I fully agree with you, Nate, and anyone else that states that answering a wrong with a wrong does not justify the killings.
I think what ties me up on the discussion of Nat Turner is that there is never any sense of the tragedy of what led to the uprising in the first place.
I agree with that, but it doesn't seem to fit with the following:
It (uprising) is usually depicted as a madman who goes on an unprovoked rampage, wild eyed with delusions. <insert Manson at this point> Rather, I envision someone who yes, probably was pushed over the edge by all that his people have suffered, the trauma, the brutality, the total destruction of one's self. In evaluating that the uprising did not make sense (in that it could not possibly succeed) or that the fact that innocents were killed does not automatically lend validation of Gray's account or lessen the tragedy on both sides.
Without Gray's account, to me Turner can only be envisioned as a madman, in the colloquial cartoon sense, who goes on an unprovoked rampage because slavery somehow drove him crazy, although millions of others bore it without going on murder sprees.
Gray's account makes Turner a real but flawed human. To state it explicitly, I'm not using mental illness as a way to insult him, but rather to help understand him; not to justify or condemn the murders, but to put the murders in the context that he saw them.
I've mentioned this before, but I grew up with a paranoid schizophrenic father, although his delusions were based around the cold war era, government spying on him, rather than religion. My father never turned violent except to make life hell with unpredictable yelling and crazy rants, and he was not charismatic--others seemed to see him as creepy and strange rather than being attracted to him. But I can see the way he viewed things in the way Gray wrote about Turner. Real humans struggle with mental illness. Cartoon characters just go crazy and go on random killing sprees.
If the movie rejects Gray, I don't know what one would base Turner's personality on. Just make up whatever one wanted, I guess. That's sad, if we have contemporary insight into Turner, and it's rejected.
Is there alternative accounts of Turner, besides Thomas Grey's?
I was hoping someone would answer, but as far as I know, Gray is all we've got, as far as anything that talks about his earlier life and personality.
.