The slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831 and the savage reprisals that followed shattered beyond repair the myth of the contented slave and the benign master, and intensified the forces of change that would plunge America into the bloodbath of the Civil War. Also the biographer of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., Stephen Oates presents an insightful narrative of the rebellion—the complex, gifted, and driven man who led it; the social conditions that produced it; and the legacy it left.