How's that for a provocative question? Actually, my question is whether Thomas Ruffin Gray, who published The Confessions of Nat Turner was gay. Before I get to why I have this question, I want to talk a little bit about Thomas Gray. In 1831 he was a lawyer in his early 30s, who had been educated at William and Mary and then trained for law ... but he had not practiced law, for he apparently had plenty of family money. For some reason, perhaps because of gambling, he fell into debt. When his father died in September 1831, he paid off one of Gray's debts and left the remainder of his property to Gray's daughter. This common practice thus kept the elder Gray's money out of the hands of Thomas Gray's creditors. Shrewd, wasn't it? Gray began practicing law because of these financial problems -- and he represented several of the slaves accused of participating in the rebellion. Gray interviewed Turner and published the interview. What remains very unclear is how much of the Confessions are actually Turner's words.
After the rebellion he was involved in a pamphlet war with one of the judges on the court that heard the trials of the rebels, Dr. Orris A. Browne. For reasons that I'm not quite sure, there was real animosity between Browne and Gray -- part of the dispute may have related to a claim that Browne had against Gray's father's estate for medical care he provided the elder Gray. At some point the dispute escalated to a challenge to a duel, though the details are lost because there have only been two of the pamphlets -- one by each of the participants.
Browne's surviving pamphlet calls Gray's character into question in a number of ways -- by referring to Gray's profligacy and his gambling, and by noting that Gray associated in extremely intimate ways with a well-known gambler, one Henry Pegram. An aside here -- Pegram operated a faro table in Southampton. About the faro table I knew nothing -- but I've since learned it was a popular form of gambling in the pre-war era.
There is an important question: who cares? Why does this matter? It's worthy asking how much this might affect how we think about Gray as a lawyer and author. Sarah Roth, a historian of antebellum literature -- whose book on antislavery and proslavery fiction has a lot to say to legal historians about the attitudes towards slavery in the judiciary and how they changed from the 1820s to the Civil War -- suggested that this might put in a different light Gray's statement in the Confessions that when he looked at Turner his blood curdled in his veins. Whatever one thinks of that idea, it may expand our understanding of who Gray was and also open a window into life in rural Virginia. It certainly reveals how quickly a pamphlet war might degenerate into casting aspersions on the private life of an opponent. Gray's response, for instance, spoke about how he was a long-term resident of Southampton and how people knew his reputation for honesty, whereas Dr. Browne was recently arrived in Southampton.
Soon I'm going to be talking about Turner's appointed lawyer, James S. French, who may have been a real hero. I want to draw out French's free thinking ideas and what they say about his role in the aftermath of the Turner rebellion. Want to know more about French right now? I've put a draft of my paper on the Nat Turner trials up on ssrn.
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