For your "Sources" the portrait on the left is the cover from Nat Turner, Terry Bisson's splendid bio in the young adult Black Americans of Achievement series. a well-written, accessible and completely unapologetic history.

um, make that portrait on the right, second one down from the top

I would like to recommend The Old Man: John Brown at Harper's Ferry
by Truman Nelson. He's no madman, he's a socialist. It's an excellent,
exciting story of John Brown and his dreams of a just world. He was a
laughinstock not a hero when I was growing up-this is what school taught
me.

Beautifully written and very informative as usual, Mike.

The reference to Luke 12:47 (as a passage used by slave owners to support the beating of slaves) intrigued me.

I was aware of the use of the myth of Ham (Genesis 9:25) to depict Black people as cursed by Noah to eternal slavery, and the use of passages in (real or spurious) epistles of Paul exhorting slaves to obey their masters (Ephesians 6:5-9) to encourage a submissive slave mentality. But I didn’t know that this passage from Luke was used as it apparently was.

The context in the gospel is that Jesus is telling his disciples that no one can know when “the Son of Man” (meaning him) is going to return to judge humanity. He tells a parable in which a “steward” (oikonomos in the original Greek) misbehaves. Oikonomos refers to a domestic overseer, and could mean a freedman or slave trusted with household management. Later in the text the hypothetical steward is referred to a doulai, which probably means slave, so let’s assume that. But there were many types and gradations of slaves, especially in the eastern part of the Roman empire, and the text (12:44) is clear that the oikonos could advance to be “place[d] over everything [the master] owns.”

In the parable the steward is put in charge of the household in his master’s absence and, misjudging the amount of time he would be absent, “sets about beating the manservants and the maids” (paidas, literally “boys,” and paidiskas or “girls,” probably but not necessarily slaves), “and eating and drinking and getting drunk.” When the master comes home and sees all this, he “cut(s) him off” and (it’s implied at least) receives “many strokes of the lash.”

So here the master (representing God) is depicted as a judicious figure indignant at the overseer-slave’s abuse of the other slaves and general negligence. The likely point of the (probably Greek) author of the Gospel of Luke was that those in the upper echelons of power (in which few people, including slaves themselves, questioned the institution of buying and selling people such as war captives in itself) who beat those beneath them and behave irresponsibly will be punished. That’s rather different than justifying the beating (or cutting up) of disobedient slaves in general.

But of course the slave owners of Nat Turner’s time wanted to spin scripture as they did, even as it drew Nat Turner to completely opposite conclusions.