarized 1850s, he made several antebellum literary appearances.
In G. P. R. James’s 1856 novel, The Old Dominion; or The Southampton
Massacre, the Nat Turner character appears heroic if flawed, raising for read-
ers the question of whether the actual “Nat Turner Revolt was morally
defensible.” Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Dred, published the same year,
used both Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey as inspiration in creating her tit-
ular character. Stowe explored the possibility that “the memories of black
rebellion passed from generation to generation of slaves.” Both novelists
reimagined Nat Turner in order to interrogate the difficult national problem
of slavery.8
While several writers busily resurrected and repurposed Nat Turner,
many local residents strove to forget. The Jerusalem courthouse, where Nat
Turner and others accused of participating in the revolt had been put on
trial, was razed and rebuilt. In 1833, just two years after the trials, county
8 • Virginia Magazine

judges and other leaders decided to destroy the old county courthouse,
deeming it “impractical for [the court] to hold its sessions in the court-
house.” Curiously, though, the new courthouse was built on the exact
footprint of the old one, slightly expanded, but not greatly changed. The
new courthouse was a simple two-story brick structure, “devoid of classical
details” (Greek columns were added later).9
The idea to destroy the original courthouse and construct another in its
place seems to have originated with Jeremiah Cobb and Clement Rochelle.
Cobb had served as the presiding judge in the trial of Nat Turner, and
Clement Rochelle was Southampton’s sheriff, responsible for bringing the
prisoners to the court. The former sentenced Nat Turner to be “hung by
the neck until you are dead! dead! dead!” while the latter stood next to
Turner on the gallows. Whatever inspired Rochelle and Cobb to rebuild the
courthouse has led to the not unreasonable speculation that “one reason for
this decision was Southampton’s determination to wipe out the horrible
memories of Nat Turner and what had transpired there.” Could the same be

The Southampton County Court House. (Photo by Mojo Hand, CCA-SA)

 Nat Turner’s Revolt and the Renaming of Jerusalem, Virginia • 9

said for changing the name of the town?10

Attempts to destroy the memories of Nat Turner and the revolt did not
end with the destruction of the courthouse. On 6 December 1831, less than
a month following Turner’s death by hanging, the governor of Virginia,
John Floyd, gave his annual address to the state. As Mary Kemp Davis point-
ed out, Floyd’s text aimed to “control ruthlessly the image of the Nat Turner
Revolt.” It operated on parallel tracks: one, to reassure the residents of the
commonwealth; the other, to showcase the violence of the event in order to
shore up laws and militias against possible future uprisings. In his remarks,
Floyd did not refer to any of the participants in the revolt by name.
Rhetorically, this minimized their individual acts and maximized their col-
lectivity. He instead referred to them en masse and always as criminals,
“assassins,” “murderers,” and “deluded fanatics.” It was a fairly fine line he
had to toe. On the one hand, this “banditti of slaves” was a ragtag group that
never grew to more than seventy participants. Yet, they managed a “horrid
barbarity” upon innocent and unsuspecting women and helpless children.
“In contrast to his failure to name a single conspirator, Floyd mentioned by
name and military rank several of the officers whom he ordered to assist the
local militia in crushing the revolt.” Brigadier Generals Eppes and Broadnax,
Captains Harrison and Richardson, Commodore Elliot, Colonels Worth
and House. With “cheerful alacrity,” Floyd noted, these officers directed
“infantry,” “artillery,” “regiments,” “cavalry,” and “troops” to the successful
subduing of the revolt. In this way, the governor rhetorically minimized the
astonishingly effective surprise attack carried out by Nat Turner and oth-
ers.11
Floyd carefully avoided any mention of Nat Turner by name at all in his
December address. As Davis asserts, “Inserted into the gap where we would
expect to see Turner’s name are generalized references to the putative leaders
of the revolt, again unnamed.” In the months following the trials and execu-
tions, the Virginia House of Delegates debated whether to end slavery as a
way to ward off the possibility of future slave uprisings. Initially, delegates
voted to regard slavery as “evil,” to advocate for the colonization of free
Blacks, and to slowly manumit slaves. But the state’s senators financially
neutered the bill and tabled any further discussion. Instead, they passed a law
“clearly written with Turner in mind” banning Black Virginians from
10 • Virginia Magazine

preaching and attending unsupervised religious services. Strikingly, just as in

Governor Floyd’s address, the name Nat Turner was entirely missing from
these discussions. As Kenneth Greenberg notes, the records of the debates
“are full of references to the ‘Southampton Tragedy’ or the ‘Southampton
Affair’—but not to ‘Nat Turner.’”12
Floyd reassured residents that the uprising was local and quickly con-
tained, but he also wanted to emphasize that the threat of future revolts was
all too real as long as free people of color and “negro preachers” were allowed
to address their fellows. As to the former, Floyd recommended “a sum of
money to aid in their removal”; the latter are “to be silenced.” This silence
was enacted legislatively as Virginians passed even more repressive anti-liter-
acy laws than were already on the books. Rules against Black people meeting
and preaching were justified as necessary “on the grounds that slaves,
because they were not fit for the exercise of democratic rights, would misun-
derstand the power given them by literacy or be misled by abolitionist prop-
aganda.” Of course, most white Virginians were afraid that Black people
would understand what they read, not that they would not. Turner’s inter-
pretation of the Bible—and that of others before him—made it clear that it
could be an incredibly effective ideological weapon in the hands of the
enslaved. Hand in hand with legislation that beefed up “patrol and militia
systems and increased the . . . severity of . . . slave codes” came laws prevent-
ing Black men and women from meeting or learning to read. In 1832, a year
after Nat Turner’s revolt, a Virginia law was passed stating, “no slave, free
negro, or mulatto . . . shall hereafter undertake to preach, exhort or conduct,
or hold any assembly, or meeting, for religious or other purposes.” The
offense was punishable by up to thirty-nine lashes.13
Nat Turner cast as “Negro preacher” was but a step away from the most
common descriptor of him: a fanatic. Early newspaper reports on the revolt
printed in the Constitutional Whig and Richmond Enquirer referred to
Nat Turner as “The Preacher-Captain,” “a preacher and a prophet,” and a
“fanatic preacher.” Increasingly, references to Turner as a preacher were sup-
planted by references to him as a “pretended prophet” or “a fanatic.” For
example, the Constitutional Whig regarded the Southampton insurrection as
“the work of fanaticism—General Nat was no preacher, but in his immedi-
ate neighbourhood, he had acquired the character of a prophet.” Several his-
 Nat Turner’s Revolt and the Renaming of Jerusalem, Virginia • 11

An 1832 letter written by Eleanor Wayland Weaver of Madison County, Virginia. She wrote that
“General Nat the preacher” was captured and put to death, and “we hope our government will take
some steps to put down Negro preaching.” (Collection of the National Museum of African American
History and Culture)
12 • Virginia Magazine

torians believe this article was probably penned by Thomas Gray, who wrote
likewise of Nat Turner in The Confessions of Nat Turner. There, too, Gray
calls Turner a “gloomy fanatic” with a “dark, bewildered and overwrought
mind,” and a “complete fanatic” with a “fiend-like face.” The Norfolk
Herald, reporting after the capture and execution of Nat Turner, published
a report that “he was instigated by the wildest superstition and fanaticism,
and was not connected with any organized plan of conspiracy.” Even as
initial press reports reflected heightened anxiety about Black preachers insti-
gating a much wider slave rebellion, Nat Turner was transformed from
a powerful, fearsome figure to a pathetic one, a pretended prophet and a
deluded madman—a fanatic.14
Even the diminutions and “peculiar absence of Nat Turner’s name from
Floyd’s December address” pale next to the disappearance of key texts: a
missing bundle of papers notated as having been filed in the governor’s
council journal, and a striking lacuna, from August through November of
1831, in the otherwise complete Calendar of Virginia State Papers. The mys-
teriously lost or destroyed materials on the Nat Turner revolt stand in
marked contrast to the many extant pages devoted to “The Gabriel
Insurrection,” which predated the Nat Turner revolt.
Minimizing, erasing, and disappearing were not the only strategies used
to control the collective memory of the revolt. Performative and excessive
violence to those captured and accused of participating in the revolt was also
common. “Exhibiting ‘a spirit of vindictive ferocity,’ the militias, troops,
and self-appointed vigilante groups took their revenge on Blacks who had
been suspected of supporting the revolt,” argues historian Patrick Breen. An
unknown number of Black people—some associated with the revolt, but
many others not—were summarily killed. Notably, these killings were fre-
quently staged. Historian Thomas Parramore documented the performative
and retributive violence. One militia group found and executed “Jack and
Andrew, Nat’s recruiters” along with seven others. Their heads were mount-
ed atop poles as “a warning to all who should undertake a similar plot.”
Henry Porter, a suspected rebel, was tortured, burned, and decapitated, his
head “spiked to a whipping post for a spectacle to other negroes.” Another
leader in the rebellion known as “General Nelson” was captured and “he too
 Nat Turner’s Revolt and the Renaming of Jerusalem, Virginia • 13

was beheaded. Both heads were taken . . . to Norfolk as trophies, while oth-
ers were spiked on posts at various crossroads.”15
In the neighborhood of Cross Keys, where Turner lived, several Black
people were apprehended and decapitated; in some instances these decapi-
tated heads were paraded on horseback as “a crude but effective” message to
those who might be sympathetic to the cause. Other decapitated heads were
spiked atop “the whipping [post] for a spectacle and a warning for other
negroes!!!!!!” and left for weeks. The location of this sign was on the road
where the rebels had been apprehended and stopped, just before Jerusalem.
These severed heads were displayed for weeks, marked by a sign: “Black

Blackhead Sign-Post Road. (Speech and photographs relating to Nat Turner’s Insurrection, circa
1900–1941, Accession #10673, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville,
Va.)
14 • Virginia Magazine

The modern-day Blackhead Signpost Road sign. (Photograph by C. Scott Pryor, used with permis-
sion)

Head Sign Post.” That sign eventually became a formal road sign marking
the intersection of McHerrin Road and Route 35. According to the Virginia
Board of Historic Resources, “The road name referred to the severed head of
a black man that was displayed on a post and left to decay to deter future
uprisings against slavery.”16
After his death by hanging, beheading was almost surely the fate of Nat
Turner, as well. No one knows for certain, but an ample number of grue-
some stories exist about what happened to his body. Eric Sundquist remarks
on claims that Turner’s “body was skinned and tanned, with one piece of it
reportedly handed down as an heirloom, or that the body was boiled into oil
and sold as a panacea known as ‘Nat’s Grease.’” Kenneth Greenburg finds
William S. Drewry’s report from 1900, that souvenirs such as wallets or
purses were made from his flesh, “carries some degree of credibility since he
knew the residents of the county intimately, had spoken to people who had
 Nat Turner’s Revolt and the Renaming of Jerusalem, Virginia • 15

Photograph of the telephone pole with a

white “x” spray-painted on it that marks
the possible site of Nat Turner’s burial.
(Photograph taken by the author)

lived through the rebellion and its aftermath, and could actually describe the
fate of specific body parts.” Though no one knows for certain, it is clear that
Turner was performatively desecrated, destroyed, and dismembered. Today
in Southampton County, a spray-painted white X on a telephone pole is the
only indication of the spot where Nat Turner’s remains may have been
buried.17
These physical defilements, interwoven with signage, rhetorical dimin-
ishments, and material disappearances, show how crucial was the control of
the memory and meaning of the Nat Turner Revolt. But memories are diffi-
cult to control, and Nat Turner as figurehead and symbol was not as readily
dismembered and scattered as his physical remains were. He cohered in new
ways, both before and after the Civil War. What remains to be seen is how
the name Jerusalem implicitly commemorated Nat Turner and framed his
ultimate end.
16 • Virginia Magazine

REGIONALLY, JERUSALEM was a typical small settlement composed of a village

surrounded by adjoining small farms chopped out of Virginia’s dense, decid-
uous forest. These farms, growing cotton, corn, and tobacco, were tended
by mostly enslaved labor. By 1830, the population of Southampton County
consisted of a majority of enslaved Black people and a sizeable population of
free Black people. Among the former was a man named “Nat Turner.”
Together with a few trusted men, Nat Turner initiated a slave revolt that
began on Sunday night, 21 August, and ended Tuesday, 23 August 1831.
The attack began in the area called Cross Keys, southwest of Jerusalem on
the Travis farm, where Nat Turner was enslaved, and ended at the Parker
farm, just short of Jerusalem proper.18
By Tuesday, 23 August, a “considerable military force” jostled into
Jerusalem consisting of hastily formed militias and local U.S. troop regi-
ments from nearby villages and counties. The rebels associated with Nat
Turner were apprehended on the road leading to Jerusalem, just three miles
shy of the courthouse. Shots rang out, the rebels scattered. Southampton
County was in chaos. Rumors traveled fast, amplifying the extent of the
insurrection and exaggerating the numbers of rebels to “a thousand or 1200
men.” Southampton Country and neighboring areas were on high alert. As
the smoke cleared, the extent of the damage was revealed. Whole families
were found murdered—men, women, and children—fifty-eight in total.
The attack that had begun late night on Sunday, 21 August, began a new
phase on Tuesday: the capturing and killing of those suspected of having
participated in the revolt. In the ensuing chaos, Nat Turner managed to
escape. He remained at large and hidden for about two months before being
found on 31 October by a farmer and his dog very near the Travis farm,
where the revolt had begun. Taken to the county courthouse in Jerusalem,
Nat Turner was jailed, put on trial, and executed by hanging.19
During the brief window of time between Turner’s capture at the end of
October, his incarceration, trial, and finally his execution on 11 November,
an enterprising lawyer named Thomas R. Gray jumped at the chance to
interview and write about Nat Turner’s version of events, probably because
Gray was in dire straits and “needed to make some money.” The result was
the famously fraught text, The Confessions of Nat Turner. In The Confessions,
Nat Turner told Gray that he must begin his story not in the weeks or days
 Nat Turner’s Revolt and the Renaming of Jerusalem, Virginia • 17

The title page of Thomas Gray’s Confessions of

Nat Turner (1831). (Virginia Museum of
History & Culture, F232.S7.T9.Rare)

before the rebellion, but long before that, in “the days of my infancy, and
even before I was born.” Turner remembered that as a child of no more than
“three or four years old,” he had told other children about an event that
occurred before his birth. Overhearing this, astonished adults, including his
mother, confirmed what he told his playmates. Together with distinctive
physical markings, these kinds of occurrences were regarded as indications
that the young boy “surely would be a prophet,” that he was clearly “intend-
ed for some great purpose.” Initially uncertain of these assessments, his
“uncommon intelligence,” “restless and inquisitive mind,” and the “most
perfect ease” with which he learned to read eventually convinced the adult
Turner to try to live up to these apprehensions of his character. This he did
by wrapping himself “in mystery” and adopting ascetical practices such as
self-isolation, fasting, and prayer. In these ways, he began to commune with
“the Spirit.” So devoted was he to the Spirit, that after once successfully run-
ning away, he followed the Spirit’s instruction that he “return to the service
18 • Virginia Magazine

of [his] earthly master,” much “to the astonishment” and dismay of fellow
slaves who “murmured against me.”20
Turner not only heard the voice of the Spirit, but he also had visions,
such as “forms of men in different attitudes,” lights in the sky, drops of
blood on the leaves of corn, and “hieroglyphic characters, and numbers” in
the woods. In May 1828, the Spirit appeared, telling him that “upon the
first sign he must commence the great work.” That sign was a solar eclipse.
Turner and his trusted colleagues decided to strike on 4 July, but Turner
changed his mind, feeling ill and uncertain. Forty days later, another sign
appeared in the form of a hazy, silvery-blue fog—an effect, apparently, of a
recent eruption of what is now called Mount St. Helen’s in Washington
state. Turner read these signs in conjunction with biblical texts and refer-
ences. Historian James Sidbury observes, “While Turner based his authority
on his special ability to understand the Bible, his interpretive gift allowed
him to turn nature into a new divine text and to read God’s intentions
there.” For example, Turner apprehended “white spirits and black spirits
engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened—the thunder rolled in the
Heavens, and blood flowed in streams—and I heard a voice saying, ‘Such is
your luck, such as you are called to see, and let it come rough or smooth,
you must surely bare [sic] it.’”21
This vision was “something of a collage,” with references both to the
Book of Revelation (“I heard a loud voice” in Rev. 1:10; 14:2; blood flowed
in streams in Rev. 16:4) and to the Gospel of Luke (“the sun was darkened”
Luke 23:45, cf. Rev. 9:2). Frequently observed as “an intimation of racial
violence” that he was already planning six years before the actual revolt, it
also reveals something crucially important: Nat Turner’s preference for the
Gospel of Luke and his deep knowledge of that gospel’s narrative.22
Scholars have long noted the importance of Turner’s biblical exegesis in
the first half of The Confessions, although they have for the most part spoken
in generic terms and assumptions about how Nat Turner used “the Bible, in
particular the prophets and the Gospel of Luke, to create a candid and
detailed explanation of many aspects of the rebellion.” There has been less
attention given to specific biblical allusions and citations. Consider, for
example, that in The Confessions Turner twice refers to a particular passage
from Luke (12:31), first from his reading of the Bible and second from hear-
 Nat Turner’s Revolt and the Renaming of Jerusalem, Virginia • 19

ing the Spirit say it: “I was struck with that particular passage which says:
‘Seek ye the kingdom of Heaven and all things shall be added unto you.’ I
reflected much on this passage, and prayed daily for light on this subject—
As I was praying one day at my plough, the spirit spoke to me, saying ‘Seek
ye the kingdom of Heaven and all things shall be added unto you.’”23
This double apprehension opens a window into how important the
Gospel of Luke was for Turner. Turner refers to the Gospel of Luke more
than any other biblical text in The Confessions, often as an indirect allusion
to Luke (for example, 19:21, 23:45; 3:5, 22:44, 3:22; 8:32, 22:63, 23:11,
and 23:36), other times quite directly, as in the above cited passage. When
he explains to Gray why he returned after successfully running away, Turner
again quotes the Spirit and again directly refers to Luke, “For he who
knoweth his Master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many
stripes” (Luke 12:48). In fact, so immersed in Luke’s gospel was Turner,
argues one scholar, that the “confession” he offers to Gray is effectively
“Luke’s life of Christ,” with a narrative arc from “precocious infant . . . with
uncanny knowledge . . . to an adult tested in the wilderness.”24
Why Luke’s gospel? Christopher Tomlins’s speculative history brings a
great deal more attention to this preference than previous investigations of
Nat Turner’s “far from simplistic or haphazard” biblical exegesis. Tomlins
proposes several possibilities: 1. Turner was born and lived in the St. Luke’s
Parish portion of Southampton County; 2. Turner’s life experience may
have resonated with certain prominent themes in Luke’s presentation of
Christ, such as depicting Jesus frequently engaged in prayer, or as a suffering
servant (quite the opposite of John’s Jesus, for example), or as fully and com-
pletely obedient to the will of God; and 3. Luke’s narrative offers the most
complete and fleshed out version of the life of Christ. Perhaps the reasons
are multiple and overlapping; regardless, “The consistency of his reliance on
Luke for inspiration is indisputable.” As such, Jerusalem was of central
importance to the drama Turner set in motion. Taking seriously Turner’s
preference for and familiarity with the Gospel of Luke illuminates why.25
The Gospel of Luke refers to Jerusalem more than any other gospel: three
times more often than the Gospel of Mark, and more than twice as much as
either the Gospels of Matthew or John. In Luke’s narrative, all the important
events occur in Jerusalem, beginning with the annunciation of the birth of
20 • Virginia Magazine

Shown here are two images of Nat Turner’s Bible. (Above:

Speech and photographs relating to Nat Turner’s Insurrection,
circa 1900–1941, Accession #10673, Special Collections,
University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va.; left:
Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African
American History and Culture, Gift of Maurice A. Person and
Noah and Brooke Porter)
 Nat Turner’s Revolt and the Renaming of Jerusalem, Virginia • 21

John the Baptist in Luke 1:5–20; continuing in the story of a young Jesus
remaining at the temple in Jerusalem after his family returns to Nazareth
(Luke 2:42–46); reaching a climax with Jesus’ crucifixion, death, and burial
in and around Jerusalem (Luke 23:26–56); and ending the text by placing
the disciples in Jerusalem after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension (Luke
24:52–3). The literary structure of the gospel also emphasizes Jerusalem,
with the first part relaying the early stages of Jesus’ life and work outside of
Jerusalem (Luke 1:1–9:50) followed by a rather abrupt turn at 9:51, in
which Jesus “set his face to go to Jerusalem” (also known as the “Jerusalem
journey,” or “the travel narrative”). Luke’s Jesus knows his journey to
Jerusalem will be fatal—indeed, that is rather the point—yet he “steadfastly
set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51). The author of Luke maintains
this locative thread throughout the text, keeping the temple in Jerusalem
“constantly in the background . . . as the only scene appropriate for such
historic moments.” The second volume of Luke’s gospel, the Book of Acts,
reiterates the literary structure of Luke and the importance of Jerusalem to
the post-Jesus story by beginning with the mandate that Jesus’ mission must
begin in Jerusalem before extending to the “uttermost part of the earth,”
with Paul preaching in Rome (Acts 1:8). Luke’s gospel unmistakably empha-
sizes the importance of Jerusalem.26
It is often assumed that Nat Turner intended to destroy Jerusalem. For
Eric Sundquist, for example, “It is beyond question that Turner himself
understood the symbolic significance of his attempted destruction of the city
of ‘abominations’ and ‘perverseness.’” Nowhere does Turner, in Gray’s text,
say that, although he does state, repeatedly, that he wanted to reach
Jerusalem. It seems he regarded a solar eclipse in February 1831 as a sign that
he “should arise and prepare myself, and slay my enemies with their own
weapons.” Indeed, Turner says that “he had a great desire to get there
[Jerusalem] to procure arms and ammunition.” Yet, he did not take a direct
route there. In fact, at first Turner and fellow rebels headed slightly south
and west, in the exact opposite direction of Jerusalem, before turning around
to the north and east, in the direction of Jerusalem. Some historians have
wondered whether Turner even had Jerusalem in mind at all. Thomas
Parramore argued that Turner’s “meanderings gave no clue as to his destina-
tion, if he had one in mind. . . . The revolt lurched aimlessly from one farm
22 • Virginia Magazine

to the next.” Only on reaching the Vaughan farm about four miles from
Jerusalem on the main road does Turner say that he was “determined on
starting for Jerusalem.” As they left there and reached the gate to the Parker
farm on the road just three miles from Jerusalem, they were confronted by
“a party of white men” who fired on them. Several of Turner’s “bravest men”
were wounded. It is at this late point that Turner develops a “great desire to
get there [Jerusalem],” and he switches to a different route in order to do
so.27
Turner, remember, is talking to Gray after he has been hiding for two
months, and as he is about to be executed by the state in Jerusalem; Turner’s
favorite and most oft-cited text is Luke, which centralizes Jerusalem as the
necessary scene for the death of Jesus, and Turner clearly understand himself
to be “a successor to or ‘double’ of Christ.” Seen through this lens, is it pos-
sible that Nat Turner has come to regard this moment as fulfilling the story;
that he, too, must die in Jerusalem like Luke’s Jesus, who says: “Today,
tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible
for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city
that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!” (Luke 13:33–34)?
In such a reading, Turner has been telling Gray a tale of two prophets who
faced parallel death sentences in parallel places. Both the outcome and the
locations (ancient and modern Jerusalems) vindicate Turner’s prophetic
authenticity and illuminate his motivation.28
Yet Gray misses it. As Turner recounts his life and what led him to this
moment, Gray suddenly interrupts: “Do you not find yourself mistaken
now?” To Gray’s way of seeing, Turner has been “warped and perverted by
the influence of early [religious] impressions.” He is pathetic, shackled, and
soon to die. Nowhere in The Confessions does Gray’s misapprehension of
Turner and Turner’s steadfast logic come into such a head-on collision:
Gray: “Do you not find yourself mistaken now?”
Turner: “Was not Christ crucified?”
Turner, answering a question with a question, strongly implied here what all
four gospels agree on, and what Luke, Turner’s favored text, insists on: the
persecuted prophet must die in Jerusalem. Gray saw Turner as the victim of
the story, not its hero. Turner’s rhetorical question in response underscores
that Gray does not understand what Turner is trying to communicate.
 Nat Turner’s Revolt and the Renaming of Jerusalem, Virginia • 23

Turner has already told Gray about his motivations. He has seen signs and
followed the directives of the Spirit; he is Christ’s successor. The drama
Turner intended, wanted, and now found himself immersed in was already
not yet effectively realized. There remained only one final episode in the
prophetic narrative: being put to death by the state. That fact, of which both
Gray and Turner are certain, affirms, for Turner at least, that no mistake has
been made, even if Gray does not understand that.29
This is speculation, admittedly. No one knows what Turner was think-
ing. But his preference for and familiarity with Luke’s gospel makes the con-
nection between Nat Turner and Jerusalem certainly poignant and possibly
pointed. That “Nat Turner . . . was executed in a town in Virginia called
Jerusalem, provid[ed] an ironic intersection of biblical traditions.” To be
sure, Nat Turner was a skilled reader and exegete. He did not rely on only
one biblical text. Furthermore, he apprehended celestial bodies and other
signs in conjunction with the Bible to craft his understanding of what the
Spirit directed him to do. Yet, prioritizing Luke, as Turner clearly did, cer-
tainly sharpens the “ironic intersection” between the biblical Jerusalem and
Nat Turner’s Jerusalem. As Turner talks with Gray, he “had completed the
allegory: revelations, the mission to the lowly, healing the sick, baptism like
that of the savior, the man reviled by his enemies, taking up the yoke, the
impending trial and execution at Jerusalem.” If Gray noticed the parallels,
he showed no indication. He focused on what he knew his readers wanted:
the sordid tale of a “complete fanatic.”30

THE LINK BETWEEN THE NAME OF JERUSALEM and Nat Turner is now much
clearer. The perennial question about why Jerusalem was changed to
Courtland has been considered afresh by situating it as perhaps one within
a larger set of efforts to deal with the ways that Nat Turner haunts the land-
scape. Doing so has raised other kinds of questions. How is the revolt
remembered in Southampton County now? Why is the best-preserved
historical building in Courtland today the Rebecca Vaughan House, a
memorial to white female innocence? And “Could the name [Jerusalem]
have helped incite the worst time Southampton county ever knew, the time
it is still remembered by today?” This essay has waded into the perennial
question of changing Jerusalem to Courtland not in order to decide which
24 • Virginia Magazine

of the two best-known explanations is more likely, but in order to explore a

third, heretofore unconsidered, possibility: that the name Jerusalem kept
alive a particularly charged association with Nat Turner, an association that
the name Courtland papered over.31
At first glance, jettisoning Jerusalem appears a minor historical footnote.
Place naming, so often overlooked in more formal processes by which racial,
ethnic, gender, class, or other forms of dominance are expressed in the
United States, in fact captures an important aspect of how such hierarchies
are emplaced. Framed within a wider production of silences and absences it
is entirely possible—indeed, to my mind probable—that changing
Jerusalem to Courtland was another brick in the wall that retrenched racial
segregation and normalized white supremacy consonant with the era of Jim
Crow. Choosing Courtland showcases what historians Lisa Blee and Jean
O’Brien identify as the “power of [dominants] to isolate moments of rupture
in . . . memory rather than to generalize them as a larger unsettling of anti-
septic national narratives.” The name Courtland is that antiseptic national
narrative in linguistic form, geographically embedding the official, institu-
tionalized power of the courts and the authority to adjudicate. It marks in
place a system built to protect and defend a slavocracy-turned-supremacy
that had been so successfully challenged by Nat Turner and others in
Jerusalem. Jerusalem, on the other hand, encoded biblical terms of authority
and justice, of prophets persecuted and prosecuted for fighting inequities
and injustices. Both names—Courtland and Jerusalem—convey what
anthropologist Keith Basso calls “covert cultural logics.” Perhaps it was
inevitable that the latter, implying as it does “the confrontation, rejection,
and persecution of God’s prophet by the ruling authorities” would have to
be replaced with the former, much better suited to “the ideologies of the
dominant group.”32
Just as Turner’s physical remains were scattered, the courthouse in which
the trials took place was razed, the name Jerusalem was also erased and
replaced. The real reason for the change is ultimately unclear. But it is cer-
tainly possible that Courtland was adopted as one in a decades-long series of
efforts to contend with the memory of the Nat Turner Revolt. Place names
embed both “a politics of space (deciding who names and controls space), and
a spatialized politics (whereby the spatial defines who has the legitimacy to
 Nat Turner’s Revolt and the Renaming of Jerusalem, Virginia • 25

speak).” They come out of particular historical circumstances. They illumi-

nate the social issues, pressures, and questions of that time, and uncannily
reflect the conversations and contestations from which and for which they
emerged. Place naming is not innocent.33

NOTES

The author would like to thank Nick Stephenson, library assistant at the Courtland branch of the
Blackwater Regional Library, for his able assistance finding sources; the Honorable Richard L.
Francis, clerk of the 5th Judicial Circuit of Virginia, who provided access to records, maps,
and Nat Turner memorabilia at the Southhampton Country Court House in Courtland; the
Southampton Agricultural and Forestry Museum staff; and the anonymous readers of an early draft
of this essay, whose comments and questions improved it greatly.
1. Yi-Fu Tuan, “Language and the Making of Place: A Narrative-Descriptive Approach,” Annals
of the Association of American Geographers 81 (1991): 688.
2. Keith Basso, “Speaking with Names: Language and Landscape among the Western Apache,”
Cultural Anthropology 3 (1988): 121; Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language
among the Western Apache (Albuquerque, N.M., 1996), 128. See also Thomas F. Thornton,
“Anthropological Studies of Place Naming,” American Indian Quarterly 21 (1997): 209–28.
3. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston,
1995), 48; Jean O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England
(Minneapolis, Minn., 2010), 55–56.
4. Jani Vuolteenaho and Lawrence D. Berg, “Towards Critical Toponymies,” in Critical
Toponymies: The Contested Politics of Place, edited by Lawrence D. Berg and Jani Vuolteenaho
(Burlington, Vt., 2009), 7.
5. The town charter can be accessed at LIS, https://law.lis.virginia.gov/charters/courtland/
(accessed 15 Nov. 2022). Several sources assert that Jerusalem was changed owing to racist slurs
(see “You asked: Jerusalem renamed Courtland in 1888 due to railroad completion,” The Tidewater
News, 16 June 2012, https://www.thetidewaternews.com/2012/06/16/you-asked-jerusalem-
renamed-courtland-in-1888-due-to-railroad-completion/ [accessed 15 Nov. 2022]; Julia Abbott
Culler, “A Comprehensive Story of Southampton County,” The Recorder, 10 April 1931, Virginia
Chronicle.com [accessed 15 Nov. 2022]; and Merle Monahan, “Down Home in Courtland,” The
Tidewater News, n.d.). Historian Daniel Crofts offers a similar explanation: “Courtland . . . was
known until the late nineteenth century as Jerusalem. Local boosters, tired of gibes about the Arabs
26 • Virginia Magazine

from Jerusalem, engineered the change of name” (Daniel Crofts, Old Southampton: Politics and
Society in a Virginia County, 1834–1869 (Charlottesville, Va., 1992), 1. See also Henry Irving
Tragle, The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation of Source Material (Amherst, Mass.,
1971), 14–15.
6. Jane Dailey, “Deference and Violence in the Postbellum Urban South: Manners and
Massacres in Danville, Virginia,” Journal of Southern History 63 (1997): 556; see also Scot French’s
discussion of the Danville Riot and “The Southampton Insurrection Scare of 1883,” in his The
Rebellious Slave: Nat Turner in American Memory (Boston, Mass., 2004), 145–47. Virginia’s
Danville Riot is not to be confused with the Illinois “Danville Race Riot” of 1903, when a white
mob seeking to lynch a Black man in the county jail encountered a Black man who shot a member
of the mob in self-defense. The mob lynched, burned, and dismembered him. That was on the way
to an intended lynching. Eventually numbering about 1,000 participants, the mob assaulted other
Black people before eventually being dispersed by the Illinois National Guard. The mayor of
Danville, Illinois, declined to press charges.
7. Shaun O’Connell, “Unhealed Cultural Memories: Styron’s Nat Turner,” New England
Journal of Public Policy 28 (2016), https://scholarworks.umb.edu/nejpp/vol28/iss2/3/ (accessed
15 Nov. 2022); Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis Coser (Chicago,
Ill., 1992), 51; Luminita Dragulescu, Nat Turner in Black and White: Race, Trauma, and the
American Cultural Imaginary (Newcastle upon Tyne, Eng., 2020), 19. The postmistress’s name is
spelled both as Barrett and Barnett.
8. See the discussion of these depictions of Nat Turner in “The Rebellious Slave as ‘Race Hero’”
in French, Rebellious Slave, 91, 147–56, and in Mary Kemp Davis, Nat Turner Before the Bar of
Judgment: Fictional Treatments of the Southampton Slave Insurrection (Baton Rouge, La., 1999), 85,
109.
9. Carl R. Lounsbury, The Courthouses of Early Virginia: An Architectural History (Charlottesville,
Va., 2005), 376.
10. Patrick Breen, The Land Shall Be Deluged with Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt
(New York, 2015), 109, 149; John O. and Margaret T. Peters, Virginia’s Historic Courthouses
(Charlottesville, Va., 1995), 102.
11. Davis, Nat Turner Before the Bar of Judgment, 18; Governor John Floyd’s Message to the
General Assembly, 6 Dec. 1831, printed in Niles’ Weekly Register, 7 Jan. 1832, 350–51,
Encyclopedia Virginia, https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Excerpts_from_Governor_John_
Floyd_s_Message_to_the_General_Assembly_December_6_1831 (accessed 15 Nov. 2022);
Davis, Nat Turner Before the Bar of Judgment, 19–20.
12. Davis, Nat Turner Before the Bar of Judgment, 19; Kenneth Greenberg, “Name, Face, Body,”
in Kenneth Greenberg, ed., Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory, ed. (New York,
2003), 10.
13. Governor John Floyd’s Message to the General Assembly, 6 Dec. 1831, Niles’ Weekly Register,
7 Jan. 1832, 350; Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature
(Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 106. For example, a bill to prevent “slaves, free negroes, and mulattoes
to preach, exhort, or conduct any assembly, day or night,” the first offense “to be punished with
stripes” (Tragle, Southampton Slave Revolt, 454–56; Stephen B. Oates, The Fires of Jubilee: Nat
Turner’s Fierce Rebellion [New York: Harper and Row, 1975], 142). The bill against preaching and
 Nat Turner’s Revolt and the Renaming of Jerusalem, Virginia • 27

religious meetings, Chap. XXII, is available at The Nat Turner Project, https://www.natturnerpro-
ject.org/laws-passed-march-15-1832 (accessed 16 Nov. 2022), which cites “Acts Passed at a
General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, Begun and Held at the Capitol, in the City
of Richmond” (Richmond, 1832), 20–22. The reference to thirty-nine lashes is of course a biblical
allusion, combining the Roman scourging of Jesus with a Jewish rule (Deut. 25:3) that criminals
should not receive more than forty lashes.
14. See newspaper accounts dated from 29 Aug. 1831 to 14 Nov. 1831, in Kenneth S. Greenberg,
ed., The Confessions of Nat Turner with Related Documents (1996; Boston, Mass., 2017), 59–88;
Thomas R. Gray, The Confessions of Nat Turner (Baltimore, Md., 1831), available at Documenting
the American South, https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/turner/turner.html, 4, 18–19. The treatment
of Nat Turner as a religious fanatic continues to find a home in current scholarly treatments. “Nat
Turner was a religious fanatic—and like many other fanatics, he let his fanaticism overcome his
basic humanity,” averred Professor Douglas Linder in 2020 (Douglas O. Linder, “The Nat Turner
‘Slave Revolt’ Trials: An Account,” Famous Trials, https://famous-trials.com/turner/2673-the-nat-
turner-slave-revolt-trials-an-account [accessed 16 Nov. 2022]; Davis, Nat Turner Before the Bar of
Judgment, 19).
15. Breen, Land Shall Be Deluged with Blood, 93–94; Thomas Parramore, “Covenant in
Jerusalem,” in Kenneth Greenberg, ed., Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory (New
York, 2003), 69. The editor of the New York Daily Advertiser wrote, “Many of the negroes in the
region of the insurrection were slaughtered under circumstances of great barbarity” (David
Allmendinger, Jr., Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County (Baltimore, Md., 2014), 289).
16. Breen, Land Shall Be Deluged with Blood, 94. As Eric Sundquist notes, fixing a head on a pole
is an oft-repeated motif in the history of slave revolts, and its meaning in this case “lies not solely
in its power of retributive terror . . . it may also be taken as a manifestation of white revulsion at
Turner’s power” (Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, 71). The quote about Blackhead Signpost Road
comes from the Virginia Department of Historic Resources website, https://www.dhr.
virginia.gov/news/17-new-state-historical-highway-markers-approved-june-2021/ [accessed 11
Dec. 2022]. The name was changed to Signpost Road in 2021, the same year that the Virginia
Department of Historic Resources approved a marker (U 29) to be placed at the intersection of
Route 35 and McHerrin Rd. It reads as follows:
Blackhead Signpost Road

In Aug. 1831, following the revolt led by enslaved preacher Nat Turner, white residents
and militias retaliated by murdering an indeterminable number of African Americans—
some involved in the revolt, some not—in Southampton County and elsewhere. At this
intersection, where Turner’s force had turned toward Jerusalem (now Courtland), the
severed head of a black man was displayed on a post and left to decay to terrorize others
and deter future uprisings against slavery. The beheaded man may have been Alfred, an
enslaved blacksmith who, though not implicated in any revolt killings, was slain by mili-
tia near here. The name of this road was changed from Blackhead Signpost to Signpost
in 2021.
On Blackhead Signpost Road, see Vanessa Lynn Lovelace, “The Rememory and Re-membering of
Nat Turner: Black Feminist Hauntology in the Geography of Southampton County, VA,”
Southeastern Geographer 61, no. 2 (2021): 130–145.
28 • Virginia Magazine

17. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, 82; Greenburg, “Name, Face, Body,” 19.
18. According to The Nat Turner Project website, there were 6,573 whites, 1,753 free Blacks, and
7,756 enslaved Blacks living in Southampton County in 1830 (“Population,” https://www.nat-
turnerproject.org/population [accessed 16 Nov. 2022]).
19. Editor John Hampden Pleasants cited this inflated number in The Constitutional Whig,
29 Aug. 1831, in Greenberg, Confessions of Nat Turner with Related Documents, 62.
20. Breen, Land Shall Be Deluged with Blood, xiii–xv (chronology of events), 146 (quote about
Gray’s financial straits); Gray, Confessions, 7, 8–10 (Turner’s quotes).
21. Gray, Confessions, 9–11 (Turner’s reference here more closely matches Luke 12:31 than Matt.
6:33); Allmendinger, Nat Turner, 22; James Sidbury, “Reading, Revelation, and Rebellion: The
Textual Communities of Gabriel, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner,” in Kenneth Greenberg, ed.,
Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory, 129.
22. Christopher Tomlins, In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History (Princeton, N.J.,
2020), 57–58.
23. Anthony Santoro, “The Prophet in His Own Words: Nat Turner’s Biblical Construction,”
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 116 (2008): 116; Gray, Confessions, 9–10.
24. Gray, Confessions, 10; Tomlins, In the Matter of Nat Turner, 62. On Turner’s preference for
the Gospel of Luke, see Allmendinger, Nat Turner, 14–20, and Tomlins, In the Matter of Nat
Turner, 50–81.
25. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, 73; Tomlins, In the Matter of Nat Turner, 52–53, 62.
26. The Gospel of Luke has four basic parts: birth, baptism, and temptation (1–4:13); ministry in
Galilee (4:14–9:50); the travel to Jerusalem, or “journey narrative” (9:51–19:27); and the passion,
crucifixion, and ascension (19:28–24:53). The journey narrative is unusual because a) it is not a
straightforward or direct route, and b) it has a distinctive chiastic structure (from the Greek letter
chi), an X-like format—ABA or AB, BA in which there are pairs of twinned passages so that if lines
were drawn you would get an X (chi). The Lucan journey is much longer than the usual chiasm,
with some twelve pairs of passages. The midpoint of the chiasm, and therefore a kind of climax, is
Luke 13:31–35, which includes Jesus’ remark, “Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be
on my way. Because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem. Jerusalem,
Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent unto it.” The chiasm is a
literary structure that here emphasizes Jerusalem, separate and apart from the many mentions of
Jerusalem in Luke’s travel narrative. On the chiastic structure of Luke-Acts, see Michael D.
Goulder, “The Chiastic Structure of the Lucan Journey,” Studia Evangelica II, ed. F. L. Cross
(Berlin, Ger., 1964), 195–202. The quote is from Burton Mack, Who Wrote the New Testament:
The Making of the Christian Myth (San Francisco, Calif., 1995), 171.
27. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, 73; Gray, Confessions, 15–16. Sundquist states that Turner’s
invocation of scriptures points directly to God’s promises to Jeremiah (4–6) and Ezekiel (9:1–8).
Yet, Turner refers to neither text (Gray, Confessions, 11; Parramore, “Covenant in Jerusalem,” 62).
For the roundabout route taken by Turner and others, see the helpful map in the initial unnum-
bered pages of Breen’s study (Breen, Land Shall Be Deluged with Blood).
28. Davis, Nat Turner Before the Bar of Judgment, 69.
 Nat Turner’s Revolt and the Renaming of Jerusalem, Virginia • 29

29. Gray, Confessions, 11, 18–19.

30. Hilton Obenzinger, American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania
(Princeton, N.J., 1999), 30; Allmendinger, Nat Turner, 21; Gray, Confessions, 18.
31. Lovelace, “The Rememory and Re-membering of Nat Turner,” 135, 139–41; Hamilton
Crockford, “Origin of First Name for Courtland Clouded,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, 17 Sept.
1962.
32. Lisa Blee and Jean O’Brien, Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit (Chapel
Hill, N.C., 2019), 205; Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places, 128; Daniel Hays, “The Persecuted Prophet
and Judgment on Jerusalem: The Use of LXX Jeremiah in the Gospel of Luke,” Bulletin for Biblical
Research 25 (2015): 455; Star MedzerianVanguri, “Introduction: Toward a Rhetorical
Onomastics,” in Star Medzerian Vanguri, ed., The Rhetorics of Names and Naming (New York,
2016), 4.
33. Robin Kearns and Lawrence Berg, “Naming as Norming,” in Lawrence Berg and Jani
Vuolteenaho, eds., Critical Toponymies: The Contested Politics of Place (Burlington, Vt., 2009), 35.
Italics are those of the authors.