The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion

The true story behind the new motion picture Birth of a Nation

“A penetrating reconstruction of the most disturbing and crucial slave uprising in America’s history.” —New York Times

The bloody 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 now newly reissued to include 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.