The fierce slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831 and the savage reprisals that followed shattered beyond repair the myth of the contented slave and the benign master, and intensified the forces of change that would plunge America into the bloodbath of the Civil War. Stephen B. Oates, the celebrated biographer of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., presents a gripping and insightful narrative of the rebellion, the complex, gifted, and driven man who led it, the social conditions that produced it, and the legacy it left. A classic including the text of the original 1831 court document 'The Confessions of Nat Turner,' here is the dramatic re-creation of the turbulent period that marked a crucial turning point in America's history.