the happy conservative

I just finished a paper about Nat Turner.

For those of you who spent your high school American History class throwing pencils into the ceiling tiles, Nat Turner led a slave rebellion. He’s usually billed as a sort of mystic hero, the Aragorn of the nineteenth century slaves, come to lead them out from under the evil one’s dark cloud. As usual, propertied white males are the embodiment of evil.

And so we’re learning about Nat Turner in American History. Not Lincoln, or Lee, or Jackson. We’re reading a book about Nat Turner, a guy who was at best a historical footnote. Why?

1. He didn’t lead a rebellion so much as a massacre. He led his men into farmhouses on a Sunday night and carved up the men, women, and children with axes. Then they left the bodies in piles. He also led his men into a school house and killed all the little children.

2. He wasn’t trying to get rid of slavery, he was trying to enslave the white people.

3. He never even regretted it, even though his actions led to the deaths of hundreds of blacks, and he couldn’t even get most slaves to rise up in rebellion with him. He was always correct.

I can’t say any of this in my paper, though. Instead, I have to talk about how the slaves rose up because they were oppressed, and how propertied white males were to blame.

Of course, slavery was a terrible thing, and quite possibly the worst thing the United States has ever been party to. Sensible people do not disagree on this point.

But that’s not the point of this book. Turner didn’t want to end slavery! He said so in his confession. He wanted to switch the slaves for the masters. Not only that, but the murder of little girls in frilly dresses with axes and hoes at school is not rebellion, it’s massacre. It’s lunacy.

How am I supposed to make this guy sound heroic? Writing the truth is a certain B, and as strong as my principles are, I have to draw the line somewhere. Nobel Prize winners and 4-star generals can afford to be honest about everything; the rest of us have face constraints on these things.

Here in the land of freedom of expression and the life of the mind, my words dare not rebel against my GPA.