Nick and I are barreling down an old country road in South Hampton County, Virginia. The cotton fields have just been picked; the stray piles of white fluff lying on the side of the road look like cotton candy. We're headed to the home of Mr. Alvin Turner, a direct descendant of the preacher and rebellion leader, Nat Turner.

It was along these same country roads almost 170 years ago that Nat Turner and his small army of free men and slaves led a bloody rampage, killing almost every white person in their path. It's not often that murder can be justified, but in the case of Turner and his followers, an uprising was the only way to protest the conditions in which they lived.

Nat Turner's mother was born in Africa. It's tough to say whether the legend is true that she was a queen, kidnapped from the upper Nile region. It is certain that she lived on the two continents of Africa and North America. She hated being a slave, as every human rejects bondage. She was so worried about her son spending his life in slavery that she tried to kill him when he was born.

Her fellow slaves kept her from killing the baby and she grew to love little Nat intensely. When she brought him to a slave who had been a medicine man in Africa, he examined markings on Nat's infant body and predicted that he would grow up to be a prophet.

Skip ahead 20 years to 1820. Nat Turner is 20 years old and hiding in the woods a few miles from his plantation. He has almost succeeded in escaping! Freedom is his! All he has to do is keep quiet and cover his body in mud so the dogs can't find him.

As he sits and listens to a posse of men passing by with barking dogs at their sides, he begins to plot his escape to the North. He'll have to find his way up the Underground Railroad -- he must look for the right signs. Rumor is that abolitionists hang a horseshoe above their doorways. Hundreds of slaves have made it up this secret pathway, and he knows he's smart enough to do the same.

But something is bothering him, tearing at him from the inside. Even though he is on his way to freedom, he feels as though he is headed in the wrong direction. Nat knows that a true Christian lives for others. His individual freedom means nothing without the freedom of his people. After hiding out in the woods for a month, he decides to return to his people -- the black slaves of the Antebellum South.

His master was so surprised by Nat's decision to return to the plantation that he did not even beat him. Nat was even allowed to begin preaching, which meant walking around freely from plantation to plantation on Sundays.

Nat Turner took preaching very seriously. He became a powerful speaker, so compelling that even a white man asked to be baptized by him. Turner worked the fields all day as a slave, and spent all his free time digging in the Bible and spreading the Gospel.

Turner came to be seen as a supernatural being. It was said that he could cure sickness with the touch of his hand, and change the weather at will. Even whites looked upon him with awe, though fully confident that he was a docile slave.

They couldn't have been more wrong. Turner was planning a war of apocalyptic proportions. He began to preach about the worst sin of the times, which his listeners knew to be slavery. Here is what Turner had to say about divine inspiration:

"The Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first."