What were the consequences of Nat Turner's Rebellion in Virginia in 1831?

Answer 1

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In total, the state executed 56 Blacks suspected of having been involved in the uprising. In the bloody aftermath, close to 200 blacks, many of whom had nothing to do with the rebellion, were beaten, tortured and murdered by angry white mobs. Prior to the Nat Turner Revolt, there was a small and ineffectual antislavery movement in the state of Virginia, largely on account of economic trends that made slavery less profitable in the Old South in the 1820s and fears among whites of the rising number of blacks, especially in the Tidewater and Piedmont regions. Most of the movement's members, including acting governor John Floyd, supported resettlement for these reasons. Considerations of white racial and moral purity also influenced many of these antislavery Virginians. However, fears of repetitions of the Nat Turner Revolt served to polarize moderates and slave owners across the South. Municipalities across the region instituted repressive policies against enslaved and free blacks. The freedoms of all black people in Virginia were tightly curtailed, and an official policy was established that forbade questioning the slave system on the grounds that any discussion might encourage similar slave revolts. There is evidence of trends in support of such policies and for slavery itself in Virginia before the revolt. This was probably due in part to the recovering Southern agricultural economy and the spread of slavery across the continent which made the excess Tidewater slaves a highly marketable commodity. Nat's actions probably accelerated existing trends. In terms of public response and loss of white lives, no other slave uprising inflicted as severe a blow to the community of slave owners in the United States. Because of this, Nat is regarded as a hero by some African Americans and pan-Africans worldwide. Nat finally became the focus of popular historical scholarship in the 1940s, when historian Herbert Aptheker was publishing the first serious scholarly work on instances of slave resistance in the antebellum South. Aptheker stressed how the rebellion was rooted in the exploitative conditions of the Southern slave system. He traversed libraries and archives throughout the South, managing to uncover roughly 250 similar instances, though none of them reached the scale of the Nat Turner Revolt. The Confessions of Nat Turner, a novel by William Styron, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1968. This book had wide critical and popular acclaim, but several black critics considered it racist and "a deliberate attempt to steal the meaning of a man's life" in the words of Lerone Bennett, Jr..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_Turner

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Answer 2

Laws greatly restricting the legal rights of free blacks and slaves were passed throughout the South.