Who was Thomas Gray and how did his background affect the transcription of Nat Turner’s Confession?

Question 1: Who was Thomas Gray and how did his background affect the transcription of Nat Turner’s Confession?

Source 1:

Gray, Thomas R. “The Confessions of Nat Turner.” Pressbooks, Pressbooks, 1 July 2022, https://unewhaven.pressbooks.pub/transforming/chapter/22/.

Interrogation of source 1:

• – Describe the genre of this source: primary source
• – Describe the author/creator: Thomas R. Gray was one of six children born to a planter and slaveholder in Southampton. His first choice in career was to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a planter, however, having fallen on hard times, he was forced to pursue a career in law. As a 1st year lawyer, he volunteered to interview Turner and transcribe his account of the rebellion.
• – Describe the publisher: The confessions were published by Thomas R. Gray and printed as a pamphlet by Lucas and Deaver, print.
• – When and where was this source originally published/produced: The confessions were originally published in Baltimore in the year 1831.
• – What do you think the purpose of this source was when it was first published: I think the purpose of this source was to provide the public with a reliable interpretation of the events of Nat Turner’s rebellion and convince them of Turner’s fanaticism.
• – What did you find useful in this source: This source was the primary source and showcased the actual writing of Thomas Gray which described the events of the rebellion and transcribed Nat Turner’s own words.

Notes:

• – Narrator believes Turner’s actions to be evil and destructive. “How it first became bewildered and confounded, and finally corrupted and led to the conception and perpetration of the most atrocious and heart-rending deeds” (Gray 4-5).
• – Turner describes his experiences as a slave (7-12).
• – Turner describes his account of the events of the rebellion (12-18).
• – The confession concludes with an account of the court proceedings and a list of the victims of the rebellion (20-22).

Closing thoughts from source 1:

This is the primary source for Turner’s confessions, Thomas Gray having directly transcribed Turner’s words and account of the events into this source. This source also provided me with Gray’s exact words and showed me his specific writing style and the original construction of the document as a whole. However, it leaves me wondering how reliable and accurate this particular source is since it was transcribed by a white lawyer after the initial rebellion had taken place.

Source 2:

Allmendinger, D. F. (2017). Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County. John Hopkins University Press.

Interrogation of source 2:

• – Describe the genre of this source: non-fiction/historical book
• – Describe the author/creator: David Allmendinger Jr. is professor emeritus of history at the University of Delaware and is the author of several other historically based books.
• – Describe the publisher: John Hopkins University Press is the publishing division of John Hopkins University. It was originally founded in 1878 and is the longest continuously running university press in the U.S.
• – When and where was this source originally published/produced: The book was first published in Baltimore in the year 2014.
• – What do you think the purpose of this source was when it was first published: I think the purpose of this book was to more deeply examine Nat Turner’s slave rebellion and his subsequent confession, specifically focusing on the lives and roles of the people involved in the rebellion and the writing of the confession.
• – What did you find useful in this source: It mentioned several biographical facts regarding Thomas Gray and allowed me to get a better idea of who the author of the original confessions was.

Notes:

• – “…Gray got his license to practice law in September 183, less than a year before the uprising” (Allmendinger 216).
• – Gray was born in Southampton country and had spent his entire life there (216)
• – “He was the youngest of six children of Thomas and Ann Cocke Brewer Gray” (216).
• – Gray grew up as the son of a slaveholder (216).
• – Gray’s neighbor, Joseph Riffin, bequeathed him a slave, a young boy by the name of Hartwell, in his will who Gray’s father later sold (217).
• – Gray “…at age twenty-one, got four hundred acres at the Round Hill plantation…” (218).
• – Gray married Mary A. Gray and had a daughter by the name of Ann Douglas Gray (218).
• – As Gray’s standings in society began to, his family’s fortunes began to sink (219).
• – His family’s hard financial times forced Gray to leave the ranks of planters and slaveholders (219).
• – “In October 1830 the magistrates certified his qualifications as an attorney and in December admitted him to practice in the court, whereupon he resigned as justice of the peace” (219-220).
• – Gray saw his forced change in career as a loss, having wanted to be a planter.“He would look back on his change of vocation with a sense of loss” (220).

Closing thoughts from source 2:

From reading this source, I was able to learn more about who Thomas Gray was before the confessions and to better understand his background. He was one of six children born to a planter and slaveholder in Southampton. His first choice in career was to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a planter, however, having fallen on hard times, he was forced to pursue a career in law. Having learned more about this, I wanted to dig more into how Gray specifically transcribed the confessions and how that affected the public’s perception of the events of the rebellion as well as Nat Turner himself.

Question 2: How did the way the confessions were written affect the public’s perception of the contents of the confessions as well as Nat Turner himself?

Source 3:

Shaw, Gwenyth K. “Berkeley Law Professor’s Book Presents a ‘Speculative History’ of Slave Rebellion Leader Nat Turner.” Berkeley Law, UC Berkeley School of Law, 21 Apr. 2022, www.law.berkeley.edu/article/berkeley-law-christopher-tomlins-in-the-matter-of-nat-turner/.

Interrogation of source 3:

• Describe the genre of this source: article, book review
• Describe the author/creator: Gwenyth K Shaw is a professional communications writer, and a faculty member of UC Berkeley’s school of law. The author of the book is subject to review, Christopher Tomlins, is a Berkeley Law professor with specialties in legal history, law and society and jurisprudence, among others.
• Describe the publisher: UC Berkeley School of Law is a distinguished law school in the US and is one of 14 of the schools and colleges that make up UC Berkeley which was founded in 1894. UC Berkeley School of Law is currently ranked in the top 14 best law schools in the U.S.
• When and where was this source originally published/produced: The article was published online September 29th, 2020. While the book that was subject to review, was published earlier that year on March 10th.
• What do you think the purpose of this source was when it was first published: I think the article’s purpose was to look into the details of the book and promote the author’s accomplishments, who is a member of the university’s faculty. The book itself was intended to compare and contrast 2 different versions of the Nat Turner confessions in order to provide a spiritual biography on Turner, critically review his rebellion, and analyze the rebellion’s impact on the community as well as the rest of the nation.
• – What did you find useful in this source: This particular source briefly mentioned how two distinct interpretations of Turner’s confession were specifically written and the impact of the writing styles on the reception of the source and their respective substance.

Notes:

• The author of the book up for review analyzed 2 different interpretations of Nat Turner’s confessions.
• “…as historical evidence the pamphlet has to be used very carefully — if it contains Turner’s voice it comes to us filtered through the mind of his white amanuensis. So my initial objective in examining the pamphlet is to ascertain just how much one can rely on what that voice says” (Tomlins).
• “By breaking it up into its constituent parts we can see how Gray builds a cage of controls around the text of Turner’s confession that urges the reader to read it in a particular way. This desire to control how the narrative is read suggests to me that the narrative itself is comparatively free of direct manipulation” (Tomlins).
• “By going to these lengths in analyzing the structure of the pamphlet I believe I can show that… the substance of Turner’s narrative can indeed be relied on as his narrative, particularly his account of himself. In other words, all the work on the structure of the pamphlet is an absolutely essential preliminary to an exploration of its substance” (Tomlins).

Concluding thoughts from source 3:

In the article, Tomlins mentioned certain aspects of Gray’s interpretation of the confessions. In his mention of Gray’s version, he briefly analyzed certain aspects of Gray’s writing and ultimately determined that the narrative is free of any manipulation. Having ascertained this from this source, it increased my curiosity as to how the confessions were made and written.

Source 4:

Greenberg, Kenneth S., editor. Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory. Oxford University Press, 2003.

Interrogation of source 4:

• Describe the genre of this source: non-fiction, historical book, collection of writings
• Describe the author/creator: This information in this source was contributed by various authors who provided multiple articles. The main editor of the collection, Kenneth S. Greenberg is a distinguished professor of history and dean of the college of arts and sciences at Suffolk University and an author of several other historical sources related to slavery in the U.S.
• Describe the publisher: Oxford University Press is the university press of the University of Oxford in England. It is the largest university press in the world and the second oldest, with its history of printing able to be dated back to the 1480s.
• When and where was this source originally published/produced: New York, 2003
• What do you think the purpose of this source was when it was first published: I think the purpose of this source was to provide a reliable source of information on the Nat Turner rebellion
• What did you find useful in this source: I was able to find a more in depth description of Thomas Gray and, more specifically, the process he partook in to write the confessions.

Notes:

• Gray was fascinated by the rebellion and took it upon himself to do research on the events “For ten weeks after the event… Gray immersed himself in factual details about the uprising” (Greenberg 24).
• Until Nat Turner was caught, 4 other prisoners in the county jail were used as sources (28).
• “…Gray assumed the role of amanuensis, writing down Nat’s recollections of his life as a slave, touching of facts known for weeks: Nat’s reading and writing, his experiments with gunpowder and paper, his revelations and prophecies, his interpreting signs and hieroglyphics, and his rising influence among neighborhood slaves” (37).
• “Then, after the narrative, Gray returned to his own point of view for a ‘cross-examination’ of the witness. He found Nat’s statement ‘corroborated by every circumstance coming within my own knowledge…’ He concluded with a commentary on the uprising and an account of Nat’s trial…” (37).
• The way Gray wrote the confessions raised suspicions about the content of the article.“The reviewer expressed no doubts about the content of the pamphlet, but Gray’s rendering of Nat’s expression gave him pause. It was eloquent, even classical. ‘This is calculated to cast some shade of doubt over the authenticity of the narrative, and to give the Bandit a character for intelligence which he does not deserve, and ought not to have received.’” (38).
• Gray’s transcription of the event appeared to be a reliable source. “Even this skeptical reviewer acknowledged, however, that in all other respects, the confession appeared to be ‘faithful and true.’ In fact, there is considerable evidence within the document of its accuracy in portraying Nat Turner…” (38).
• Most of the content within the confessions was new and not a compilation of earlier sources. “Except for some short, familiar phrases and the two lists of names, Gray incorporated no previously published written matter” (38).
• Gray’s purpose in writing the confessions the way he did was to persuade readers of Turner’s fanaticism and the authenticity of his confession. “He adhered instead to another of his purposes, that of persuading readers about the centrality of the fanatic and the authenticity of his confession” (42).

Closing thoughts from source 4:

This source gave lots of new and in depth details about the work that went into interviewing witnesses and the writing of Nat Turner’s confession. It also provided me with information as to Gray’s role in the process, specifically the passion he had for the project, the research he did before interviewing Turner and the connections he had which assisted him in the writing and publishing process. Most importantly, it gave me insight into how some members of the public perceived the events of Turner’s rebellion as portrayed by Gray’s words. The confessions were first met with suspicion but many people came around to the idea that the confessions, as written by Gray, provided reliable information about Turner and his rebellion.

Source 5:

Tomlins, Christopher. “Looking for Law in ‘The Confessions of Nat Turner’.” SSRN, Elsevier, 9 Apr. 2016, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2760657.

Interrogation of source 5:

• – Describe the genre of this source: research paper
• – Describe the author/creator: Christopher Tomlins is a professor in the Legal Studies department of UC Berkeley’s law school. He was educated as a historian at John Hopkins University, with his teaching career having begun in the early 1980s.
• – Describe the publisher: The research paper itself was published through UC Berkeley’s Public Law and Legal Theory series, which is a journal that contains abstracts and papers from the institution on related subjects. The website for which the paper was published on, the Social Science Research network, SSRN, is a repository of papers by accredited scholars dedicated to subjects within the social sciences.
• – When and where was this source originally published/produced: The paper was first published online in April of 2016 via UC Berkeley’s Public Law and Legal Theory series.
• – What do you think the purpose of this source was when it was first published: The purpose of this paper is to answer 2 main questions about The Confessions of Nat Turner; are the confessions a reliable source and what exactly do the confessions evidence?
• – What did you find useful in this source: This source analyzed the way the confessions were written as well as what the confessions actually detailed. It gave me a much better idea about how the confessions were written and what that writing said about Gray as an author, the confessions as a reliable source and Nat Turner as a person.

Notes:

• – Gray’s pamphlet does not contain Turner’s actual words but Gray’s translation of them. “He does not represent the published statement as verbatim Turner but rather as one ‘with little or no variation, from his own words’ (Tomlins 5).
• – Tomlins observes the marked differences between the 2nd and 1st halves of the confessions. The second half presents “… the rebellion in real time, as a linear sequence of events. It is written in complete sentences, punctuated in standard form, separated by periods” (6). While the 1st half of the pamphlet is, “…poorly organized and hastily written – ungrammatical, broken, scribbled” (7).
• – “The Confessions of Nat Turner is an impressionistic but largely accurate narrative account of the coming-to-be of a slave rebellion, based, invaluably, on an extended conversation with the rebellion’s leader and architect, supplemented by commentary written by the opportunistic white amanuensis” (8).

Closing thoughts from source 5:

This source took an analytical look at the specific writing of the confessions. The author, Christopher Tomlins, analyzed the grammar, sentence structure and punctuation Gray used in writing the confessions and evaluated their impact on the confessions as a whole. The later half of the essay looked more into what was talked about in the confessions and how other historians and authors in the past have taken their own approach in interpreting the events of Turner’s rebellion. In an attempt to answer my second question, this source supplied me with much of the information needed to formulate a potential answer.

Concluding Thoughts:

When I started my research. My main question focused on who Thomas R. Gray was a person. I hoped to gain insight into this by looking into biographical sources that described Gray’s background. The second source I interrogated in an attempt to answer my first question was David Allmendinger’s book, Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County. From this source I was able to gather that Thomas R. Gray was born and raised in Southampton Country as one of six children to Thomas and Ann Cocke Brewer Gray. Gray’s father was a planter as well as a slaveholder, a vocation Gray wished to pursue in his adulthood. However, falling on hard times financially, Gray was forced to leave planting behind and pursue a career in law, the same career that led him to Nat Turner.

Once I had gained a better understanding on the topic of Gray’s background, my question changed to focus more on how Gray specifically wrote the Confessions and how that writing style impacted the public’s perception of the Confessions. Through my interrogation of multiple sources, I was able to find several that took an in depth look at the Confessions and focused on the role Gray had to play in its deliverance. Before Gray had the opportunity to interview Turner, he did a multitude of research on the rebellion including interviewing several other captured slaves who had partook in Turner’s rebellion, enlisting the help of several other law professionals in this endeavor. Once Gray’s transcription of the events of the rebellion was complete, he self published the confessions as a pamphlet. After its publication, the confessions were received fairly well by the public with only a few suspicions. On one occasion as mentioned in source 4, a reviewer accepted the contents of the pamphlet but was suspicious of the way the confessions were written. This was largely due to the eloquent and intelligent formatting of the pamphlet which seemed to give Turner, a murderous rebel, an intelligence which was not deserved. Additionally, the 1st half of the confessions, as analyzed by Christopher Tomlins in source 5, was poorly organized and hastily written, which was in clear contrast to the later half of the confessions which displayed complete sentences and proper punctuation.

In the end, I was largely able to answer my two questions. Thomas R. Gray, despite his upbringing as the son of a white slave holder, appears to be a reliable source, having transcribed the confessions in words very close to Turner’s own with little to no undue bias or manipulation. In addition, the manner in which the confessions were written convinced the public as to the authenticity and accuracy of the information provided in the original pamphlet in regards to the events of the rebellion. However, this manner of writing also provided Turner with a sense of humanity many readers did not believe he deserved.