In 1831, this Negro preacher and slave felt called to free his fellow slaves. As a result, he murdered his master and led the largest slave uprising in U.S. history, which ended with his eventual hanging. What was his name?

The figure at the center of this 1831 uprising was Nat Turner, an enslaved preacher in Southampton County, Virginia. Deeply religious and literate, Turner believed he received prophetic visions from God. He interpreted a solar eclipse earlier that year as a divine signal to begin a violent campaign to free his people. In August, he and a small group of followers launched their rebellion by killing his master, Joseph Travis, and his family. The group moved from plantation to plantation, gathering more followers and killing approximately 60 white inhabitants in what became the deadliest slave revolt in United States history.

The rebellion was suppressed within two days, but its impact was profound and lasting. Turner himself eluded capture for over two months before he was found, tried, and executed. In the aftermath, a wave of paranoia and hysteria swept through the South. White militias and mobs retaliated by murdering as many as 200 Black people, many of whom had no involvement in the uprising. Southern states responded by passing much harsher laws, known as "black codes," that forbade the education of enslaved and free Black people, restricted their right to assemble, and curtailed the rights of all Black individuals, further entrenching the institution of slavery and escalating the tensions that would lead to the Civil War.