Nat Turner: Slave Rebel and Lightning Rod

After Nat Turner, the slave-rebellion leader, was hanged, 174 years ago today, he was dissected. His skin was made into a purse, his flesh turned to grease, his bones divvied up as souvenirs. His head was permanently separated from his body and made the rounds as a curio, reportedly spending much of the twentieth century at the College of Wooster, in Ohio. But his identity was shredded as well, and just as the parts of his body may never be put back together again, so too is his legacy fatally fragmented, fractured by unreliable sources and the countryâ??s unease with its slaveholding past. And while archaeologists argue over whether an unidentified skull is Turnerâ??s and whether his partial skeleton lies buried under such-and-such a Virginia parking lot, historians and activists debate which of the many personalities and motives assigned him in the last century and a half are truly his.