d 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 in me." It is very possible
that it may have been so, but the printed accounts of Nat Turner's
person look suspicious: he is described in Governor Floyd's proclamation
as having a scar on one of his temples, also one on the back of his
neck, and a large knot on one of the bones of his right arm, produced by
a blow; and although these were explained away in Virginia newspapers
as being produced by fights with his companions, yet such affrays are
entirely foreign to the admitted habits of the man. It must, therefore,
remain an open question, whether the scars and the knot were produced by
black hands or by white.

Whatever Nat Turner's experiences of slavery might have been, it is
certain that his plans were not suddenly adopted, but that he had
brooded over them for years. To this day there are traditions among the
Virginia slaves of the keen devices of "Prophet Nat". If he was
caught with lime and lamp-black in hand, conning over a half-finished
county-map on the barn-door, he was always "planning what to do, if he
were blind", or "studying how to get to Mr. Francis's house." When he
had called a meeting of slaves, and some poor whites came eavesdropping,
the poor whites at once became the subjects for discussion; he
incidentally mentioned that the masters had been heard threatening to
drive them away; one slave had been ordered to shoot Mr. Jones's pigs,
another to tear down Mr. Johnson's fences. The poor whites, Johnson and
Jones, ran home to see to their homesteads, and were better friends than
ever to Prophet Nat.

He never was a Baptist preacher, though such vocation has often been
attributed to him. The impression arose from his having immersed
himself, during one of his periods of special enthusiasm, together with
a poor white man named Brantley. "About this time", he says in his
Confession, "I told these things to a white man, on whom it had a
wonderful effect, and he ceased from his wickedness, and was attacked
immediately with a cutaneous eruption, and the blood oozed from th