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Reasons For Nat Turner's Rebellion

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In Nat Turner, Kyle Baker illustrates a part of history that textbooks merely gloss over. He gives names to the 55 whites who were murdered. However, it is impossible to mention all the names of the thousands of blacks that suffered because of the slave trade. But was Nat Turner’s revenge justified? Although Nat Turner’s rebellion is unjustifiable because so many were killed, he is not entirely to blame because white slaveholders denied him and other black people of basic rights which forced them to act out. The morality of Nat Turner’s rebellion may initially seem like a bit of a gray area. The bottom line is, however, if you take away the racial issues, you are left with 55 people murdered in cold blood. It would be one thing if all of the victims were white slaveholders, but at least 24 of them were children (Baker, 179.) They were killed for things that they hadn’t even done. Nevertheless, the atrocity of Nat Turner’s rebellion does not take away from the atrocity of the slave trade. One thing that the enslaved and the slaveholders had in common was the …show more content…

The subhuman treatment is especially apparent in the depiction of the slave ships where the white men packed them like sardines and branded them like cattle. They saw Africans as their monetary value rather than their personal value (Baker, 35-44.) People of all ages and sexes suffered or died. In addition, the atrocity of the slave trade and slavery as a whole still has lasting effects today due to the lingering bigotry of whites over the years. It makes sense why history books don’t delve deeper into Nat Turner’s rebellion because while it was a horrific event, it was a dramatically smaller scale in comparison to the slave trade. In fact, without the slave trade, Nat Turner’s rebellion would have never happened. No innocents would have been harmed if whites could have seen black men and women as equals rather than

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