Nat Turner's Rebellion Spurs Unprecedented Intellectual Counter-Response

While Turner's Southampton uprising was suppressed, the intellectual resistance it ignited was lasting. Black writers and orators pointed to Turner as proof that slavery could not endure. The Virginia legislature debated emancipation in 1832 — the last such debate in a Southern state. Frederick Douglass later called Turner 'a martyr' and David Walker's Appeal was seen as its ideological precursor.