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Fires Of Jubilee Summary

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Stephen B. Oates “Fires of Jubilee”; recounts the violent events of the Slave Rebellion led by Nat Turner, he will always be remembered as the slave who started the rebellion. He started the rebellion only after he thought he received a sign from God. The events took place in Southampton, Virginia in 1831. One of the leading parts during Nat’s rebellion was religion; during the 1830s slaves depended on religion in order to get them through their days. Each slave had different rituals and different beliefs that they lived by. Nat thought he was a prophet sent from God and was waiting for a sign from God saying it was time for him to make things different. During the rebellion white southerners were scared for their lives. The point the author …show more content…

I generally agree with the author and how he doesn’t want to make any moral judgments towards Nat Turner, however there are some points that I do not agree with.
To me the story about Nat Turner seems a little far fetch, but at the same time completely believable for some people. Here is a man that is more educated than most slaves and can remember things from before he was born sent here to make slaves feel like they have a chance in this world of hate. The book giving so much back ground on Nat and his home life and then everything he went through puts you in his shoes and makes you think through his eyes, even though he is not the one telling the story. Nat got his last name from a wealthy planter who purchased his mother, named Benjamin Turner. The Turners were Methodist and an extremely religious family at that, “So that their own Negroes might be saved, the Turners held prayer services on their farm and took the blacks to Sunday chapel”(10). The fact that most slave owners in this time period cared enough about their slaves to take them to church tells that they were not taken advantage of

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