As his conviction deepened, the solar eclipse early in 1831 appeared to
him to be a sign that the day of vengeance was at hand. In the following
months he collected a small band of followers, and in August they went
into action. Unlike Prosser and Vesey, he began with only a very small
band which lessened his chance of betrayal. As they moved from farm to
farm, slaughtering the white inhabitants, they were joined by many of the
slaves who were freed in the process. However, word of the massacre
spread. At one farm, they were met by armed resistance. Slaves as well
as masters fought fiercely to stop the attack. Some of Turner's men were
killed and wounded, and the planned drive towards Jerusalem was thrown
off stride. This enabled the militia to arrive and break up the attack.
In due time Turner and several of his followers were captured and
executed.

White men in both the South and the North saw little similarity between
these insurrections and the American Revolution. The Turner massacre was
universally depicted as the work of savages and brutes, not of men.
Vigilance was tightened, and new laws controlling the slaves were passed
throughout the South. Both the violence of the slaves and the verbal
abuse of the abolitionists only served to strengthen the South in its
defense of the peculiar institution. Slaves who revolted were depicted
as beasts who could not be freed because they would endanger society.
Submissive slaves were pictured as children in need of paternal
protection from the evils of a complex, modern world. They were never
seen as men whose rights and liberties had been proclaimed in the
Declaration of Independence.

Growing Racism

As Afro-American freedmen sought to claim their rights as men and
citizens, they were confronted with constant resistance from whites who
were unwilling to accept them. Actually, pressure from the mass of
Northern white workers had contributed to abolition of slavery in those
states. In the Northern states slavery was forced to compete with free
white labor in a way which was not true of the plantation economy of the
South. White workers continually complained that slavery was keeping
their wages down and unemployment up, and in 1737 the governor of New
York had asked the Legislature to investigate the charges that slave
competition contributed to unemployment. While this attack had helped to
undermine slavery, it had also exacerbated tension between black