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BLACK REBELLION: FIVE SLAVE REVOLTS

From Travellers and Outlaws

Episodes In American History


By Thomas Wentworth Higginson


With An Appendix Of Authorities



[Transcriber's note: This text contains five chapters of T.W. Higgison's
'Travellers and Outlaws'. This collection is commonly referred to as
'Black Rebellion: five slave revolts'.]




AUTHOR'S NOTE:

The author would express his thanks to the proprietors and editors of the
_Atlantic Monthly_, _Harper's Magazine_, and the _Century_, for their
permission to reprint such portions of this volume as were originally
published in those periodicals.

CAMBRIDGE, MASS.



CONTENTS.

THE MAROONS OF JAMAICA

THE MAROONS OF SURINAM

GABRIEL'S DEFEAT

DENMARK VESEY

NAT TURNER'S INSURRECTION

APPENDIX





THE MAROONS OF JAMAICA


The Maroons! it was a word of peril once; and terror spread along the
skirts of the blue mountains of Jamaica when some fresh foray of those
unconquered guerrillas swept down from the outlying plantations, startled
the Assembly from its order, Gen. Williamson from his billiards, and Lord
Balcarres from his diplomatic ease,--endangering, according to the
official statement, "public credit," "civil rights," and "the prosperity,
if not the very existence, of the country," until they were "persuaded to
make peace" at last. They were the Circassians of the New World, but they
were black, instead of white; and as the Circassians refused to be
transferred from the Sultan to the Czar, so the Maroons refused to be
transferred from Spanish dominion to English, and thus their revolt
began. The difference is, that while the white mountaineers numbered four
hundred thousand, and only defied Nicholas, the black mountaineers
numbered less than two thousand, and defied Cromwell; and while the
Circassians, after years of revolt, were at last subdued, the Maroons, on
the other hand, who rebelled in 1655, were never conquered, but only made
a compromise of allegiance, and exist as a separate race to-day.

When Admirals Penn and Venables landed in Jamaica, in 1655, there was not
a remnant left of the sixty thousand natives whom the Spaniards had found
there a century and a half before. Their pitiful tale is told only by
those caves, still known among the mountains, where thousands of human
skeletons strew the ground. In their place dwelt two foreign races,--an
effeminate, ignorant, indolent white community of fifteen hundred, with a
black slave population quite as large and infinitely more hardy and
energetic. The Spaniards were readily subdued by the English: the negroes
remained unsubdued. The slaveholders were banished from the island: the
slaves only exiled themselves to the mountains; thence the English could
not dislodge them, nor the buccaneers whom the English employed. And when
Jamaica subsided into a British colony, and peace was made with Spain,
and the children of Cromwell's Puritan soldiers were beginning to grow
rich by importing slaves for Roman-Catholic Spaniards, the Maroons still
held their own wild empire in the mountains, and, being sturdy heathens
every one, practised Obeah rites in approved pagan fashion.

The word Maroon is derived, according to one etymology, from the Spanish
word _Marrano_, a wild boar,--these fugitives being all boar-hunters;
according to another, from _Marony_, a river separating French and Dutch
Guiana, where a colony of them dwelt and still dwells; and by another
still, from _Cimarron_, a word meaning untamable, and used alike for apes
and runaway slaves. But whether these rebel marauders were regarded as
monkeys or men, they made themselves equally formidable. As early as
1663, the Governor and Council of Jamaica offered to each Maroon, who
should surrender, his freedom and twenty acres of land; but not one
accepted the terms. During forty years, forty-four Acts of Assembly were
passed in respect to them, and at least a quarter of a million pounds
sterling were expended in the warfare against them. In 1733, the force
employed in this service consisted of two regiments of regular troops,
and the whole militia of the island; but the Assembly said that "the
Maroons had within a few years greatly increased, notwithstanding all the
measures that had been concerted for their suppression," "to the great
terror of his Majesty's subjects," and "to the manifest weakening and
preventing the further increase of strength and inhabitants of the
island."

The special affair in progress, at the time of these statements, was
called Cudjoe's War. Cudjoe was a gentleman of extreme brevity and
blackness, whose full-length portrait can hardly be said to adorn
Dallas's History of the Maroons; but he was as formidable a guerrilla as
Marion. Under his leadership, the various bodies of fugitives were
consolidated into one force, and thoroughly organized. Cudjoe, like
Schamyl, was religious as well as military head of his people; by Obeah
influence he established a thorough freemasonry among both slaves and
insurgents; no party could be sent forth, by the government, but he knew
it in time to lay an ambush, or descend with fire and sword on the region
left unprotected. He was thus always supplied with arms and ammunition;
and as his men were perfect marksmen, never wasted a shot, and never
risked a battle, his forces naturally increased, while those of his
opponents were decimated. His men were never captured, and never took a
prisoner; it was impossible to tell when they were defeated; in dealing
with them, as Pelissier said of the Arabs, "peace was not purchased by
victory;" and the only men who could obtain the slightest advantage
against them were the imported Mosquito Indians, or the "Black Shot," a
company of Government negroes. For nine full years this particular war
continued unchecked, Gen. Williamson ruling Jamaica by day and Cudjoe by
night.

The rebels had every topographical advantage, for they held possession of
the "Cockpits." Those highlands are furrowed through and through, as by
an earthquake, with a series of gaps or ravines, resembling the
California cañons, or those similar fissures in various parts of the
Atlantic States, known to local fame either poetically as ice-glens, or
symbolically as purgatories. These Jamaica chasms vary from two hundred
yards to a mile in length; the rocky walls are fifty or a hundred feet
high, and often absolutely inaccessible, while the passes at each end
admit but one man at a time. They are thickly wooded, wherever trees can
grow; water flows within them; and they often communicate with one
another, forming a series of traps for an invading force. Tired and
thirsty with climbing, the weary soldiers toil on, in single file,
without seeing or hearing an enemy, up the steep and winding path they
traverse one "cockpit," then enter another. Suddenly a shot is fired from
the dense and sloping forest on the right, then another and another, each
dropping its man; the startled troops face hastily in that direction,
when a more murderous volley is poured from the other side; the heights
above flash with musketry, while the precipitous path by which they came
seems to close in fire behind them. By the time the troops have formed in
some attempt at military order, the woods around them are empty, and
their agile and noiseless foes have settled themselves into ambush again,
farther up the defile, ready for a second attack, if needed. But one is
usually sufficient; disordered, exhausted, bearing their wounded with
them, the soldiers retreat in panic, if permitted to escape at all, and
carry fresh dismay to the barracks, the plantations, and the Government
House.

It is not strange, then, that high military authorities, at that period,
should have pronounced the subjugation of the Maroons a thing more
difficult than to obtain a victory over any army in Europe. Moreover,
these people were fighting for their liberty, with which aim no form of
warfare seemed to them unjustifiable; and the description given by
Lafayette of the American Revolution was true of this one,--"the grandest
of causes, won by contests of sentinels and outposts." The utmost hope of
a British officer, ordered against the Maroons, was to lay waste a
provision-ground, or cut them off from water. But there was little
satisfaction in this: the wild-pine leaves and the grapevine-withes
supplied the rebels with water; and their plantation-grounds were the
wild pineapple and the plantain-groves, and the forests, where the wild
boars harbored, and the ringdoves were as easily shot as if they were
militiamen. Nothing but sheer weariness of fighting seems to have brought
about a truce at last, and then a treaty, between those high contracting
parties, Cudjoe and Gen. Williamson.

But how to execute a treaty between these wild Children of the Mist and
respectable diplomatic Englishmen? To establish any official relations
without the medium of a preliminary bullet, required some ingenuity of
manoeuvring. Cudjoe was willing, but inconveniently cautious: he would
not come halfway to meet any one; nothing would content him but an
interview in his own chosen cockpit. So he selected one of the most
difficult passes, posting in the forests a series of outlying parties, to
signal with their horns, one by one, the approach of the
plenipotentiaries, and then to retire on the main body. Through this line
of dangerous sentinels, therefore, Col. Guthrie and his handful of men
bravely advanced; horn after horn they heard sounded, but there was no
other human noise in the woods, and they had advanced till they saw the
smoke of the Maroon huts before they caught a glimpse of a human form.

A conversation was at last opened with the invisible rebels. On their
promise of safety, Dr. Russell advanced alone to treat with them; then
several Maroons appeared, and finally Cudjoe himself. The formidable
chief was not highly military in appearance, being short, fat,
humpbacked, dressed in a tattered blue coat without skirts or sleeves,
and an old felt hat without a rim. But if he had blazed with regimental
scarlet, he could not have been treated with more distinguished
consideration; indeed, in that case, "the exchange of hats" with which
Dr. Russell finally volunteered, in Maroon fashion, to ratify
negotiations, might have been a less severe test of good fellowship. This
fine stroke of diplomacy had its effect, however; the rebel captains
agreed to a formal interview with Col. Guthrie and Capt. Sadler, and a
treaty was at last executed with all due solemnity, under a large
cotton-tree at the entrance of Guthrie's Defile. This treaty recognized
the military rank of "Capt. Cudjoe," "Capt. Accompong," and the rest;
gave assurance that the Maroons should be "forever hereafter in a perfect
state of freedom and liberty;" ceded to them fifteen hundred acres of
land; and stipulated only that they should keep the peace, should harbor
no fugitive from justice or from slavery, and should allow two white
commissioners to remain among them, simply to represent the British
Government.

During the following year a separate treaty was made with another large
body of insurgents, called the Windward Maroons. This was not effected,
however, until after an unsuccessful military attempt, in which the
mountaineers gained a signal triumph. By artful devices,--a few fires
left burning with old women to watch them,--a few provision-grounds
exposed by clearing away the bushes,--they lured the troops far up among
the mountains, and then surprised them by an ambush. The militia all
fled, and the regulars took refuge under a large cliff in a stream, where
they remained four hours up to their waists in water, until finally they
forded the river, under full fire, with terrible loss. Three months after
this, however, the Maroons consented to an amicable interview, exchanging
hostages first. The position of the white hostage, at least, was not the
most agreeable; he complained that he was beset by the women and children
with indignant cries of "Buckra, Buckra," while the little boys pointed
their fingers at him as if stabbing him, and that with evident relish.
However, Capt. Quao, like Capt. Cudjoe, made a treaty at last; and hats
were interchanged, instead of hostages.

Independence being thus won and acknowledged, there was a suspension of
hostilities for some years. Among the wild mountains of Jamaica, the
Maroons dwelt in a savage freedom. So healthful and beautiful was the
situation of their chief town, that the English Government has erected
barracks there of late years, as being the most salubrious situation on
the island. They breathed an air ten degrees cooler than that inhaled by
the white population below; and they lived on a daintier diet, so that
the English epicures used to go up among them for good living. The
mountaineers caught the strange land-crabs, plodding in companies of
millions their sidelong path from mountain to ocean, and from ocean to
mountain again. They hunted the wild boars, and prepared the flesh by
salting and smoking it in layers of aromatic leaves, the delicious
"jerked hog" of buccaneer annals. They reared cattle and poultry,
cultivated corn and yams, plantains and cocoas, guavas, and papaws and
mameys, and avocados, and all luxurious West-Indian fruits; the very
weeds of their orchards had tropical luxuriance in their fragrance and in
their names; and from the doors of their little thatched huts they looked
across these gardens of delight to the magnificent lowland forests, and
over those again to the faint line of far-off beach, the fainter
ocean-horizon, and the illimitable sky.

They had senses like those of American Indians; tracked each other by the
smell of the smoke of fires in the air, and called to each other by
horns, using a special note to designate each of their comrades, and
distinguishing it beyond the range of ordinary hearing. They spoke
English diluted with Spanish and African words, and practised Obeah rites
quite undiluted with Christianity. Of course they associated largely with
the slaves, without any very precise regard to treaty stipulations;
sometimes brought in fugitives, and sometimes concealed them; left their
towns and settled on the planters lands when they preferred them: but
were quite orderly and luxuriously happy. During the formidable
insurrection of the Koromantyn slaves, in 1760, they played a dubious
part. When left to go on their own way, they did something towards
suppressing it; but when placed under the guns of the troops, and ordered
to fire on those of their own color, they threw themselves on the ground
without discharging a shot. Nevertheless, they gradually came up into
reputable standing; they grew more and more industrious and steady; and
after they had joined very heartily in resisting D'Estaing's threatened
invasion of the island in 1779, it became the fashion to speak of "our
faithful and affectionate Maroons."

In 1795, their position was as follows: Their numbers had not materially
increased, for many had strayed off and settled on the outskirts of
plantations; nor materially diminished, for many runaway slaves had
joined them; while there were also separate settlements of fugitives, who
had maintained their freedom for twenty years. The white superintendents
had lived with the Maroons in perfect harmony, without the slightest
official authority, but with a great deal of actual influence. But there
was an "irrepressible conflict" behind all this apparent peace, and the
slightest occasion might, at any moment, revive all the old terror. That
occasion was close at hand.

Capt. Cudjoe and Capt. Accompong, and the other founders of Maroon
independence, had passed away; and "Old Montagu" reigned in their stead,
in Trelawney Town. Old Montagu had all the pomp and circumstance of
Maroon majesty: he wore a laced red coat, and a hat superb with gold lace
and plumes; none but captains could sit in his presence; he was helped
first at meals, and no woman could eat beside him; he presided at
councils as magnificently as at table, though with less appetite; and
possessed, meanwhile, not an atom of the love or reverence of any human
being. The real power lay entirely with Major James, the white
superintendent, who had been brought up among the Maroons by his father
(and predecessor), and who was the idol of this wild race. In an evil
hour, the Government removed him, and put a certain unpopular Capt.
Craskell in his place; and as there happened to be, about the same time,
a great excitement concerning a hopeful pair of young Maroons, who had
been seized and publicly whipped on a charge of hog-stealing, their
kindred refused to allow the new superintendent to remain in the town. A
few attempts at negotiation only brought them to a higher pitch of wrath,
which ended in their despatching the following peculiar diplomatic note
to the Earl of Balcarres: "The Maroons wishes nothing else from the
country but battle, and they desires not to see Mr. Craskell up here at
all. So they are waiting every moment for the above on Monday. Mr. David
Schaw will see you on Sunday morning for an answer. They will wait till
Monday, nine o'clock, and if they don't come up, they will come down
themselves." Signed, "Col. Montagu and all the rest."

It turned out, at last, that only two or three of the Maroons were
concerned in this remarkable defiance; but meanwhile it had its effect.
Several ambassadors were sent among the insurgents, and were so favorably
impressed by their reception as to make up a subscription of money for
their hosts, on departing; only the "gallant Col. Gallimore," a Jamaica
Camillus, gave iron instead of gold, by throwing some bullets into the
contribution-box. And it was probably in accordance with his view of the
subject, that, when the Maroons sent ambassadors in return, they were at
once imprisoned, most injudiciously and unjustly; and when Old Montagu
himself and thirty-seven others, following, were seized and imprisoned
also, it is not strange that the Maroons, joined by many slaves, were
soon in open insurrection.

Martial law was instantly proclaimed throughout the island. The fighting
men among the insurgents were not, perhaps, more than five hundred;
against whom the Government could bring nearly fifteen hundred regular
troops and several thousand militiamen. Lord Balcarres himself took the
command, and, eager to crush the affair, promptly marched a large force
up to Trelawney Town, and was glad to march back again as expeditiously
as possible. In his very first attack, he was miserably defeated, and had
to fly for his life, amid a perfect panic of the troops, in which some
forty or fifty were killed,--including Col. Sandford, commanding the
regulars, and the bullet-loving Col. Gallimore, in command of the
militia,--while not a single Maroon was even wounded, so far as could be
ascertained.

After this a good deal of bush-fighting took place. The troops gradually
got possession of several Maroon villages, but not till every hut had
been burnt by its owner. It was in the height of the rainy season; and,
between fire and water, the discomfort of the soldiers was enormous.
Meanwhile the Maroons hovered close around them in the woods, heard all
their orders, picked off their sentinels, and, penetrating through their
lines at night, burned houses and destroyed plantations far below. The
only man who could cope with their peculiar tactics was Major James, the
superintendent just removed by Government; and his services were not
employed, as he was not trusted. On one occasion, however, he led a
volunteer party farther into the mountains than any of the assailants had
yet penetrated, guided by tracks known to himself only, and by the smell
of the smoke of Maroon fires. After a very exhausting march, including a
climb of a hundred and fifty feet up the face of a precipice, he brought
them just within the entrance of Guthrie's Defile. "So far," said he,
pointing to the entrance, "you may pursue, but no farther; no force can
enter here; no white man except myself, or some soldier of the Maroon
establishment, has ever gone beyond this. With the greatest difficulty I
have penetrated four miles farther, and not ten Maroons have gone so far
as that. There are two other ways of getting into the defile, practicable
for the Maroons, but not for any one of you. In neither of them can I
ascend or descend with my arms, which must be handed to me, step by step,
as practised by the Maroons themselves. One of the ways lies to the
eastward, and the other to the westward; and they will take care to have
both guarded, if they suspect that I am with you; which, from the route
you have come to-day, they will. They now see you, and if you advance
fifty paces more, they will convince you of it." At this moment a Maroon
horn sounded the notes indicating his name; and, as he made no answer, a
voice was heard, inquiring if he were among them. "If he is," said the
voice, "let him go back, we do not wish to hurt him, but as for the rest
of you, come on and try battle if you choose." But the gentlemen did not
choose.

In September the House of Assembly met. Things were looking worse and
worse. For five months a handful of negroes and mulattoes had defied the
whole force of the island, and they were defending their liberty by
precisely the same tactics through which their ancestors had won it. Half
a million pounds sterling had been spent within this time, besides the
enormous loss incurred by the withdrawal of so many able-bodied men from
their regular employments. "Cultivation was suspended," says an
eye-witness; "the courts of law had long been shut up; and the island at
large seemed more like a garrison under the power of law-martial, than a
country of agriculture and commerce, of civil judicature, industry, and
prosperity." Hundreds of the militia had died of fatigue, large numbers
had been shot down, the most daring of the British officers had fallen;
while the insurgents had been invariably successful, and not one of them
was known to have been killed. Capt. Craskell, the banished
superintendent, gave it to the Assembly as his opinion, that the whole
slave population of the island was in sympathy with the Maroons, and
would soon be beyond control. More alarming still, there were rumors of
French emissaries behind the scenes; and though these were explained
away, the vague terror remained. Indeed, the lieutenant-governor
announced in his message that he had satisfactory evidence that the
French Convention was concerned in the revolt. A French prisoner, named
Murenson, had testified that the French agent at Philadelphia (Fauchet)
had secretly sent a hundred and fifty emissaries to the island, and
threatened to land fifteen hundred negroes. And though Murenson took it
all back at last, yet the Assembly was moved to make a new offer of three
hundred dollars for killing or taking a Trelawney Maroon, and a hundred
and fifty dollars for killing or taking any fugitive slave who had joined
them. They also voted five hundred pounds as a gratuity to the Accompong
tribe of Maroons, who had thus far kept out of the insurrection; and
various prizes and gratuities were also offered by the different
parishes, with the same object of self-protection.

The commander-in-chief being among the killed, Col. Walpole was promoted
in his stead, and brevetted as general, by way of incentive. He found a
people in despair, a soldiery thoroughly intimidated, and a treasury not
empty, but useless. But the new general had not served against the
Maroons for nothing, and was not ashamed to go to school to his
opponents. First, he waited for the dry season; then he directed all his
efforts towards cutting off his opponents from water, and, most effectual
move of all, he attacked each successive cockpit by dragging up a
howitzer, with immense labor, and throwing in shells. Shells were a
visitation not dreamed of in Maroon philosophy, and their quaint
compliments to their new opponent remain on record. "Damn dat little
buckra!" they said, "he cunning more dan dem toder. Dis here da new
fashion for fight: him fire big ball arter you, and when big ball 'top,
de damn sunting [something] fire arter you again." With which Parthian
arrows of rhetoric the mountaineers retreated.

But this did not last long. The Maroons soon learned to keep out of the
way of the shells, and the island relapsed into terror again. It was
deliberately resolved at last, by a special council convoked for the
purpose, "to persuade the rebels to make peace." But as they had not as
yet shown themselves very accessible to softer influences, it was thought
best to combine as many arguments as possible, and a certain Col.
Quarrell had hit upon a wholly new one. His plan simply was, since men,
however well disciplined, had proved powerless against Maroons, to try a
Spanish fashion against them, and use dogs. The proposition was met, in
some quarters, with the strongest hostility. England, it was said, had
always denounced the Spaniards as brutal and dastardly for hunting down
the natives of that very soil with hounds; and should England now follow
the humiliating example? On the other side, there were plenty who eagerly
quoted all known instances of zoölogical warfare: all Oriental nations,
for instance, used elephants in war, and, no doubt, would gladly use
lions and tigers also, but for their extreme carnivorousness, and their
painful indifference to the distinction between friend and foe; why not,
then, use these dogs, comparatively innocent and gentle creatures? At any
rate, "something must be done;" the final argument always used, when a
bad or desperate project is to be made palatable. So it was voted at last
to send to Havana for an invoice of Spanish dogs, with their accompanying
chasseurs; and the efforts at persuading the Maroons were postponed till
the arrival of these additional persuasives. And when Col. Quarrell
finally set sail as commissioner to obtain the new allies, all scruples
of conscience vanished in the renewal of public courage and the chorus of
popular gratitude; a thing so desirable must be right; thrice they were
armed who knew their Quarrell just.

But after the parting notes of gratitude died away in the distance, the
commissioner began to discover that he was to have a hard time of it. He
sailed for Havana in a schooner manned with Spanish renegadoes, who
insisted on fighting every thing that came in their way,--first a Spanish
schooner, then a French one. He landed at Batabano, struck across the
mountains towards Havana, stopped at Besucal to call on the wealthy
Marquesa de San Felipe y San Jorge, grand patroness of dogs and
chasseurs, and finally was welcomed to Havana by Don Luis de las Casas,
who overlooked, for this occasion only, an injunction of his court
against admitting foreigners within his government; "the only accustomed
exception being," as Don Luis courteously assured him, "in favor of
foreign traders who came with new negroes." To be sure, the commissioner
had not brought any of these commodities; but then he had come to obtain
the means of capturing some, and so might pass for an irregular
practitioner of the privileged profession.

Accordingly, Don Guillermo Dawes Quarrell (so ran his passport) found no
difficulty in obtaining permission from the governor to buy as many dogs
as he desired. When, however, he carelessly hinted at the necessity of
taking, also, a few men who should have care of the dogs,--this being,
after all, the essential part of his expedition,--Don Luis de las Casas
put on instantly a double force of courtesy, and assured him of the
entire impossibility of recruiting a single Spaniard for English service.
Finally, however, he gave permission and passports for six chasseurs.
Under cover of this, the commissioner lost no time in enlisting forty; he
got them safe to Batabano; but at the last moment, learning the state of
affairs, they refused to embark on such very irregular authority. When he
had persuaded them, at length, the officer of the fort interposed
objections. This was not to be borne, so Don Guillermo bribed him and
silenced him; a dragoon was, however, sent to report to the governor; Don
Guillermo sent a messenger after him, and bribed him too; and thus at
length, after myriad rebuffs, and after being obliged to spend the last
evening at a puppet-show in which the principal figure was a burlesque on
his own personal peculiarities, the weary Don Guillermo, with his crew of
renegadoes, and his forty chasseurs and their one hundred and four
muzzled dogs, set sail for Jamaica.

These new allies were certainly something formidable, if we may trust the
pictures and descriptions in Dallas's History. The chasseur was a tall,
meagre, swarthy Spaniard or mulatto, lightly clad in cotton shirt and
drawers, with broad straw hat, and moccasins of raw-hide; his belt
sustaining his long, straight, flat sword or _machete_, like an iron bar
sharpened at one end; and he wore by the same belt three cotton leashes
for his three dogs, sometimes held also by chains. The dogs were a fierce
breed, crossed between hound and mastiff, never unmuzzled but for attack,
and accompanied by smaller dogs called _finders_. It is no wonder, when
these wild and powerful creatures were landed at Montego Bay, that terror
ran through the town, doors were everywhere closed, and windows crowded;
not a negro dared to stir; and the muzzled dogs, infuriated by
confinement on shipboard, filled the silent streets with their noisy
barking and the rattling of their chains.

How much would have come of all this in actual conflict, does not appear.
The Maroons had already been persuaded to make peace upon certain
conditions and guaranties,--a decision probably accelerated by the
terrible rumors of the bloodhounds, though they never saw them. It was
the declared opinion of the Assembly, confirmed by that of Gen. Walpole,
that "nothing could be clearer than that, if they had been off the
island, the rebels could not have been induced to surrender."
Nevertheless, a treaty was at last made, without the direct intervention
of the quadrupeds. Again commissioners went up among the mountains to
treat with negotiators at first invisible; again were hats and jackets
interchanged, not without coy reluctance on the part of the well-dressed
Englishmen; and a solemn agreement was effected. The most essential part
of the bargain was a guaranty of continued independence, demanded by the
suspicious Maroons. Gen. Walpole, however, promptly pledged himself that
no such unfair advantage should be taken of them as had occurred with the
hostages previously surrendered, who were placed in irons; nor should any
attempt be made to remove them from the island. It is painful to add,
that this promise was outrageously violated by the Colonial Government,
to the lasting grief of Gen. Walpole, on the ground that the Maroons had
violated the treaty by a slight want of punctuality in complying with its
terms, and by remissness in restoring the fugitive slaves who had taken
refuge among them. As many of the tribe as surrendered, therefore, were
at once placed in confinement, and ultimately shipped from Port Royal to
Halifax, to the number of six hundred, on the 6th of June, 1796. For the
credit of English honor, we rejoice to know that Gen. Walpole not merely
protested against this utter breach of faith, but indignantly declined
the sword of honor which the Assembly had voted him, in its gratitude,
and then retired from military service forever.

The remaining career of this portion of the Maroons is easily told. They
were first dreaded by the inhabitants of Halifax, then welcomed when
seen, and promptly set to work on the citadel, then in process of
reconstruction, where the "Maroon Bastion" still remains,--their only
visible memorial. Two commissioners had charge of them, one being the
redoubtable Col. Quarrell; and twenty-five thousand pounds were
appropriated for their temporary support. Of course they did not prosper;
pensioned colonists never do, for they are not compelled into habits of
industry. After their delicious life in the mountains of Jamaica, it
seemed rather monotonous to dwell upon that barren soil,--for theirs was
such that two previous colonies had deserted it,--and in a climate where
winter lasts seven months in the year. They had a schoolmaster, and he
was also a preacher; but they did not seem to appreciate that luxury of
civilization, utterly refusing, on grounds of conscience, to forsake
polygamy, and, on grounds of personal comfort, to listen to the doctrinal
discourses of their pastor, who was an ardent Sandemanian. They smoked
their pipes during service time, and left Old Montagu, who still
survived, to lend a vicarious attention to the sermon. One discourse he
briefly reported as follows, very much to the point: "Massa parson say no
mus tief, no mus meddle wid somebody wife, no mus quarrel, mus set down
softly." So they sat down very softly, and showed an extreme
unwillingness to get up again. But, not being naturally an idle race,--at
least, in Jamaica the objection lay rather on the other side,--they soon
grew tired of this inaction. Distrustful of those about them, suspicious
of all attempts to scatter them among the community at large, frozen by
the climate, and constantly petitioning for removal to a milder one, they
finally wearied out all patience. A long dispute ensued between the
authorities of Nova Scotia and Jamaica, as to which was properly
responsible for their support; and thus the heroic race, that for a
century and a half had sustained themselves in freedom in Jamaica, were
reduced to the position of troublesome and impracticable paupers,
shuttlecocks between two selfish parishes. So passed their unfortunate
lives, until, in 1800, their reduced population was transported to Sierra
Leone, at a cost of six thousand pounds; since which they disappear from
history.

It was judged best not to interfere with those bodies of Maroons which
had kept aloof from the late outbreak, at the Accompong settlement, and
elsewhere. They continued to preserve a qualified independence, and
retain it even now. In 1835, two years after the abolition of slavery in
Jamaica, there were reported sixty families of Maroons as residing at
Accompong Town, eighty families at Moore Town, one hundred and ten
families at Charles Town, and twenty families at Scott Hall, making two
hundred and seventy families in all,--each station being, as of old,
under the charge of a superintendent. But there can be little doubt,
that, under the influences of freedom, they are rapidly intermingling
with the mass of colored population in Jamaica.

The story of the exiled Maroons attracted attention in high quarters, in
its time: the wrongs done to them were denounced in Parliament by
Sheridan, and mourned by Wilberforce; while the employment of bloodhounds
against them was vindicated by Dundas, and the whole conduct of the
Colonial Government defended, through thick and thin, by Bryan Edwards.
This thorough partisan even had the assurance to tell Mr. Wilberforce, in
Parliament, that he knew the Maroons, from personal knowledge, to be
cannibals, and that, if a missionary were sent among them in Nova Scotia,
they would immediately eat him; a charge so absurd that he did not
venture to repeat it in his History of the West Indies, though his
injustice to the Maroons is even there so glaring as to provoke the
indignation of the more moderate Dallas. But, in spite of Mr. Edwards,
the public indignation ran quite high in England, against the bloodhounds
and their employers, so that the home ministry found it necessary to send
a severe reproof to the Colonial Government. For a few years the tales of
the Maroons thus emerged from mere colonial annals, and found their way
into annual registers and parliamentary debates; but they have long since
vanished from popular memory. Their record still retains its interest,
however, as that of one of the heroic races of the world; and all the
more, because it is with their kindred that the American nation has to
deal, in solving one of the most momentous problems of its future career.




THE MAROONS OF SURINAM.


When that eccentric individual, Capt. John Gabriel Stedman, resigned his
commission in the English Navy, took the oath of abjuration, and was
appointed ensign in the Scots brigade employed for two centuries by
Holland, he little knew that "their High Mightinesses the States of the
United Provinces" would send him out, within a year, to the forests of
Guiana, to subdue rebel negroes. He never imagined that the year 1773
would behold him beneath the rainy season in a tropical country, wading
through marshes and splashing through lakes, exploring with his feet for
submerged paths, commanding impracticable troops, and commanded by an
insufferable colonel, feeding on greegree worms and fed upon by
mosquitos, howled at by jaguars, hissed at by serpents, and shot at by
those exceedingly unattainable gentlemen, "still longed for, never seen,"
the Maroons of Surinam.

Yet, as our young ensign sailed up the Surinam River, the world of tropic
beauty came upon him with enchantment. Dark, moist verdure was close
around him, rippling waters below; the tall trees of the jungle and the
low mangroves beneath were all hung with long vines and lianas, a maze of
cordage, like a fleet at anchor; lithe monkeys travelled ceaselessly up
and down these airy paths, in armies, bearing their young, like
knapsacks, on their backs; macaws and humming-birds, winged jewels, flew
from tree to tree. As they neared Paramaribo, the river became a smooth
canal among luxuriant plantations; the air was perfumed music, redolent
of orange-blossoms and echoing with the songs of birds and the sweet
plash of oars; gay barges came forth to meet them; "while groups of naked
boys and girls were promiscuously playing and flouncing, like so many
tritons and mermaids, in the water." And when the troops
disembarked,--five hundred fine young men, the oldest not thirty, all
arrayed in new uniforms and bearing orange-flowers in their caps, a
bridal wreath for beautiful Guiana,--it is no wonder that the Creole
ladies were in ecstasy; and the boyish recruits little foresaw the day,
when, reduced to a few dozens, barefooted and ragged as filibusters,
their last survivors would gladly re-embark from a country beside which
even Holland looked dry and even Scotland comfortable.

For over all that earthly paradise there brooded not alone its terrible
malaria, its days of fever and its nights of deadly chill, but the worse
shadows of oppression and of sin, which neither day nor night could
banish. The first object which met Stedman's eye, as he stepped on shore,
was the figure of a young girl stripped to receive two hundred lashes,
and chained to a hundred-pound weight. And the few first days gave a
glimpse into a state of society worthy of this exhibition,--men without
mercy, women without modesty, the black man a slave to the white man's
passions, and the white man a slave to his own. The later West-Indian
society in its worst forms is probably a mere dilution of the utter
profligacy of those early days. Greek or Roman decline produced nothing
more debilitating or destructive than the ordinary life of a Surinam
planter, and his one virtue of hospitality only led to more unbridled
excesses and completed the work of vice. No wonder that Stedman himself,
who, with all his peculiarities, was essentially simple and manly, soon
became disgusted, and made haste to get into the woods and cultivate the
society of the Maroons.

The rebels against whom this expedition was sent were not the original
Maroons of Surinam, but a later generation. The originals had long since
established their independence, and their leaders were flourishing their
honorary silver-mounted canes in the streets of Paramaribo. Fugitive
negroes had begun to establish themselves in the woods from the time when
the colony was finally ceded by the English to the Dutch, in 1674. The
first open outbreak occurred in 1726, when the plantations on the
Seramica River revolted; it was found impossible to subdue them, and the
government very imprudently resolved to make an example of eleven
captives, and thus terrify the rest of the rebels. They were tortured to
death, eight of the eleven being women: this drove the others to madness,
and plantation after plantation was visited with fire and sword. After a
long conflict, their chief, Adoe, was induced to make a treaty, in 1749.
The rebels promised to keep the peace, and in turn were promised freedom,
money, tools, clothes, and, finally, arms and ammunition.

But no permanent peace was ever made upon a barrel of gunpowder as a
basis; and, of course, an explosion followed this one. The colonists
naturally evaded the last item of the bargain; and the rebels, receiving
the gifts, and remarking the omission of the part of Hamlet, asked
contemptuously if the Europeans expected negroes to subsist on combs and
looking-glasses? New hostilities at once began; a new body of slaves on
the Ouca River revolted; the colonial government was changed in
consequence, and fresh troops shipped from Holland; and after four
different embassies had been sent into the woods, the rebels began to
listen to reason. The black generals, Capt. Araby and Capt. Boston,
agreed upon a truce for a year, during which the colonial government
might decide for peace or war, the Maroons declaring themselves
indifferent. Finally the government chose peace, delivered ammunition,
and made a treaty, in 1761; the white and black plenipotentiaries
exchanged English oaths and then negro oaths, each tasting a drop of the
other's blood during the latter ceremony, amid a volley of remarkable
incantations from the black _gadoman_ or priest. After some final
skirmishes, in which the rebels almost always triumphed, the treaty was
at length accepted by all the various villages of Maroons. Had they known
that at this very time five thousand slaves in Berbice were just rising
against their masters, and were looking to them for assistance, the
result might have been different; but this fact had not reached them, nor
had the rumors of insurrection in Brazil among negro and Indian slaves.
They consented, therefore, to the peace. "They write from Surinam," says
the "Annual Register" for Jan. 23, 1761, "that the Dutch governor,
finding himself unable to subdue the rebel negroes of that country by
force, hath wisely followed the example of Gov. Trelawney at Jamaica, and
concluded an amicable treaty with them; in consequence of which, all the
negroes of the woods are acknowledged to be free, and all that is passed
is buried in oblivion." So ended a war of thirty-six years; and in
Stedman's day the original three thousand Ouca and Seramica Maroons had
multiplied, almost incredibly, to fifteen thousand.

But for those slaves not sharing in this revolt it was not so easy to
"bury the whole past in oblivion." The Maroons had told some very plain
truths to the white ambassadors, and had frankly advised them, if they
wished for peace, to mend their own manners and treat their chattels
humanely. But the planters learned nothing by experience,--and, indeed,
the terrible narrations of Stedman were confirmed by those of Alexander,
so lately as 1831. Of course, therefore, in a colony comprising eighty
thousand blacks to four thousand whites, other revolts were stimulated by
the success of this one. They reached their highest point in 1772, when
an insurrection on the Cottica River, led by a negro named Baron, almost
gave the finishing blow to the colony; the only adequate protection being
found in a body of slaves liberated expressly for that purpose,--a
dangerous and humiliating precedent. "We have been obliged to set three
or four hundred of our stoutest negroes free to defend us," says an
honest letter from Surinam, in the "Annual Register" for Sept. 5, 1772.
Fortunately for the safety of the planters, Baron presumed too much upon
his numbers, and injudiciously built a camp too near the seacoast, in a
marshy fastness, from which he was finally ejected by twelve hundred
Dutch troops, though the chief work was done, Stedman thinks, by the
"black rangers" or liberated slaves. Checked by this defeat, he again
drew back into the forests, resuming his guerrilla warfare against the
plantations. Nothing could dislodge him; blood-hounds were proposed, but
the moisture of the country made them useless: and thus matters stood
when Stedman came sailing, amid orange-blossoms and music, up the winding
Surinam.

Our young officer went into the woods in the condition of Falstaff,
"heinously unprovided." Coming from the unbounded luxury of the
plantations, he found himself entering "the most horrid and impenetrable
forests, where no kind of refreshment was to be had,"--he being
provisioned only with salt pork and pease. After a wail of sorrow for
this inhuman neglect, he bursts into a gush of gratitude for the private
generosity which relieved his wants at the last moment by the following
list of supplies: "24 bottles best claret, 12 ditto Madeira, 12 ditto
porter, 12 ditto cider, 12 ditto rum, 2 large loaves white sugar, 2
gallons brandy, 6 bottles muscadel, 2 gallons lemon-juice, 2 gallons
ground coffee, 2 large Westphalia hams, 2 salted bullocks' tongues, 1
bottle Durham mustard, 6 dozen spermaceti candles." The hams and tongues
seem, indeed, rather a poor halfpennyworth to this intolerable deal of
sack; but this instance of Surinam privation in those days may open some
glimpse at the colonial standards of comfort. "From this specimen,"
moralizes our hero, "the reader will easily perceive, that, if some of
the inhabitants of Surinam show themselves the disgrace of the creation
by their cruelties and brutality, others, by their social feelings,
approve themselves an ornament to the human species. With this instance
of virtue and generosity I therefore conclude this chapter."

But the troops soon had to undergo worse troubles than those of the
commissariat. The rainy season had just set in. "As for the negroes,"
said Mr. Klynhaus, the last planter with whom they parted, "you may
depend on never seeing a soul of them, unless they attack you off guard;
but the climate, the climate, will murder you all." Bringing with them
constitutions already impaired by the fevers and dissipation of
Paramaribo, the poor boys began to perish long before they began to
fight. Wading in water all day, hanging their hammocks over water at
night, it seemed a moist existence, even compared with the climate of
England and the soil of Holland. It was a case of "Invent a shovel, and
be a magistrate," even more than Andrew Marvell found it in the United
Provinces. In fact, Raynal evidently thinks that nothing but Dutch
experience in hydraulics could ever have cultivated Surinam.

The two gunboats which held one division of the expedition were merely
old sugar-barges, roofed over with boards, and looking like coffins. They
were pleasantly named the "Charon" and the "Cerberus," but Stedman
thought that the "Sudden Death" and the "Wilful Murder" would have been
titles more appropriate. The chief duty of the troops consisted in lying
at anchor at the intersections of wooded streams, waiting for rebels who
never came. It was dismal work, and the raw recruits were full of the
same imaginary terrors which have haunted other heroes less severely
tested: the monkeys never rattled the cocoa-nuts against the trees, but
they all heard the axes of Maroon wood-choppers; and when a sentinel
declared, one night, that he had seen a negro go down the river in a
canoe, with his pipe lighted, the whole force was called to arms--against
a firefly. In fact, the insect race brought by far the most substantial
dangers. The rebels eluded the military, but the chigres, locusts,
scorpions, and bush-spiders were ever ready to come half-way to meet
them; likewise serpents and alligators proffered them the freedom of the
forests, and exhibited a hospitality almost excessive. Snakes twenty feet
long hung their seductive length from the trees; jaguars volunteered
their society through almost impenetrable marshes; vampire bats perched
by night with lulling endearments upon the toes of the soldiers. When
Stedman describes himself as killing thirty-eight mosquitoes at one
stroke, we must perhaps pardon something to the spirit of martyrdom. But
when we add to these the other woes of his catalogue,--prickly-heat,
ringworm, putrid-fever, "the growling of Col. Fougeaud, dry sandy
savannas, unfordable marshes, burning hot days, cold and damp nights,
heavy rains, and short allowance,"--we can hardly wonder that three
captains died in a month, and that in two months his detachment of
forty-two was reduced to a miserable seven.

Yet, through all this, Stedman himself kept his health. His theory of the
matter almost recalls the time-honored prescription of "A light heart and
a thin pair of breeches," for he attributes his good condition to his
keeping up his spirits and kicking off his shoes. Daily bathing in the
river had also something to do with it; and, indeed, hydropathy was first
learned of the West-India Maroons,--who did their "packing" in wet
clay,--and was carried by Dr. Wright to England. But his extraordinary
personal qualities must have contributed most to his preservation. Never
did a "meagre, starved, black, burnt, and ragged tatterdemalion," as he
calls himself, carry about him such a fund of sentiment, philosophy,
poetry, and art. He had a great faculty for sketching, as the engravings
in his volumes, with all their odd peculiarities, show; his deepest woes
he coined always into couplets, and fortified himself against hopeless
despair with Ovid and Valerius Flaccus, Pope's Homer and Thomson's
"Seasons." Above all reigned his passion for natural history, a ready
balm for every ill. Here he was never wanting to the occasion; and, to do
justice to Dutch Guiana, the occasion never was wanting to him. Were his
men sickening, the peccaries were always healthy without the camp, and
the cockroaches within; just escaping from a she-jaguar, he satisfies
himself, ere he flees, that the print of her claws on the sand is
precisely the size of a pewter dinner-plate; bitten by a scorpion, he
makes sure of a scientific description in case he should expire of the
bite; is the water undrinkable, there is at least some rational interest
in the number of legs possessed by the centipedes which pre-occupy it.
This is the highest triumph of man over his accidents, when he thus turns
his pains to gains, and becomes an entomologist in the tropics.

Meanwhile the rebels kept their own course in the forests, and
occasionally descended upon plantations beside the very river on whose
upper waters the useless troops were sickening and dying. Stedman himself
made several campaigns, with long intervals of illness, before he came
any nearer to the enemy than to burn a deserted village or destroy a
rice-field. Sometimes they left the "Charon" and the "Cerberus" moored by
grape-vines to the pine-trees, and made expeditions into the woods,
single file. Our ensign, true to himself, gives the minutest schedule of
the order of march, and the oddest little diagram of manikins with cocked
hats, and blacker manikins bearing burdens. First, negroes with
bill-hooks to clear the way; then the van-guard; then the main body,
interspersed with negroes bearing boxes of ball-cartridges; then the
rear-guard, with many more negroes, bearing camp-equipage, provisions,
and new rum, surnamed "kill-devil," and appropriately followed by a sort
of palanquin for the disabled. Thus arrayed, they marched valorously
forth into the woods, to some given point; then they turned, marched back
to the boats, then rowed back to camp, and straightway went into the
hospital. Immediately upon this, the coast being clear, Baron and his
rebels marched out again, and proceeded to business.

In the course of years, these Maroons had acquired their own peculiar
tactics. They built stockaded fortresses on marshy islands, accessible by
fords which they alone could traverse. These they defended further by
sharp wooden pins, or crows'-feet, concealed beneath the surface of the
miry ground,--and, latterly, by the more substantial protection of
cannon, which they dragged into the woods, and learned to use. Their
bush-fighting was unique. Having always more men than weapons, they
arranged their warriors in threes,--one to use the musket, another to
take his place if wounded or slain, and a third to drag away the body.
They had Indian stealthiness and swiftness, with more than Indian
discipline; discharged their fire with some approach to regularity, in
three successive lines, the signals being given by the captain's horn.
They were full of ingenuity: marked their movements for each other by
scattered leaves and blazed trees; ran zigzag, to dodge bullets; gave
wooden guns to their unarmed men, to frighten the plantation negroes on
their guerrilla expeditions; and borrowed the red caps of the black
rangers whom they slew, to bewilder the aim of the others. One of them,
finding himself close to the muzzle of a ranger's gun, threw up his hand
hastily. "What!" he exclaimed, "will you fire on one of your own party?"
"God forbid!" cried the ranger, dropping his piece, and was instantly
shot through the body by the Maroon, who the next instant had disappeared
in the woods.

These rebels were no saints: their worship was obi-worship; the women had
not far outgrown the plantation standard of chastity, and the men drank
"kill-devil" like their betters. Stedman was struck with the difference
between the meaning of the word "good" in rebellious circles and in
reputable. "It must, however, be observed, that what we Europeans call a
good character was by the Africans looked upon as detestable, especially
by those born in the woods, whose only crime consisted in avenging the
wrongs done to their forefathers." But if martial virtues be virtues,
such were theirs. Not a rebel ever turned traitor or informer, ever
flinched in battle or under torture, ever violated a treaty or even a
private promise. But it was their power of endurance which was especially
astounding; Stedman is never weary of paying tribute to this, or of
illustrating it in sickening detail; indeed, the records of the world
show nothing to surpass it; "the lifted axe, the agonizing wheel," proved
powerless to subdue it; with every limb lopped, every bone broken, the
victims yet defied their tormentors, laughed, sang, and died triumphant.

Of course they repaid these atrocities in kind. If they had not, it would
have demonstrated the absurd paradox, that slavery educates higher
virtues than freedom. It bewilders all the relations of human
responsibility, if we expect the insurrectionary slave to commit no
outrages; if slavery has not depraved him, it has done him little harm.
If it be the normal tendency of bondage to produce saints like Uncle Tom,
let us all offer ourselves at auction immediately. It is Cassy and Dred
who are the normal protest of human nature against systems which degrade
it. Accordingly, these poor, ignorant Maroons, who had seen their
brothers and sisters flogged, burned, mutilated, hanged on iron hooks,
broken on the wheel, and had been all the while solemnly assured that
this was paternal government, could only repay the paternalism in the
same fashion, when they had the power. Stedman saw a negro chained to a
red-hot distillery-furnace; he saw disobedient slaves, in repeated
instances, punished by the amputation of a leg, and sent to boat-service
for the rest of their lives; and of course the rebels borrowed these
suggestions. They could bear to watch their captives expire under the
lash, for they had previously watched their parents. If the government
rangers received twenty-five florins for every rebel right-hand which
they brought in, of course they risked their own right hands in the
pursuit. The difference was, that the one brutality was that of a mighty
state, and the other was only the retaliation of the victims. And after
all, Stedman never ventures to assert that the imitation equalled the
original, or that the Maroons had inflicted nearly so much as they had
suffered.

The leaders of the rebels, especially, were men who had each his own
story of wrongs to tell. Baron, the most formidable, had been the slave
of a Swedish gentleman, who had taught him to read and write, taken him
to Europe, promised to manumit him on his return--and then, breaking his
word, sold him to a Jew. Baron refused to work for his new master, was
publicly flogged under the gallows, fled to the woods next day, and
became the terror of the colony. Joli Coeur, his first captain, was
avenging the cruel wrongs of his mother. Bonny, another leader, was born
in the woods, his mother having taken refuge there just previously, to
escape from his father, who was also his master. Cojo, another, had
defended his master against the insurgents until he was obliged by ill
usage to take refuge among them; and he still bore upon his wrist, when
Stedman saw him, a silver band, with the inscription,--"True to the
Europeans." In dealing with wrongs like these, Mr. Carlyle would have
found the despised negroes quite as ready as himself to take the
total-abstinence pledge against rose-water.

In his first two-months' campaign, Stedman never saw the trace of a
Maroon; in the second, he once came upon their trail; in the third, one
captive was brought in, two surrendered themselves voluntarily, and a
large party was found to have crossed a river within a mile of the camp,
ferrying themselves on palm-trunks, according to their fashion. Deep
swamps and scorching sands, toiling through briers all day, and sleeping
at night in hammocks suspended over stagnant water, with weapons
supported on sticks crossed beneath,--all this was endured for two years
and a half, before Stedman personally came in sight of the enemy.

On Aug. 20, 1775, the troops found themselves at last in the midst of the
rebel settlements. These villages and forts bore a variety of expressive
names, such as "Hide me, O thou surrounding verdure," "I shall be taken,"
"The woods lament for me," "Disturb me, if you dare," "Take a tasting, if
you like it," "Come, try me, if you be men," "God knows me, and none
else," "I shall moulder before I shall be taken." Some were only
plantation-grounds with a few huts, and were easily laid waste; but all
were protected more or less by their mere situations. Quagmires
surrounded them, covered by a thin crust of verdure, sometimes broken
through by one man's weight, when the victim sank hopelessly into the
black and bottomless depths below. In other directions there was a solid
bottom, but inconveniently covered by three or four feet of water,
through which the troops waded breast-deep, holding their muskets high in
the air, unable to reload them when once discharged, and liable to be
picked off by rebel scouts, who ingeniously posted themselves in the tops
of palm-trees.

Through this delectable region Col. Fougeaud and his followers slowly
advanced, drawing near the fatal shore where Capt. Meyland's detachment
had just been defeated, and where their mangled remains still polluted
the beach. Passing this point of danger without attack, they suddenly met
a small party of rebels, each bearing on his back a beautifully woven
hamper of snow-white rice: these loads they threw down, and disappeared.
Next appeared an armed body from the same direction, who fired upon them
once, and swiftly retreated; and in a few moments the soldiers came upon
a large field of standing rice, beyond which lay, like an amphitheatre,
the rebel village. But between the village and the field had been piled
successive defences of logs and branches, behind which simple redoubts
the Maroons lay concealed. A fight ensued, lasting forty minutes, during
which nearly every soldier and ranger was wounded; but, to their great
amazement, not one was killed. This was an enigma to them until after the
skirmish, when the surgeon found that most of them had been struck, not
by bullets, but by various substitutes, such as pebbles, coat-buttons,
and bits of silver coin, which had penetrated only skin deep. "We also
observed that several of the poor rebel negroes, who had been shot, had
only the shards of Spa-water cans instead of flints, which could seldom
do execution; and it was certainly owing to these circumstances that we
came off so well."

The rebels at length retreated, first setting fire to their village; a
hundred or more lightly built houses, some of them two stories high, were
soon in flames; and as this conflagration occupied the only neck of land
between two impassable morasses, the troops were unable to follow, and
the Maroons had left nothing but rice-fields to be pillaged. That night
the military force was encamped in the woods; their ammunition was almost
gone, so they were ordered to lie flat on the ground, even in case of
attack; they could not so much as build a fire. Before midnight an attack
was made on them, partly with bullets, and partly with words. The Maroons
were all around them in the forest, but their object was a puzzle; they
spent most of the night in bandying compliments with the black rangers,
whom they alternately denounced, ridiculed, and challenged to single
combat. At last Fougeaud and Stedman joined in the conversation, and
endeavored to make this midnight volley of talk the occasion for a
treaty. This was received with inextinguishable laughter, which echoed
through the woods like a concert of screech-owls, ending in a _charivari_
of horns and hallooing. The colonel, persisting, offered them "life,
liberty, victuals, drink, and all they wanted;" in return, they ridiculed
him unmercifully. He was a half-starved Frenchman, who had run away from
his own country, and would soon run away from theirs; they profoundly
pitied him and his soldiers; they would scorn to spend powder on such
scarecrows; they would rather feed and clothe them, as being poor white
slaves, hired to be shot at, and starved for fourpence a day. But as for
the planters, overseers, and rangers, they should die, every one of them,
and Bonny should be governor of the colony. "After this, they tinkled
their bill-hooks, fired a volley, and gave three cheers; which, being
answered by the rangers, the clamor ended, and the rebels dispersed with
the rising sun."

Very aimless nonsense it certainly appeared. But the next day put a new
aspect on it; for it was found, that, under cover of all this noise, the
Maroons had been busily occupied all night, men, women, and children, in
preparing and filling great hampers of the finest rice, yams, and
cassava, from the adjacent provision-grounds, to be used for subsistence
during their escape, leaving only chaff and refuse for the hungry
soldiers. "This was certainly such a masterly trait of generalship in a
savage people, whom we affected to despise, as would have done honor to
any European commander."

From this time the Maroons fulfilled their threats. Shooting down without
mercy every black ranger who came within their reach,--one of these
rangers being, in Stedman's estimate, worth six white soldiers,--they
left Col. Fougeaud and his regulars to die of starvation and fatigue. The
enraged colonel, "finding himself thus foiled by a naked negro, swore he
would pursue Bonny to the world's end." But he never got any nearer than
to Bonny's kitchen-gardens. He put the troops on half-allowance, sent
back for provisions and ammunition,--and within ten days changed his
mind, and retreated to the settlements in despair. Soon after, this very
body of rebels, under Bonny's leadership, plundered two plantations in
the vicinity, and nearly captured a powder-magazine, which was, however,
successfully defended by some armed slaves.

For a year longer these expeditions continued. The troops never gained a
victory, and they lost twenty men for every rebel killed; but they
gradually checked the plunder of plantations, destroyed villages and
planting-grounds, and drove the rebels, for the time at least, into the
deeper recesses of the woods, or into the adjacent province of Cayenne.
They had the slight satisfaction of burning Bonny's own house, a
two-story wooden hut, built in the fashion of our frontier guardhouses.
They often took single prisoners,--some child, born and bred in the
woods, and frightened equally by the first sight of a white man and of a
cow,--or some warrior, who, on being threatened with torture, stretched
forth both hands in disdain, and said, with Indian eloquence, "These
hands have made tigers tremble." As for Stedman, he still went
barefooted, still quarrelled with his colonel, still sketched the scenery
and described the reptiles, still reared greegree worms for his private
kitchen, still quoted good poetry and wrote execrable, still pitied all
the sufferers around him, black, white, and red, until finally he and his
comrades were ordered back to Holland in 1776.

Among all that wasted regiment of weary and broken-down men, there was
probably no one but Stedman who looked backward with longing as they
sailed down the lovely Surinam. True, he bore all his precious
collections with him,--parrots and butterflies, drawings on the backs of
old letters, and journals kept on bones and cartridges. But he had left
behind him a dearer treasure; for there runs through all his eccentric
narrative a single thread of pure romance, in his love for his beautiful
quadroon wife and his only son.

Within a month after his arrival in the colony, our susceptible ensign
first saw Joanna, a slave-girl of fifteen, at the house of an intimate
friend. Her extreme beauty and modesty first fascinated him, and then her
piteous narrative,--for she was the daughter of a planter, who had just
gone mad and died in despair from the discovery that he could not legally
emancipate his own children from slavery. Soon after, Stedman was
dangerously ill, was neglected and alone; fruits and cordials were
anonymously sent to him, which proved at last to have come from Joanna;
and she came herself, ere long, and nursed him, grateful for the visible
sympathy he had shown to her. This completed the conquest; the passionate
young Englishman, once recovered, loaded her with presents which she
refused; talked of purchasing her, and educating her in Europe, which she
also declined as burdening him too greatly; and finally, amid the
ridicule of all good society in Paramaribo, surmounted all legal
obstacles, and was united to the beautiful girl in honorable marriage. He
provided a cottage for her, where he spent his furloughs, in perfect
happiness, for four years.

The simple idyl of their loves was unbroken by any stain or
disappointment, and yet always shadowed with the deepest anxiety for the
future. Though treated with the utmost indulgence, she was legally a
slave, and so was the boy of whom she became the mother. Cojo, her uncle,
was a captain among the rebels against whom her husband fought. And up to
the time when Stedman was ordered back to Holland, he was unable to
purchase her freedom; nor could he, until the very last moment, procure
the emancipation of his boy. His perfect delight at this last triumph,
when obtained, elicited some satire from his white friends. "While the
well-thinking few highly applauded my sensibility, many not only blamed
but publicly derided me for my paternal affection, which was called a
weakness, a whim." "Nearly forty beautiful boys and girls were left to
perpetual slavery by their parents of my acquaintance, and many of them
without being so much as once inquired after at all."

But Stedman was a true-hearted fellow, if his sentiment did sometimes run
to rodomontade; he left his Joanna only in the hope that a year or two in
Europe would repair his ruined fortunes, and he could return to treat
himself to the purchase of his own wedded wife. He describes, with
unaffected pathos, their parting scene,--though, indeed, there were
several successive partings,--and closes the description in a
characteristic manner: "My melancholy having surpassed all description, I
at last determined to weather one or two painful years in her absence;
and in the afternoon went to dissipate my mind at a Mr. Roux' cabinet of
Indian curiosities; where, as my eye chanced to fall on a rattlesnake, I
will, before I leave the colony, describe this dangerous reptile."

It was impossible to write the history of the Maroons of Surinam except
through the biography of our ensign (at last promoted captain), because
nearly all we know of them is through his quaint and picturesque
narrative, with its profuse illustrations by his own hand. It is not
fair, therefore, to end without chronicling his safe arrival in Holland,
on June 3, 1777. It is a remarkable fact, that, after his life in the
woods, even the Dutch looked slovenly to his eyes. "The inhabitants, who
crowded about us, appeared but a disgusting assemblage of ill-formed and
ill-dressed rabble,--so much had my prejudices been changed by living
among Indians and blacks: their eyes seemed to resemble those of a pig;
their complexions were like the color of foul linen; they seemed to have
no teeth, and to be covered over with rags and dirt. This prejudice,
however, was not against these people only, but against all Europeans in
general, when compared to the sparkling eyes, ivory teeth, shining skin,
and remarkable cleanliness of those I had left behind me." Yet, in spite
of these superior attractions, he never recrossed the Atlantic; for his
Joanna died soon after, and his promising son, being sent to the father,
was educated in England, became a midshipman in the navy, and was lost at
sea. With his elegy, in which the last depths of bathos are sadly sounded
by a mourning parent,--who is induced to print them only by "the effect
they had on the sympathetic and ingenious Mrs. Cowley,"--the "Narrative
of a Five Years' Expedition" closes.

The war, which had cost the government forty thousand pounds a year, was
ended, and left both parties essentially as when it began. The Maroons
gradually returned to their old abodes, and, being unmolested themselves,
left others unmolested thenceforward. Originally three thousand,--in
Stedman's time, fifteen thousand,--they were estimated at seventy
thousand by Capt. Alexander, who saw Guiana in 1831; and a later American
scientific expedition, having visited them in their homes, reported them
as still enjoying their wild freedom, and multiplying, while the Indians
on the same soil decay. The beautiful forests of Surinam still make the
morning gorgeous with their beauty, and the night deadly with their
chill; the stately palm still rears, a hundred feet in air, its straight
gray shaft and its head of verdure; the mora builds its solid, buttressed
trunk, a pedestal for the eagle; the pine of the tropics holds out its
myriad hands with water-cups for the rain and dews, where all the birds
and the monkeys may drink their fill; the trees are garlanded with
epiphytes and convolvuli, and anchored to the earth by a thousand vines.
High among their branches, the red and yellow mocking-birds still build
their hanging nests, uncouth storks and tree-porcupines cling above, and
the spotted deer and the tapir drink from the sluggish stream below. The
night is still made noisy with a thousand cries of bird and beast; and
the stillness of the sultry noon is broken by the slow tolling of the
_campañero_, or bell-bird, far in the deep, dark woods, like the chime of
some lost convent. And as Nature is unchanged there, so apparently is
man; the Maroons still retain their savage freedom, still shoot their
wild game and trap their fish, still raise their rice and cassava, yams
and plantains,--still make cups from the gourd-tree and hammocks from the
silk-grass plant, wine from the palm-tree's sap, brooms from its leaves,
fishing-lines from its fibres, and salt from its ashes. Their life does
not yield, indeed, the very highest results of spiritual culture; its
mental and moral results may not come up to the level of civilization,
but they rise far above the level of slavery. In the changes of time, the
Maroons may yet elevate themselves into the one, but they will never
relapse into the other.




GABRIEL'S DEFEAT


In exploring among dusty files of newspapers for the true records of
Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, I have caught occasional glimpses of a plot
perhaps more wide in its outlines than that of either, which has lain
obscure in the darkness of half a century, traceable only in the
political events which dated from it, and the utter incorrectness of the
scanty traditions which assumed to preserve it. And though researches in
public libraries have only proved to me how rapidly the materials for
American history are vanishing,--since not one of our great institutions
possessed, a few years since, a file of any Southern newspaper of the
year 1800,--yet the little which I have gained may have an interest that
makes it worth preserving. Three times, at intervals of thirty years, did
a wave of unutterable terror sweep across the Old Dominion, bringing
thoughts of agony to every Virginian master, and of vague hope to every
Virginian slave. Each time did one man's name become a spell of dismay
and a symbol of deliverance. Each time did that name eclipse its
predecessor, while recalling it for a moment to fresher memory: John
Brown revived the story of Nat Turner, as in his day Nat Turner recalled
the vaster schemes of Gabriel.

On Sept. 8, 1800, a Virginia correspondent wrote thus to the Philadelphia
_United-States Gazette:_--

    "For the week past, we have been under momentary expectation of a
    rising among the negroes, who have assembled to the number of
    nine hundred or a thousand, and threatened to massacre all the
    whites. They are armed with desperate weapons, and secrete
    themselves in the woods. God only knows our fate: we have strong
    guards every night under arms."

It was no wonder, if there were foundation for such rumors. Liberty was
the creed or the cant of the day. France was being disturbed by
revolution, and England by Clarkson. In America, slavery was habitually
recognized as a misfortune and an error, only to be palliated by the
nearness of its expected end. How freely anti-slavery pamphlets had been
circulated in Virginia, we know from the priceless volumes collected and
annotated by Washington, and now preserved in the Boston Athenaeum.
Jefferson's "Notes on Virginia," itself an anti-slavery tract, had passed
through seven editions. Judge St. George Tucker, law-professor in William
and Mary College, had recently published his noble work, "A Dissertation
on Slavery, with a Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of it in the State
of Virginia." From all this agitation, a slave insurrection was a mere
corollary. With so much electricity in the air, a single flash of
lightning foreboded all the terrors of the tempest. Let but a single
armed negro be seen or suspected, and at once, on many a lonely
plantation, there were trembling hands at work to bar doors and windows
that seldom had been even closed before, and there was shuddering when a
gray squirrel scrambled over the roof, or a shower of walnuts came down
clattering from the overhanging boughs.

Early in September, 1800, as a certain Mr. Moseley Sheppard, of Henrico
County in Virginia, was one day sitting in his counting-room, two negroes
knocked at the door, and were let in. They shut the door themselves, and
began to unfold an insurrectionary plot, which was subsequently repeated
by one of them, named Ben Woodfolk or Woolfolk, in presence of the court,
on the 15th of the same month.

He stated, that about the first of the preceding June, he had been asked
by a negro named Colonel George whether he would like to be made a Mason.
He refused; but George ultimately prevailed on him to have an interview
with a certain leading man among the blacks, named Gabriel. Arrived at
the place of meeting, he found many persons assembled, to whom a
preliminary oath was administered, that they would keep secret all which
they might hear. The leaders then began, to the dismay of this witness,
to allude to a plan of insurrection, which, as they stated, was already
far advanced toward maturity. Presently a man named Martin, Gabriel's
brother, proposed religious services, caused the company to be duly
seated, and began an impassioned exposition of Scripture, bearing upon
the perilous theme. The Israelites were glowingly portrayed as a type of
successful resistance to tyranny; and it was argued, that now, as then,
God would stretch forth his arm to save, and would strengthen a hundred
to overthrow a thousand. Thus passed, the witness stated, this
preparatory meeting. At a subsequent gathering the affair was brought to
a point; and the only difficult question was, whether to rise in
rebellion upon a certain Saturday, or upon the Sunday following. Gabriel
said that Saturday was the day already fixed, and that it must not be
altered; but George was for changing it to Sunday, as being more
convenient for the country negroes, who could travel on that day without
suspicion. Gabriel, however, said decisively that they had enough to
carry Richmond without them; and Saturday was therefore retained as the
momentous day.

This was the confession, so far as it is now accessible; and on the
strength of it, Ben Woolfolk was promptly pardoned by the court for all
his sins, past, present, or to come, and they proceeded with their
investigation. Of Gabriel little appeared to be known, except that he had
been the property of Thomas Prosser, a young man who had recently
inherited a plantation a few miles from Richmond, and who had the
reputation among his neighbors of "behaving with great barbarity to his
slaves." Gabriel was, however, reported to be "a fellow of courage and
intellect above his rank in life," to be about twenty-five years of age,
and to be guiltless of the alphabet.

Further inquiry made it appear that the preparations of the insurgents
were hardly adequate to any grand revolutionary design,--at least, if
they proposed to begin with open warfare. The commissariat may have been
well organized, for black Virginians are apt to have a prudent eye to the
larder; but the ordnance department and the treasury were as low as if
Secretary Floyd had been in charge of them. A slave called "Prosser's
Ben" testified that he went with Gabriel to see Ben Woolfolk, who was
going to Caroline County to enlist men, and that "Gabriel gave him three
shillings for himself and three other negroes, to be expended in
recruiting men." Their arms and ammunition, so far as reported, consisted
of a peck of bullets, ten pounds of powder, and twelve scythe-swords,
made by Gabriel's brother Solomon, and fitted with handles by Gabriel
himself. "These cutlasses," said subsequently a white eye-witness, "are
made of scythes cut in two and fixed into well-turned handles. I have
never seen arms so murderous. Those who still doubt the importance of the
conspiracy which has been so fortunately frustrated would shudder with
horror at the sight of these instruments of death." And as it presently
appeared that a conspirator named Scott had astonished his master by
accidentally pulling ten dollars from a ragged pocket which seemed
inadequate to the custody of ten cents, it was agreed that the plot might
still be dangerous, even though the resources seemed limited.

And indeed, as was soon discovered, the effective weapon of the
insurgents lay in the very audacity of their plan. If the current
statements of all the Virginia letter-writers were true, "nothing could
have been better contrived." It was to have taken effect on the first day
of September. The rendezvous for the blacks was to be a brook six miles
from Richmond. Eleven hundred men were to assemble there, and were to be
divided into three columns, their officers having been designated in
advance. All were to march on Richmond,--then a town of eight thousand
inhabitants,--under cover of night. The right wing was instantly to seize
upon the penitentiary building, just converted into an arsenal; while the
left wing was to take possession of the powder-house. These two columns
were to be armed chiefly with clubs, as their undertaking depended for
success upon surprise, and was expected to prevail without hard fighting.
But it was the central force, armed with muskets, cutlasses, knives, and
pikes, upon which the chief responsibility rested; these men were to
enter the town at both ends simultaneously, and begin a general carnage,
none being excepted save the French inhabitants, who were supposed for
some reason to be friendly to the negroes. In a very few hours, it was
thought, they would have entire control of the metropolis. And that this
hope was not in the least unreasonable, was shown by the subsequent
confessions of weakness from the whites. "They could scarcely have failed
of success," wrote the Richmond correspondent of the Boston _Chronicle_;
"for, after all, we could only muster four or five hundred men, of whom
not more than thirty had muskets."

For the insurgents, if successful, the penitentiary held several thousand
stand of arms; the powder-house was well stocked; the Capitol contained
the State treasury; the mills would give them bread; the control of the
bridge across James River would keep off enemies from beyond. Thus
secured and provided, they planned to issue proclamations summoning to
their standard "their fellow-negroes and the friends of humanity
throughout the continent." In a week, it was estimated, they would have
fifty thousand men on their side, with which force they could easily
possess themselves of other towns; and, indeed, a slave named John
Scott--possibly the dangerous possessor of the ten dollars--was already
appointed to head the attack on Petersburg. But in case of final failure,
the project included a retreat to the mountains, with their new-found
property. John Brown was therefore anticipated by Gabriel, sixty years
before, in believing the Virginia mountains to have been "created, from
the foundation of the world, as a place of refuge for fugitive slaves."

These are the statements of the contemporary witnesses; they are repeated
in many newspapers of the year 1800, and are in themselves clear and
consistent. Whether they are on the whole exaggerated or under-stated, it
is now impossible to say. It is certain that a Richmond paper of Sept. 12
(quoted in the New-York _Gazette_ of Sept. 18) declares that "the plot
has been entirely exploded, which was shallow; and, had the attempt been
made to carry it into execution, but little resistance would have been
required to render the scheme entirely abortive." But it is necessary to
remember that this is no more than the Charleston newspapers said at the
very crisis of Denmark Vesey's formidable plot. "Last evening," wrote a
lady from Charleston in 1822, "twenty-five hundred of our citizens were
under arms to guard our property and lives. But it is a subject _not to
be mentioned_ [so underscored]; and unless you hear of it elsewhere, say
nothing about it." Thus it is always hard to know whether to assume the
facts of an insurrection as above or below the estimates. This Virginian
excitement also happened at a period of intense political agitation, and
was seized upon as a boon by the Federalists. The very article above
quoted is ironically headed "Holy Insurrection," and takes its motto from
Jefferson, with profuse capital letters: "The Spirit of the Master is
abating, that of the Slave rising from the dust, his condition
mollifying."

In view of the political aspect thus given to the plot, and of its
ingenuity and thoroughness likewise, the Virginians were naturally
disposed to attribute to white men some share in it; and speculation
presently began to run wild. The newspapers were soon full of theories,
no two being alike, and no one credible. The plot originated, some said,
in certain handbills written by Jefferson's friend Callender, then in
prison at Richmond on a charge of sedition; these were circulated by two
French negroes, aided by a "United Irishman" calling himself a Methodist
preacher, and it was in consideration of these services that no Frenchman
was to be injured by the slaves. When Gabriel was arrested, the editor of
the _United-States Gazette_ affected much diplomatic surprise that no
letters were _yet_ found upon his person "from Fries, Gallatin, or Duane,
nor was he at the time of his capture accompanied by any United
Irishman." "He, however, acknowledges that there are others concerned,
and that he is not the principal instigator." All Federalists agreed that
the Southern Democratic talk was constructive insurrection,--which it
certainly was,---and they painted graphic pictures of noisy "Jacobins"
over their wine, and eager dusky listeners behind their chairs. "It is
evident that the French principles of liberty and equality have been
effused into the minds of the negroes, and that the incautious and
intemperate use of the words by some whites among us have inspired them
with hopes of success." "While the fiery Hotspurs of the State vociferate
their _French babble_ of the natural equality of man, the insulted negro
will be constantly stimulated to cast away his cords, and to sharpen his
pike." "It is, moreover, believed, though not positively known, that a
great many of our profligate and abandoned whites (who are distinguished
by the burlesque appellation of _Democrats_) are implicated with the
blacks, and would have joined them if they had commenced their
operations.... The Jacobin printers and their friends are panic-struck.
Never was terror more strongly depicted in the countenances of men."
These extracts from three different Federalist newspapers show the
amiable emotions of that side of the house; while Democratic Duane, in
the _Aurora_, could find no better repartee than to attribute the whole
trouble to the policy of the administration in renewing commercial
intercourse with San Domingo.

I have discovered in the Norfolk _Epitome of the Times_, for Oct. 9,
1800, a remarkable epistle written from Richmond Jail by the unfortunate
Callender himself. He indignantly denies the charges against the
Democrats, of complicity in dangerous plots, boldly retorting them upon
the Federalists. "An insurrection at this critical moment by the negroes
of the Southern States would have thrown every thing into confusion, and
consequently it was to have prevented the choice of electors in the whole
or the greater part of the States to the south of the Potomac. Such a
disaster must have tended directly to injure the interests of Mr.
Jefferson, and to promote the slender possibility of a second election of
Mr. Adams." And, to be sure, the _United-States Gazette_ followed up the
thing with a good, single-minded party malice which cannot be surpassed
in these present days, ending in such altitudes of sublime coolness as
the following: "The insurrection of the negroes in the Southern States,
which appears to be organized on the true French plan, must be decisive,
with every reflecting man in those States, of the election of Mr. Adams
and Gen. Pinckney. The military skill and approved bravery of the general
must be peculiarly valuable to his countrymen at these trying moments."
Let us have a military Vice-President, by all means, to meet this
formidable exigency of Gabriel's peck of bullets, and this unexplained
three shillings in the pocket of "Prosser's Ben"!

But Gabriel's campaign failed, like that of the Federalists; and the
appointed day brought disasters more fatal than even the sword of Gen.
Pinckney. The affrighted negroes declared that "the stars in their
courses fought against Sisera." The most furious tempest ever known in
Virginia burst upon the land that day, instead of an insurrection. Roads
and plantations were submerged. Bridges were carried away. The fords,
which then, as now, were the frequent substitutes for bridges in that
region, were rendered wholly impassable. The Brook Swamp, one of the most
important strategic points of the insurgents, was entirely inundated,
hopelessly dividing Prosser's farm from Richmond; the country negroes
could not get in, nor those from the city get out. The thousand men
dwindled to a few hundred, and these half paralyzed by superstition;
there was nothing to do but to dismiss them, and before they could
re-assemble they were betrayed.

That the greatest alarm was instantly created throughout the community,
there is no question. All the city of Richmond was in arms, and in all
large towns of the State the night-patrol was doubled. It is a little
amusing to find it formally announced, that "the Governor, impressed with
the magnitude of the danger, has appointed for himself three
aides-de-camp." A troop of United-States cavalry was ordered to Richmond.
Numerous arrests were made. Men were convicted on one day, and hanged on
the next,--five, six, ten, fifteen at a time, almost without evidence.
Three hundred dollars were offered by Gov. Monroe for the arrest of
Gabriel; as much more for another chief named Jack Bowler, _alias_
Ditcher; whereupon Bowler _alias_ Ditcher surrendered himself, but it
took some weeks to get upon the track of Gabriel. He was finally captured
at Norfolk, on board a schooner just arrived from Richmond, in whose hold
he had concealed himself for eleven days, having thrown overboard a
bayonet and bludgeon, which were his only arms. Crowds of people
collected to see him, including many of his own color. He was arrested on
Sept. 24, convicted on Oct. 3, and executed on Oct. 7; and it is known of
him further, only, that, like almost all leaders of slave insurrections,
he showed a courage which his enemies could not gainsay. "When he was
apprehended, he manifested the greatest marks of firmness and confidence,
showing not the least disposition to equivocate, or screen himself from
justice,"--but making no confession that could implicate any one else.
"The behavior of Gabriel under his misfortunes," said the Norfolk
_Epitome_ of Sept. 25, "was such as might be expected from a mind capable
of forming the daring project which he had conceived." The _United-States
Gazette_ for Oct. 9 states, more sarcastically, that "the general is said
to have manifested the utmost composure, and with the true spirit of
heroism seems ready to resign his high office, and even his life, rather
than gratify the officious inquiries of the Governor."

Some of these newspapers suggest that the authorities found it good
policy to omit the statement made by Gabriel, whatever it was. At any
rate, he assured them that he was by no means the sole instigator of the
affair; he could name many, even in Norfolk, who were more deeply
concerned. To his brother Solomon he is said to have stated that the real
head of the plot was Jack Bowler. Still another leader was "Gen. John
Scott," already mentioned, the slave of Mr. Greenhow, hired by Mr.
McCrea. He was captured by his employer in Norfolk, just as he was boldly
entering a public conveyance to escape; and the Baltimore _Telegraphe_
declared that he had a written paper directing him to apply to Alexander
Biddenhurst or Weddenhurst in Philadelphia, "corner of Coats Alley and
Budd Street, who would supply his needs." What became of this military
individual, or of his Philadelphia sympathizers, does not appear. But it
was noticed, as usually happens in such cases, that all the insurgents
had previously passed for saints. "It consists within my knowledge," says
one letter-writer, "that many of these wretches who were or would have
been partakers in the plot have been treated with the utmost tenderness
by their masters, and were more like children than slaves."

These appear to be all the details now accessible of this once famous
plot. They were not very freely published, even at the time. "The
minutiae of the conspiracy have not been detailed to the public," said
the Salem (Mass.) _Gazette_ of Oct. 7, "and perhaps, through a mistaken
notion of prudence and policy, will not be detailed in the Richmond
papers." The New-York _Commercial Advertiser_ of Oct. 13 was still more
explicit. "The trials of the negroes concerned in the late insurrection
are suspended until the opinions of the Legislature can be had on the
subject. This measure is said to be owing to the immense numbers who are
interested in the plot, whose death, should they all be found guilty and
be executed, will nearly produce the annihilation of the blacks in this
part of the country." And in the next issue of the same journal a
Richmond correspondent makes a similar statement, with the following
addition: "A conditional amnesty is perhaps expected. At the next session
of the Legislature [of Virginia], they took into consideration the
subject referred to them, in secret session, with closed doors. The whole
result of their deliberations has never yet been made public, as the
injunction of secrecy has never been removed. To satisfy the court, the
public, and themselves, they had a task so difficult to perform, that it
is not surprising that their deliberations were in secret."

It is a matter of historical interest to know that in these mysterious
sessions lay the germs of the American Colonization Society. A
correspondence was at once secretly commenced between the Governor of
Virginia and the President of the United States, with a view to securing
a grant of land whither troublesome slaves might be banished. Nothing
came of it then; but in 1801, 1802, and 1804, these attempts were
renewed. And finally, on Jan. 22, 1805, the following vote was passed,
still in secret session: "_Resolved_, that the Senators of this State in
the Congress of the United States be instructed, and the Representatives
be requested, to use their best efforts for the obtaining from the
General Government a competent portion of territory in the State of
Louisiana, to be appropriated to the residence of such people of color as
have been or shall be emancipated, or hereafter may become dangerous to
the public safety," etc. But of all these efforts nothing was known till
their record was accidentally discovered by Charles Fenton Mercer in
1816. He at once brought the matter to light, and moved a similar
resolution in the Virginia Legislature; it was almost unanimously
adopted, and the first formal meeting of the Colonization Society, in
1817, was called "in aid" of this Virginia movement. But the whole
correspondence was never made public until the Nat Turner insurrection of
1831 recalled the previous excitement; and these papers were demanded by
Mr. Summers, a member of the Legislature, who described them as "having
originated in a convulsion similar to that which had recently, but more
terribly, occurred."

But neither these subsequent papers, nor any documents which now appear
accessible, can supply any authentic or trustworthy evidence as to the
real extent of the earlier plot. It certainly was not confined to the
mere environs of Richmond. The Norfolk _Epitome_ of Oct. 6 states that on
the 6th and 7th of the previous month one hundred and fifty blacks,
including twenty from Norfolk, were assembled near Whitlock's Mills in
Suffolk County, and remained in the neighborhood till the failure of the
Richmond plan became known. Petersburg newspapers also had letters
containing similar tales. Then the alarm spread more widely. Near
Edenton, N.C., there was undoubtedly a real insurrection, though promptly
suppressed; and many families ultimately removed from that vicinity in
consequence. In Charleston, S.C., there was still greater excitement, if
the contemporary press may be trusted; it was reported that the
freeholders had been summoned to appear in arms, on penalty of a fine of
fifteen pounds, which many preferred to pay rather than risk taking the
fever which then prevailed. These reports were, however, zealously
contradicted in letters from Charleston, dated Oct. 8; and the Charleston
newspapers up to Sept. 17 had certainly contained no reference to any
especial excitement. This alone might not settle the fact, for reasons
already given. But the omission of any such affair from the valuable
pamphlet published in 1822 by Edwin C. Holland, containing reminiscences
of insurrections in South Carolina, is presumptive evidence that no very
extended agitation occurred.

But wherever there was a black population, slave or emancipated, men's
startled consciences made cowards of them all, and recognized the negro
as a dangerous man, because an injured one. In Philadelphia it was
seriously proposed to prohibit the use of sky-rockets for a time, because
they had been employed as signals in San Domingo. "Even in Boston," said
the New-York _Daily Advertiser_ of Sept. 20, "fears are expressed, and
measures of prevention adopted." This probably refers to a singular
advertisement which appeared in some of the Boston newspapers on Sept.
16, and runs as follows:--

    "NOTICE TO BLACKS.

    "The officers of the police having made returns to the subscriber
    of the names of the following persons who are Africans or
    negroes, not subjects of the Emperor of Morocco nor citizens of
    any of the United States, the same are hereby warned and directed
    to depart out of this Commonwealth before the tenth day of
    October next, as they would avoid the pains and penalties of the
    law in that case provided, which was passed by the Legislature
    March 26, 1788.

    "CHARLES BULFINCH, Superintendent.

    "By order and direction of the Selectmen."

The names annexed are about three hundred, with the places of their
supposed origin, and they occupy a column of the paper. So at least
asserts the _United-States Gazette_ of Sept. 23. "It seems probable,"
adds the editor, "from the nature of the notice, that some suspicion of
the design of the negroes is entertained; and we regret to say there is
too much cause." The law of 1788 above mentioned was "An Act for
suppressing rogues, vagabonds, and the like," which forbade all persons
of African descent, unless citizens of some one of the United States or
subjects of the Emperor of Morocco, from remaining more than two months
within the Commonwealth, on penalty of imprisonment and hard labor. This
singular statute remained unrepealed until 1834.

Amid the general harmony in the contemporary narratives of Gabriel's
insurrection, it would be improper to pass by one exceptional legend,
which by some singular fatality has obtained more circulation than all
the true accounts put together. I can trace it no farther back than Nat
Turner's time, when it was published in the Albany _Evening Journal_;
thence transferred to the _Liberator_ of Sept. 17, 1831, and many other
newspapers; then refuted in detail by the _Richmond Enquirer_ of Oct. 21;
then resuscitated in the John-Brown epoch by the Philadelphia _Press_,
and extensively copied. It is fresh, spirited, and full of graphic and
interesting details, nearly every one of which is altogether false.

Gabriel in this narrative becomes a rather mythical being, of vast
abilities and life-long preparations. He bought his freedom, it is
stated, at the age of twenty-one, and then travelled all over the
Southern States, enlisting confederates and forming stores of arms. At
length his plot was discovered, in consequence of three negroes having
been seen riding out of a stable-yard together; and the Governor offered
a reward of ten thousand dollars for further information, to which a
Richmond gentleman added as much more. Gabriel concealed himself on board
the "Sally Ann," a vessel just sailing for San Domingo, and was revealed
by his little nephew, whom he had sent for a jug of rum. Finally, the
narrative puts an eloquent dying speech into Gabriel's mouth, and, to
give a properly tragic consummation, causes him to be torn to death by
four wild horses. The last item is, however, omitted in the more recent
reprints of the story.

Every one of these statements appears to be absolutely erroneous. Gabriel
lived and died a slave, and was probably never out of Virginia. His plot
was voluntarily revealed by accomplices. The rewards offered for his
arrest amounted to three hundred dollars only. He concealed himself on
board the schooner "Mary," bound to Norfolk, and was discovered by the
police. He died on the gallows, with ten associates, having made no
address to the court or the people. All the errors of the statement were
contradicted when it was first made public, but they have proved very
hard to kill.

Some of these events were embodied in a song bearing the same title with
this essay, "Gabriel's Defeat," and set to a tune of the same name, both
being composed by a colored man. Several witnesses have assured me of
having heard this sung in Virginia, as a favorite air at the dances of
the white people, as well as in the huts of the slaves. It is surely one
of history's strange parallelisms, that this fatal enterprise, like that
of John Brown afterwards, should thus have embalmed itself in music. And
twenty-two years after these events, their impression still remained
vivid enough for Benjamin Lundy, in Tennessee, to write: "So well had
they matured their plot, and so completely had they organized their
system of operations, that nothing but a seemingly miraculous
intervention of the arm of Providence was supposed to have been capable
of saving the city from pillage and flames, and the inhabitants thereof
from butchery. So dreadful was the alarm and so great the consternation
produced on this occasion, that a member of Congress from that State was
some time after heard to express himself in his place as follows: 'The
night-bell is never heard to toll in the city of Richmond, but the
anxious mother presses her infant more closely to her bosom.'" The
Congressman was John Randolph of Roanoke, and it was Gabriel who had
taught him the lesson.

And longer than the melancholy life of that wayward statesman,--down even
to the beginning of the American civil war,--there lingered in Richmond a
memorial of those days, most peculiar and most instructive. Before the
days of secession, when the Northern traveller in Virginia, after
traversing for weary leagues its miry ways, its desolate fields, and its
flowery forests, rode at last into its metropolis, he was sure to be
guided ere long to visit its stately Capitol, modelled by Jefferson, when
French minister, from the Maison Carrée. Standing before it, he might
admire undisturbed the Grecian outline of its exterior; but he found
himself forbidden to enter, save by passing an armed and uniformed
sentinel at the doorway. No other State of the Union then found it
necessary to protect its State House by a permanent cordon of bayonets.
Yet there for half a century stood sentinel the "Public Guard" of
Virginia; and when the traveller asked the origin of the precaution, he
was told that it was the lasting memorial of Gabriel's Defeat.




DENMARK VESEY


On Saturday afternoon, May 25, 1822, a slave named Devany, belonging to
Col. Prioleau of Charleston, S.C., was sent to market by his
mistress,--the colonel being absent in the country. After doing his
errands, he strolled down upon the wharves in the enjoyment of that
magnificent wealth of leisure which usually characterized the former
"house-servant" of the South, when beyond hail of the street-door. He
presently noticed a small vessel lying in the stream, with a peculiar
flag flying; and while looking at it, he was accosted by a slave named
William, belonging to Mr. John Paul, who remarked to him, "I have often
seen a flag with the number 76, but never one with the number 96 upon it
before." After some further conversation on this trifling point, William
suddenly inquired, "Do you know that something serious is about to take
place?" Devany disclaiming the knowledge of any graver impending crisis
than the family dinner, the other went on to inform him that many of the
slaves were "determined to right themselves." "We are determined," he
added, "to shake off our bondage, and for that purpose we stand on a good
foundation; many have joined, and if you will go with me, I will show you
the man who has the list of names, and who will take yours down."

This startling disclosure was quite too much for Devany: he was made of
the wrong material for so daring a project; his genius was culinary, not
revolutionary. Giving some excuse for breaking off the conversation, he
went forthwith to consult a free colored man, named Pensil or Pencell,
who advised him to warn his master instantly. So he lost no time in
telling the secret to his mistress and her young son; and on the return
of Col. Prioleau from the country, five days afterward, it was at once
revealed to him. Within an hour or two he stated the facts to Mr.
Hamilton, the intendant, or, as he would now be called, mayor; Mr.
Hamilton at once summoned the corporation, and by five o'clock Devany and
William were under examination.

This was the first warning of a plot which ultimately filled Charleston
with terror. And yet so thorough and so secret was the organization of
the negroes, that a fortnight passed without yielding the slightest
information beyond the very little which was obtained from these two.
William Paul was, indeed, put in confinement, and soon gave evidence
inculpating two slaves as his employers,--Mingo Harth and Peter Poyas.
But these men, when arrested, behaved with such perfect coolness, and
treated the charge with such entire levity;--their trunks and premises,
when searched, were so innocent of all alarming contents;--that they were
soon discharged by the wardens. William Paul at length became alarmed for
his own safety, and began to let out further facts piecemeal, and to
inculpate other men. But some of those very men came voluntarily to the
intendant, on hearing that they were suspected, and indignantly offered
themselves for examination. Puzzled and bewildered, the municipal
government kept the thing as secret as possible, placed the city guard in
an efficient condition, provided sixteen hundred rounds of ball
cartridges, and ordered the sentinels and patrols to be armed with loaded
muskets. "Such had been our fancied security, that the guard had
previously gone on duty without muskets, and with only sheathed bayonets
and bludgeons."

It has since been asserted, though perhaps on questionable authority,
that the Secretary of War was informed of the plot, even including some
details of the plan and the leader's name, before it was known in
Charleston. If so, he utterly disregarded it; and, indeed, so well did
the negroes play their part, that the whole report was eventually
disbelieved, while--as was afterwards proved--they went on to complete
their secret organization, and hastened by a fortnight the appointed day
of attack. Unfortunately for their plans, however, another betrayal took
place at the very last moment, from a different direction. A class-leader
in a Methodist church had been persuaded or bribed by his master to
procure further disclosures. He at length came and stated, that, about
three months before, a man named Rolla, slave of Gov. Bennett, had
communicated to a friend of his the fact of an intended insurrection, and
had said that the time fixed for the outbreak was the following Sunday
night, June 16. As this conversation took place on Friday, it gave but a
very short time for the city authorities to act, especially as they
wished neither to endanger the city nor to alarm it.

Yet so cautiously was the game played on both sides that the whole thing
was still kept a secret from the Charleston public; and some members of
the city government did not fully appreciate their danger till they had
passed it. "The whole was concealed," wrote the governor afterwards,
"until the time came; but secret preparations were made. Saturday night
and Sunday morning passed without demonstrations; doubts were excited,
and counter orders issued for diminishing the guard." It afterwards
proved that these preparations showed to the slaves that their plot was
betrayed, and so saved the city without public alarm. Newspaper
correspondence soon was full of the story, each informant of course
hinting plainly that he had been behind the scenes all along, and had
withheld it only to gratify the authorities in their policy of silence.
It was "now no longer a secret," they wrote; adding, that, for five or
six weeks, but little attention had been paid by the community to these
rumors, the city council having kept it carefully to themselves until a
number of suspicious slaves had been arrested. This refers to ten
prisoners who were seized on June 18, an arrest which killed the plot,
and left only the terrors of what might have been. The investigation,
thus publicly commenced, soon revealed a free colored man named Denmark
Vesey as the leader of the enterprise,--among his chief coadjutors being
that innocent Peter and that unsuspecting Mingo who had been examined and
discharged nearly three weeks before.

It is matter of demonstration, that, but for the military preparations on
the appointed Sunday night, the attempt would have been made. The
ringleaders had actually met for their final arrangements, when, by
comparing notes, they found themselves foiled; and within another week
they were prisoners on trial. Nevertheless, the plot which they had laid
was the most elaborate insurrectionary project ever formed by American
slaves, and came the nearest to a terrible success. In boldness of
conception and thoroughness of organization there has been nothing to
compare with it; and it is worth while to dwell somewhat upon its
details, first introducing the _dramatis personae_.

Denmark Vesey had come very near figuring as a revolutionist in Hayti,
instead of South Carolina. Capt. Vesey, an old resident of Charleston,
commanded a ship that traded between St. Thomas and Cape Français, during
our Revolutionary War, in the slave-transportation line. In the year 1781
he took on board a cargo of three hundred and ninety slaves, and sailed
for the Cape. On the passage, he and his officers were much attracted by
the beauty and intelligence of a boy of fourteen, whom they unanimously
adopted into the cabin as a pet. They gave him new clothes, and a new
name, Télémaque, which was afterwards gradually corrupted into Telmak and
Denmark. They amused themselves with him until their arrival at Cape
Français, and then, "having no use for the boy," sold their pet as if he
had been a macaw or a monkey. Capt. Vesey sailed for St. Thomas; and,
presently making another trip to Cape Français, was surprised to hear
from his consignee that Télémaque would be returned on his hands as being
"unsound,"--not in theology nor in morals, but in body,--subject to
epileptic fits, in fact. According to the custom of that place, the boy
was examined by the city physician, who required Capt. Vesey to take him
back; and Denmark served him faithfully, with no trouble from epilepsy,
for twenty years, travelling all over the world with him, and learning to
speak various languages. In 1800 he drew a prize of fifteen hundred
dollars in the East Bay-street Lottery, with which he bought his freedom
from his master for six hundred dollars,--much less than his market
value. From that time, the official report says, he worked as a carpenter
in Charleston, distinguished for physical strength and energy. "Among
those of his color he was looked up to with awe and respect. His temper
was impetuous and domineering in the extreme, qualifying him for the
despotic rule of which he was ambitious. All his passions were
ungovernable and savage; and to his numerous wives and children he
displayed the haughty and capricious cruelty of an Eastern bashaw."

"For several years before he disclosed his intentions to any one, he
appears to have been constantly and assiduously engaged in endeavoring to
imbitter the minds of the colored population against the white. He
rendered himself perfectly familiar with all those parts of the
Scriptures which he thought he could pervert to his purpose, and would
readily quote them to prove that slavery was contrary to the laws of God;
that slaves were bound to attempt their emancipation, however shocking
and bloody might be the consequences; and that such efforts would not
only be pleasing to the Almighty, but were absolutely enjoined, and their
success predicted, in the Scriptures. His favorite texts when he
addressed those of his own color were Zech. xiv. 1-3, and Josh. vi. 21;
and in all his conversations he identified their situation with that of
the Israelites. The number of inflammatory pamphlets on slavery brought
into Charleston from some of our sister States within the last four years
(and once from Sierra Leone), and distributed amongst the colored
population of the city, for which there was a great facility, in
consequence of the unrestricted intercourse allowed to persons of color
between the different States in the Union, and the speeches in Congress
of those opposed to the admission of Missouri into the Union, perhaps
garbled and misrepresented, furnished him with ample means for inflaming
the minds of the colored population of the State; and by distorting
certain parts of those speeches, or selecting from them particular
passages, he persuaded but too many that Congress had actually declared
them free, and that they were held in bondage contrary to the laws of the
land. Even whilst walking through the streets in company with another, he
was not idle; for if his companion bowed to a white person, he would
rebuke him, and observe that all men were born equal, and that he was
surprised that any one would degrade himself by such conduct; that he
would never cringe to the whites, nor ought any one who had the feelings
of a man. When answered, 'We are slaves,' he would sarcastically and
indignantly reply, 'You deserve to remain slaves;' and if he were further
asked, 'What can we do?' he would remark, 'Go and buy a spelling-book,
and read the fable of Hercules and the Wagoner,' which he would then
repeat, and apply it to their situation. He also sought every opportunity
of entering into conversation with white persons, when they could be
overheard by negroes near by, especially in grog-shops,--during which
conversation he would artfully introduce some bold remark on slavery; and
sometimes, when, from the character he was conversing with, he found he
might still be bolder, he would go so far, that, had not his declarations
in such situations been clearly proved, they would scarcely have been
credited. He continued this course until some time after the commencement
of the last winter; by which time he had not only obtained incredible
influence amongst persons of color, but many feared him more than their
owners, and, one of them declared, even more than his God."

It was proved against him, that his house had been the principal place of
meeting for the conspirators, that all the others habitually referred to
him as the leader, and that he had shown great address in dealing with
different temperaments and overcoming a variety of scruples. One witness
testified that Vesey had read to him from the Bible about the deliverance
of the children of Israel; another, that he had read to him a speech
which had been delivered "in Congress by a Mr. King" on the subject of
slavery, and Vesey had said that "this Mr. King was the black man's
friend; that he, Mr. King, had declared he would continue to speak,
write, and publish pamphlets against slavery the longest day he lived,
until the Southern States consented to emancipate their slaves, for that
slavery was a great disgrace to the country." But among all the reports
there are only two sentences which really reveal the secret soul of
Denmark Vesey, and show his impulses and motives. "He said he did not go
with Creighton to Africa, because he had not a will; he wanted to stay
and see what he could do for his fellow-creatures." The other takes us
still nearer home. Monday Gell stated in his confession, that Vesey, on
first broaching the plan to him, said "he was satisfied with his own
condition, being free; but, as all his children were slaves, he wished to
see what could be done for them."

It is strange to turn from this simple statement of a perhaps intelligent
preference, on the part of a parent, for seeing his offspring in a
condition of freedom, to the _naïve_ astonishment of his judges. "It is
difficult to imagine," says the sentence finally passed on Denmark Vesey,
"what infatuation could have prompted you to attempt an enterprise so
wild and visionary. You were a free man, comparatively wealthy, and
enjoyed every comfort compatible with your situation. You had, therefore,
much to risk and little to gain." Yet one witness testified: "Vesey said
the negroes were living such an abominable life, they ought to rise. I
said, I was living well; he said, though I was, others were not, and that
'twas such fools as I that were in the way and would not help them, and
that after all things were well he would mark me." "His general
conversation," said another witness, a white boy, "was about religion,
which he would apply to slavery; as, for instance, he would speak of the
creation of the world, in which he would say all men had equal rights,
blacks as well as whites, etc.; all his religious remarks were mingled
with slavery." And the firmness of this purpose did not leave him, even
after the betrayal of his cherished plans. "After the plot was
discovered," said Monday Gell, in his confession, "Vesey said it was all
over, unless an attempt were made to rescue those who might be condemned,
by rushing on the people and saving the prisoners, or all dying
together."

The only person to divide with Vesey the claim of leadership was Peter
Poyas. Vesey was the missionary of the cause, but Peter was the
organizing mind. He kept the register of "candidates," and decided who
should or should not be enrolled. "We can't live so," he often reminded
his confederates; "we must break the yoke." "God has a hand in it; we
have been meeting for four years, and are not yet betrayed." Peter was a
ship-carpenter, and a slave of great value. He was to be the military
leader. His plans showed some natural generalship: he arranged the
night-attack; he planned the enrolment of a mounted troop to scour the
streets; and he had a list of all the shops where arms and ammunition
were kept for sale. He voluntarily undertook the management of the most
difficult part of the enterprise,--the capture of the main
guard-house,--and had pledged himself to advance alone and surprise the
sentinel. He was said to have a magnetism in his eyes, of which his
confederates stood in great awe; if he once got his eye upon a man, there
was no resisting it. A white witness has since narrated, that, after his
arrest, he was chained to the floor in a cell, with another of the
conspirators. Men in authority came, and sought by promises, threats, and
even tortures, to ascertain the names of other accomplices. His
companion, wearied out with pain and suffering, and stimulated by the
hope of saving his own life, at last began to yield. Peter raised
himself, leaned upon his elbow, looked at the poor fellow, saying
quietly, "Die like a man," and instantly lay down again. It was enough;
not another word was extorted.

One of the most notable individuals in the plot was a certain Jack
Purcell, commonly called Gullah Jack,--Gullah signifying Angola, the
place of his origin. A conjurer by profession and by lineal heritage in
his own country, he had resumed the practice of his vocation on this side
the Atlantic. For fifteen years he had wielded in secret an immense
influence among a sable constituency in Charleston; and as he had the
reputation of being invulnerable, and of teaching invulnerability as an
art, he was very good at beating up recruits for insurrection. Over those
of Angolese descent, especially, he was a perfect king, and made them
join in the revolt as one man. They met him monthly at a place called
Bulkley's Farm, selected because the black overseer on that plantation
was one of the initiated, and because the farm was accessible by water,
thus enabling them to elude the patrol. There they prepared cartridges
and pikes, and had primitive banquets, which assumed a melodramatic
character under the inspiriting guidance of Jack. If a fowl was privately
roasted, that mystic individual muttered incantations over it; and then
they all grasped at it, exclaiming, "Thus we pull Buckra to pieces!" He
gave them parched corn and ground-nuts to be eaten as internal safeguards
on the day before the outbreak, and a consecrated _cullah_, or crab's
claw, to be carried in the mouth by each, as an amulet. These rather
questionable means secured him a power which was very unquestionable; the
witnesses examined in his presence all showed dread of his conjurations,
and referred to him indirectly, with a kind of awe, as "the little man
who can't be shot."

When Gullah Jack was otherwise engaged, there seems to have been a sort
of deputy seer employed in the enterprise, a blind man named Philip. He
was a preacher; was said to have been born with a caul on his head, and
so claimed the gift of second-sight. Timid adherents were brought to his
house for ghostly counsel. "Why do you look so timorous?" he said to
William Garner, and then quoted Scripture, "Let not your heart be
troubled." That a blind man should know how he looked, was beyond the
philosophy of the visitor; and this piece of rather cheap ingenuity
carried the day.

Other leaders were appointed also. Monday Gell was the scribe of the
enterprise; he was a native African, who had learned to read and write.
He was by trade a harness-maker, working chiefly on his own account. He
confessed that he had written a letter to President Boyer of the new
black republic; "the letter was about the sufferings of the blacks, and
to know if the people of St. Domingo would help them if they made an
effort to free themselves." This epistle was sent by the black cook of a
Northern schooner, and the envelope was addressed to a relative of the
bearer.

Tom Russell was the armorer, and made pikes "on a very improved model,"
the official report admits. Polydore Faber fitted the weapons with
handles. Bacchus Hammett had charge of the fire-arms and ammunition, not
as yet a laborious duty. William Garner and Mingo Harth were to lead the
horse-company. Lot Forrester was the courier, and had done, no one ever
knew how much, in the way of enlisting country negroes, of whom Ned
Bennett was to take command when enlisted. Being the governor's servant,
Ned was probably credited with some official experience. These were the
officers: now for the plan of attack.

It was the custom then, as later, for the country negroes to flock
largely into Charleston on Sunday. More than a thousand came, on ordinary
occasions, and a far larger number might at any time make their
appearance without exciting any suspicion. They gathered in, especially
by water, from the opposite sides of Ashley and Cooper Rivers, and from
the neighboring islands; and they came in a great number of canoes of
various sizes,--many of which could carry a hundred men,--which were
ordinarily employed in bringing agricultural products to the Charleston
market. To get an approximate knowledge of the number, the city
government once ordered the persons thus arriving to be counted,--and
that during the progress of the trials, at a time when the negroes were
rather fearful of coming into town; and it was found, that, even then,
there were more than five hundred visitors on a single Sunday. This fact,
then, was the essential point in the plan of insurrection. Whole
plantations were found to have been enlisted among the "candidates," as
they were termed; and it was proved that the city negroes, who lived
nearest the place of meeting, had agreed to conceal these confederates in
their houses to a large extent, on the night of the proposed outbreak.

The details of the plan, however, were not rashly committed to the mass
of the confederates; they were known only to a few, and were finally to
be announced only after the evening prayer-meetings on the appointed
Sunday. But each leader had his own company enlisted, and his own work
marked out. When the clock struck twelve, all were to move. Peter Poyas
was to lead a party ordered to assemble at South Bay, and to be joined by
a force from James's Island; he was then to march up and seize the
arsenal and guard-house opposite St. Michael's Church, and detach a
sufficient number to cut off all white citizens who should appear at the
alarm-posts. A second body of negroes, from the country and the Neck,
headed by Ned Bennett, was to assemble on the Neck, and seize the arsenal
there. A third was to meet at Gov. Bennett's Mills, under command of
Rolla, and, after putting the governor and intendant to death, to march
through the city, or be posted at Cannon's Bridge, thus preventing the
inhabitants of Cannonsborough from entering the city. A fourth, partly
from the country, and partly from the neighboring localities in the city,
was to rendezvous on Gadsden's Wharf, and attack the upper guard-house. A
fifth, composed of country and Neck negroes, was to assemble at Bulkley's
Farm, two miles and a half from the city, seize the upper
powder-magazine, and then march down; and a sixth was to assemble at
Denmark Vesey's, and obey his orders. A seventh detachment, under Gullah
Jack, was to assemble in Boundary Street, at the head of King Street, to
capture the arms of the Neck company of militia, and to take an
additional supply from Mr. Duquercron's shop. The naval stores on Mey's
Wharf were also to be attacked. Meanwhile, a horse-company, consisting of
many draymen, hostlers, and butcher-boys, was to meet at Lightwood's
Alley, and then scour the streets to prevent the whites from assembling.
Every white man coming out of his own door was to be killed; and, if
necessary, the city was to be fired in several places,--slow-match for
this purpose having been purloined from the public arsenal, and placed in
an accessible position.

Beyond this, the plan of action was either unformed or undiscovered; some
slight reliance seems to have been placed on English aid,--more on
assistance from St. Domingo. At any rate, all the ships in the harbor
were to be seized; and in these, if the worst came to the worst, those
most deeply inculpated could set sail, bearing with them, perhaps, the
spoils of shops and of banks. It seems to be admitted by the official
narrative, that they might have been able, at that season of the year,
and with the aid of the fortifications on the Neck and around the harbor,
to retain possession of the city for some time.

So unsuspicious were the authorities, so unprepared the citizens, so open
to attack lay the city, that nothing seemed necessary to the success of
the insurgents except organization and arms. Indeed, the plan of
organization easily covered a supply of arms. By their own contributions
they had secured enough to strike the first blow,--a few hundred pikes
and daggers, together with swords and guns for the leaders. But they had
carefully marked every place in the city where weapons were to be
obtained. On King-street Road, beyond the municipal limits, in a common
wooden shop, were left unguarded the arms of the Neck company of militia,
to the number of several hundred stand; and these were to be secured by
Bacchus Hammett, whose master kept the establishment. In Mr. Duquercron's
shop there were deposited for sale as many more weapons; and they had
noted Mr. Schirer's shop in Queen Street, and other gunsmiths'
establishments. Finally, the State arsenal in Meeting Street, a building
with no defences except ordinary wooden doors, was to be seized early in
the outbreak. Provided, therefore, that the first moves proved
successful, all the rest appeared sure.

Very little seems to have been said among the conspirators in regard to
any plans of riot or debauchery, subsequent to the capture of the city.
Either their imaginations did not dwell on them, or the witnesses did not
dare to give testimony, or the authorities to print it. Death was to be
dealt out, comprehensive and terrible; but nothing more is mentioned. One
prisoner, Rolla, is reported in the evidence to have dropped hints in
regard to the destiny of the women; and there was a rumor in the
newspapers of the time, that he or some other of Gov. Bennett's slaves
was to have taken the governor's daughter, a young girl of sixteen, for
his wife, in the event of success; but this is all. On the other hand,
Denmark Vesey was known to be for a war of immediate and total
extermination; and when some of the company opposed killing "the
ministers and the women and children," Vesey read from the Scriptures
that all should be cut off, and said that "it was for their safety not to
leave one white skin alive, for this was the plan they pursued at St.
Domingo." And all this was not a mere dream of one lonely enthusiast, but
a measure which had been maturing for four full years among several
confederates, and had been under discussion for five months among
multitudes of initiated "candidates."

As usual with slave-insurrections, the best men and those most trusted
were deepest in the plot. Rolla was the only prominent conspirator who
was not an active church-member. "Most of the ringleaders," says a
Charleston letter-writer of that day, "were the rulers or class-leaders
in what is called the African Society, and were considered faithful,
honest fellows. Indeed, many of the owners could not be convinced, till
the fellows confessed themselves, that they were concerned, and that the
first object of all was to kill their masters." And the first official
report declares that it would not be difficult to assign a motive for the
insurrectionists, "if it had not been distinctly proved, that, with
scarcely an exception, they had no individual hardship to complain of,
and were among the most humanely treated negroes in the city. The
facilities for combining and confederating in such a scheme were amply
afforded by the extreme indulgence and kindness which characterize the
domestic treatment of our slaves. Many slave-owners among us, not
satisfied with ministering to the wants of their domestics by all the
comforts of abundant food and excellent clothing, with a misguided
benevolence have not only permitted their instruction, but lent to such
efforts their approbation and applause."

"I sympathize most sincerely," says the anonymous author of a pamphlet of
the period, "with the very respectable and pious clergyman whose heart
must still bleed at the recollection that his confidential class-leader,
but a week or two before his just conviction, had received the communion
of the Lord's Supper from his hand. This wretch had been brought up in
his pastor's family, and was treated with the same Christian attention as
was shown to their own children." "To us who are accustomed to the base
and proverbial ingratitude of these people, this ill return of kindness
and confidence is not surprising; but they who are ignorant of their real
character will read and wonder."

One demonstration of this "Christian attention" had lately been the
closing of the African Church,--of which, as has been stated, most of the
leading revolutionists were members,--on the ground that it tended to
spread the dangerous infection of the alphabet. On Jan. 15, 1821, the
city marshal, John J. Lafar, had notified "ministers of the gospel and
others who keep night--and Sunday-schools for slaves, that the education
of such persons is forbidden by law, and that the city government feel
imperiously bound to enforce the penalty." So that there were some
special as well as general grounds for disaffection among these
ungrateful favorites of fortune, the slaves. Then there were fancied
dangers. An absurd report had somehow arisen,--since you cannot keep men
ignorant without making them unreasonable also,--that on the ensuing
Fourth of July the whites were to create a false alarm, and that every
black man coming out was to be killed, "in order to thin them;" this
being done to prevent their joining an imaginary army supposed to be on
its way from Hayti. Others were led to suppose that Congress had ended
the Missouri Compromise discussion by making them all free, and that the
law would protect their liberty if they could only secure it. Others,
again, were threatened with the vengeance of the conspirators, unless
they also joined; on the night of attack, it was said, the initiated
would have a countersign, and all who did not know it would share the
fate of the whites. Add to this the reading of Congressional speeches,
and of the copious magazine of revolution to be found in the Bible,--and
it was no wonder, if they for the first time were roused, under the
energetic leadership of Vesey, to a full consciousness of their own
condition.

"Not only were the leaders of good character, and very much indulged by
their owners; but this was very generally the case with all who were
convicted,--many of them possessing the highest confidence of their
owners, and not one of bad character." In one case it was proved that
Vesey had forbidden his followers to trust a certain man, because he had
once been seen intoxicated. In another case it was shown that a slave
named George had made every effort to obtain their confidence, but was
constantly excluded from their meetings as a talkative fellow who could
not be trusted,--a policy which his levity of manner, when examined in
court, fully justified. They took no women into counsel,--not from any
distrust apparently, but in order that their children might not be left
uncared-for in case of defeat and destruction. House-servants were rarely
trusted, or only when they had been carefully sounded by the chief
leaders. Peter Poyas, in commissioning an agent to enlist men, gave him
excellent cautions: "Don't mention it to those waiting-men who receive
presents of old coats, etc., from their masters, or they'll betray us; I
will speak to them." When he did speak, if he did not convince them, he
at least frightened them. But the chief reliance was on those slaves who
were hired out, and therefore more uncontrolled,--and also upon the
country negroes.

The same far-sighted policy directed the conspirators to disarm suspicion
by peculiarly obedient and orderly conduct. And it shows the precaution
with which the thing was carried on, that, although Peter Poyas was
proved to have had a list of some six hundred persons, yet not one of his
particular company was ever brought to trial. As each leader kept to
himself the names of his proselytes, and as Monday Gell was the only one
of these leaders who turned traitor, any opinion as to the numbers
actually engaged must be altogether conjectural. One witness said nine
thousand; another, six thousand six hundred. These statements were
probably extravagant, though not more so than Gov. Bennett's assertion,
on the other side, that "all who were actually concerned had been brought
to justice,"--unless by this phrase he designates only the ringleaders.
The avowed aim of the governor's letter, indeed, is to smooth the thing
over, for the credit and safety of the city; and its evasive tone
contrasts strongly with the more frank and thorough statements of the
judges, made after the thing could no longer be hushed up. These high
authorities explicitly acknowledge that they had failed to detect more
than a small minority of those concerned in the project, and seem to
admit, that, if it had once been brought to a head, the slaves generally
would have joined in.

"We cannot venture to say," says the intendant's pamphlet, "to how many
the knowledge of the intended effort was communicated, who without
signifying their assent, or attending any of the meetings, were yet
prepared to profit by events. That there are many who would not have
permitted the enterprise to have failed at a critical moment, for the
want of their co-operation, we have the best reason for believing." So
believed the community at large; and the panic was in proportion, when
the whole danger was finally made public. "The scenes I witnessed," says
one who has since narrated the circumstances, "and the declaration of the
impending danger that met us at all times and on all occasions, forced
the conviction that never were an entire people more thoroughly alarmed
than were the people of Charleston at that time.... During the
excitement, and the trial of the supposed conspirators, rumor proclaimed
all, and doubtless more than all, the horrors of the plot. The city was
to be fired in every quarter; the arsenal in the immediate vicinity was
to be broken open, and the arms distributed to the insurgents, and a
universal massacre of the white inhabitants to take place. Nor did there
seem to be any doubt in the mind of the people, that such would actually
have been the result had not the plot fortunately been detected before
the time appointed for the outbreak. It was believed, as a matter of
course, that every black in the city would join in the insurrection, and
that if the original design had been attempted, and the city taken by
surprise, the negroes would have achieved a complete and easy victory.
Nor does it seem at all impossible that such might have been, or yet may
be, the case, if any well-arranged and resolute rising should take
place."

Indeed, this universal admission, that all the slaves were ready to take
part in any desperate enterprise, was one of the most startling aspects
of the affair. The authorities say that the two principal State's
evidence declared that "they never spoke to any person of color on the
subject, or knew of any one who had been spoken to by the other leaders,
who had withheld his assent." And the conspirators seem to have been
perfectly satisfied that all the remaining slaves would enter their ranks
upon the slightest success. "Let us assemble a sufficient number to
commence the work with spirit, and we'll not want men; they'll fall in
behind us fast enough." And as an illustration of this readiness, the
official report mentions a slave who had belonged to one master for
sixteen years, sustaining a high character for fidelity and affection,
who had twice travelled with him through the Northern States, resisting
every solicitation to escape, and who yet was very deeply concerned in
the insurrection, though knowing it to involve the probable destruction
of the whole family with whom he lived.

One singular circumstance followed the first rumors of the plot. Several
white men, said to be of low and unprincipled character, at once began to
make interest with the supposed leaders among the slaves, either from
genuine sympathy, or with the intention of betraying them for money, or
by profiting by the insurrection, should it succeed. Four of these were
brought to trial; but the official report expresses the opinion that many
more might have been discovered but for the inadmissibility of slave
testimony against whites. Indeed, the evidence against even these four
was insufficient for a capital conviction, although one was overheard,
through stratagem, by the intendant himself, and arrested on the spot.
This man was a Scotchman, another a Spaniard, a third a German, and the
fourth a Carolinian. The last had for thirty years kept a shop in the
neighborhood of Charleston; he was proved to have asserted that "the
negroes had as much right to fight for their liberty as the white
people," had offered to head them in the enterprise, and had said that in
three weeks he would have two thousand men. But in no case, it appears,
did these men obtain the confidence of the slaves; and the whole plot was
conceived and organized, so far as appears, without the slightest
co-operation from any white man.

The trial of the conspirators began on Wednesday, June 19. At the request
of the intendant, Justices Kennedy and Parker summoned five freeholders
(Messrs. Drayton, Heyward, Pringle, Legaré, and Turnbull) to constitute a
court, under the provisions of the Act "for the better ordering and
governing negroes and other slaves." The intendant laid the case before
them, with a list of prisoners and witnesses. By a vote of the court, all
spectators were excluded, except the owners and counsel of the slaves
concerned. No other colored person was allowed to enter the jail, and a
strong guard of soldiers was kept always on duty around the building.
Under these general arrangements the trials proceeded with elaborate
formality, though with some variations from ordinary usage,--as was,
indeed, required by the statute.

For instance, the law provided that the testimony of any Indian or slave
could be received, without oath, against a slave or free colored person,
although it was not valid, even under oath, against a white. But it is
best to quote the official language in respect to the rules adopted: "As
the court had been organized under a statute of a peculiar and local
character, and intended for the government of a distinct class of persons
in the community, they were bound to conform their proceedings to its
provisions, which depart in many essential features from the principles
of the common law and some of the settled rules of evidence. The court,
however, determined to adopt those rules, whenever they were not
repugnant to nor expressly excepted by that statute, nor inconsistent
with the local situation and policy of the State; and laid down for their
own government the following regulations: First, that no slave should be
tried except in the presence of his owner or his counsel, and that notice
should be given in every case at least one day before the trial; second,
that the testimony of one witness, unsupported by additional evidence or
by circumstances, should lead to no conviction of a capital nature;
third, that the witnesses should be confronted with the accused and with
each other in every case, except where testimony was given under a solemn
pledge that the names of the witnesses should not be divulged,--as they
declared, in some instances, that they apprehended being murdered by the
blacks, if it was known that they had volunteered their evidence; fourth,
that the prisoners might be represented by counsel, whenever this was
requested by the owners of the slaves, or by the prisoners themselves if
free; fifth, that the statements or defences of the accused should be
heard in every case, and they be permitted themselves to examine any
witness they thought proper."

It is singular to observe how entirely these rules seem to concede that a
slave's life has no sort of value to himself, but only to his master. His
master, not he himself, must choose whether it be worth while to employ
counsel. His master, not his mother or his wife, must be present at the
trial. So far is this carried, that the provision to exclude "persons who
had no particular interest in the slaves accused" seems to have excluded
every acknowledged relative they had in the world, and admitted only
those who had invested in them so many dollars. And yet the very first
section of that part of the statute under which they were tried lays down
an explicit recognition of their humanity: "And whereas natural justice
forbids that any _person_, of what condition soever, should be condemned
unheard." So thoroughly, in the whole report, are the ideas of person and
chattel intermingled, that when Gov. Bennett petitions for mitigation of
sentence in the case of his slave Batteau, and closes, "I ask this,
gentlemen, as an individual incurring a severe and distressing loss," it
is really impossible to decide whether the predominant emotion be
affectional or financial.

It is a matter of painful necessity to acknowledge that the proceedings
of most slave-tribunals have justified the honest admission of Gov. Adams
of South Carolina, in his legislative message of 1855: "The
administration of our laws, in relation to our colored population, by our
courts of magistrates and freeholders, as these courts are at present
constituted, calls loudly for reform. Their decisions are rarely in
conformity with justice or humanity." This trial, as reported by the
justices themselves, seems to have been no worse than the
average,--perhaps better. In all, thirty-five were sentenced to death,
thirty-four to transportation, twenty-seven acquitted by the court, and
twenty-five discharged without trial, by the Committee of
Vigilance,--making in all one hundred and twenty-one.

The sentences pronounced by Judge Kennedy upon the leading rebels, while
paying a high tribute to their previous character, of course bring all
law and all Scripture to prove the magnitude of their crime. "It is a
melancholy fact," he says, "that those servants in whom we reposed the
most unlimited confidence have been the principal actors in this wicked
scheme." Then he rises into earnest appeals. "Are you incapable of the
heavenly influence of that gospel, all whose paths are peace? It was to
reconcile us to our destiny on earth, and to enable us to discharge with
fidelity all our duties, whether as master or servant, that those
inspired precepts were imparted by Heaven to fallen man."

To these reasonings the prisoners had, of course, nothing to say; but the
official reports bear the strongest testimony to their fortitude. "Rolla,
when arraigned, affected not to understand the charge against him, and,
when it was at his request further explained to him, assumed, with
wonderful adroitness, astonishment and surprise. He was remarkable,
throughout his trial, for great presence and composure of mind. When he
was informed he was convicted, and was advised to prepare for death,
though he had previously (but after his trial) confessed his guilt, he
appeared perfectly confounded, but exhibited no signs of fear. In Ned's
behavior there was nothing remarkable; but his countenance was stern and
immovable, even whilst he was receiving the sentence of death: from his
looks it was impossible to discover or conjecture what were his feelings.
Not so with Peter: for in his countenance were strongly marked
disappointed ambition, revenge, indignation, and an anxiety to know how
far the discoveries had extended; and the same emotions were exhibited in
his conduct. He did not appear to fear personal consequences, for his
whole behavior indicated the reverse; but exhibited an evident anxiety
for the success of their plan, in which his whole soul was embarked. His
countenance and behavior were the same when he received his sentence; and
his only words were, on retiring, 'I suppose you'll let me see my wife
and family before I die?' and that not in a supplicating tone. When he
was asked, a day or two after, if it was possible he could wish to see
his master and family murdered, who had treated him so kindly, he only
replied to the question by a smile. Monday's behavior was not peculiar.
When he was before the court, his arms were folded; he heard the
testimony given against him, and received his sentence, with the utmost
firmness and composure. But no description can accurately convey to
others the impression which the trial, defence, and appearance of Gullah
Jack made on those who witnessed the workings of his cunning and rude
address. When arrested and brought before the court, in company with
another African named Jack, the property of the estate of Pritchard, he
assumed so much ignorance, and looked and acted the fool so well, that
some of the court could not believe that this was the necromancer who was
sought after. This conduct he continued when on his trial, until he saw
the witnesses and heard the testimony as it progressed against him; when,
in an instant, his countenance was lighted up as if by lightning, and his
wildness and vehemence of gesture, and the malignant glance with which he
eyed the witnesses who appeared against him, all indicated the savage,
who indeed had been _caught_, but not _tamed_. His courage, however, soon
forsook him. When he received sentence of death, he earnestly implored
that a fortnight longer might be allowed him, and then a week longer,
which he continued earnestly to solicit until he was taken from the
court-room to his cell; and when he was carried to execution, he gave up
his spirit without firmness or composure."

Not so with Denmark Vesey. The plans of years were frustrated; his own
life and liberty were thrown away; many others were sacrificed through
his leadership; and one more was added to the list of unsuccessful
insurrections. All these disastrous certainties he faced calmly, and gave
his whole mind composedly to the conducting of his defence. With his arms
tightly folded, and his eyes fixed on the floor, he attentively followed
every item of the testimony. He heard the witnesses examined by the
court, and cross-examined by his own counsel; and it is evident from the
narrative of the presiding judge, that he showed no small skill and
policy in the searching cross-examination which he then applied. The
fears, the feelings, the consciences, of those who had betrayed him, all
were in turn appealed to; but the facts were quite overpowering, and it
was too late to aid his comrades or himself. Then turning to the court,
he skilfully availed himself of the point which had so much impressed the
community: the intrinsic improbability that a man in his position of
freedom and prosperity should sacrifice every thing to free other people.
If they thought it so incredible, why not give him the benefit of the
incredibility? The act being, as they stated, one of infatuation, why
convict him of it on the bare word of men who, by their own showing, had
not only shared the infatuation, but proved traitors to it? An ingenious
defence,--indeed, the only one which could by any possibility be
suggested, anterior to the days of Choate and somnambulism; but in vain.
He was sentenced; and it was not, apparently, till the judge reproached
him for the destruction he had brought on his followers, that he showed
any sign of emotion. Then the tears came into his eyes. But he said not
another word.

The executions took place on five different days; and, bad as they were,
they might have been worse. After the imaginary Negro Plot of New York,
in 1741, thirteen negroes had been judicially burned alive; two had
suffered the same sentence at Charleston in 1808; and it was undoubtedly
some mark of progress, that in this case the gallows took the place of
the flames. Six were hanged on July 2, upon Blake's lands, near
Charleston,--Denmark Vesey, Peter Poyas, Jesse, Ned, Rolla, and
Batteau,--the last three being slaves of the governor himself. Gullah
Jack and John were executed "on the Lines," near Charleston, on July 12;
and twenty-two more on July 26. Four others suffered their fate on July
30; and one more, William Garner, effected a temporary escape, was
captured, and tried by a different court, and was finally executed on
Aug. 9.

The self-control of these men did not desert them at their execution.
When the six leaders suffered death, the report says, Peter Poyas
repeated his charge of secrecy: "Do not open your lips; die silent, as
you shall see me do;" and all obeyed. And though afterwards, as the
particulars of the plot became better known, there was less inducement to
conceal, yet every one of the thirty-five seems to have met his fate
bravely, except the conjurer. Gov. Bennett, in his letter, expresses much
dissatisfaction at the small amount learned from the participators. "To
the last hour of the existence of several who appeared to be conspicuous
actors in the drama, they were pressingly importuned to make further
confessions,"--this "importuning" being more clearly defined in a letter
of Mr. Ferguson, owner of two of the slaves, as "having them severely
corrected." Yet so little was obtained, that the governor was compelled
to admit at last that the really essential features of the plot were not
known to any of the informers.

It is to be remembered, that the plot failed because a man unauthorized
and incompetent, William Paul, undertook to make enlistments on his own
account. He happened on one of precisely that class of men,--favored
house-servants,--whom his leaders had expressly reserved for more skilful
manipulations. He being thus detected, one would have supposed that the
discovery of many accomplices would at once have followed. The number
enlisted was counted by thousands; yet for twenty-nine days after the
first treachery, and during twenty days of official examination, only
fifteen of the conspirators were ferreted out. Meanwhile the informers'
names had to be concealed with the utmost secrecy; they were in peril of
their lives from the slaves,--William Paul scarcely dared to go beyond
the doorstep,--and the names of important witnesses examined in June were
still suppressed in the official report published in October. That a
conspiracy on so large a scale should have existed in embryo during four
years, and in an active form for several months, and yet have been so
well managed, that, after actual betrayal, the authorities were again
thrown off their guard, and the plot nearly brought to a head
again,--this certainly shows extraordinary ability in the leaders, and a
talent for concerted action on the part of slaves generally, with which
they have hardly been credited.

And it is also to be noted, that the range of the conspiracy extended far
beyond Charleston. It was proved that Frank, slave of Mr. Ferguson,
living nearly forty miles from the city, had boasted of having enlisted
four plantations in his immediate neighborhood. It was in evidence that
the insurgents "were trying all round the country, from Georgetown and
Santee round about to Combahee, to get people;" and, after the trials, it
was satisfactorily established that Vesey "had been in the country as far
north as South Santee, and southwardly as far as the Euhaws, which is
between seventy and eighty miles from the city." Mr. Ferguson himself
testified that the good order of any gang was no evidence of their
ignorance of the plot, since the behavior of his own initiated slaves had
been unexceptionable, in accordance with Vesey's directions.

With such an organization and such materials, there was nothing in the
plan which could be pronounced incredible or impracticable. There is no
reason why they should not have taken the city. After all the governor's
entreaties as to moderate language, the authorities were obliged to admit
that South Carolina had been saved from a "horrible catastrophe." "For,
although success could not possibly have attended the conspirators, yet,
before their suppression, Charleston would probably have been wrapped in
flames, many valuable lives would have been sacrificed, and an immense
loss of property sustained by the citizens, even though no other
distressing occurrences were experienced by them; while the plantations
in the lower country would have been disorganized, and the agricultural
interests have sustained an enormous loss." The Northern journals had
already expressed still greater anxieties. "It appears," said the
New-York _Commercial Advertiser_, "that, but for the timely disclosure,
the whole of that State would in a few days have witnessed the horrid
spectacle once witnessed in St. Domingo."

My friend, David Lee Child, has kindly communicated to me a few memoranda
of a conversation held long since with a free colored man who had worked
in Vesey's shop during the time of the insurrection; and these generally
confirm the official narratives. "I was a young man then," he said; "and,
owing to the policy of preventing communication between free colored
people and slaves, I had little opportunity of ascertaining how the
slaves felt about it. I know that several of them were abused in the
street, and some put in prison, for appearing in sackcloth. There was an
ordinance of the city, that any slave who wore a badge of mourning should
be imprisoned and flogged. They generally got the law, which is
thirty-nine lashes; but sometimes it was according to the decision of the
court." "I heard, at the time, of arms being buried in coffins at
Sullivan's Island." "In the time of the insurrection, the slaves were
tried in a small room in the jail where they were confined. No colored
person was allowed to go within two squares of the prison. Those two
squares were filled with troops, five thousand of whom were on duty day
and night. I was told, Vesey said to those that tried him, that the work
of insurrection would go on; but as none but white persons were permitted
to be present, I cannot tell whether he said it."

During all this time there was naturally a silence in the Charleston
journals, which strongly contrasts with the extreme publicity at last
given to the testimony. Even the _National Intelligencer_, at Washington,
passed lightly over the affair, and deprecated the publication of
particulars. The Northern editors, on the other hand, eager for items,
were constantly complaining of this reserve, and calling for further
intelligence. "The Charleston papers," said the Hartford _Courant_ of
July 16, "have been silent on the subject of the insurrection; but
letters from this city state that it has created much alarm, and that two
brigades of troops were under arms for some time to suppress any risings
that might have taken place." "You will doubtless hear," wrote a
Charleston correspondent of the same paper, just before, "many reports,
and some exaggerated ones." "There was certainly a disposition to revolt,
and some preparations made, principally by the plantation negroes, to
take the city." "We hoped they would progress so far as to enable us to
ascertain and punish the ringleaders." "Assure my friends that we feel in
perfect security, although the number of nightly guards, and other
demonstrations, may induce a belief among strangers to the contrary."

The strangers would have been very blind strangers, if they had not been
more influenced by the actions of the Charleston citizens than by their
words. The original information was given on May 25, 1822. The time
passed, and the plot failed on June 16. A plan for its revival on July 2
proved abortive. Yet a letter from Charleston, in the Hartford _Courant_
of Aug. 6, represented the panic as unabated: "Great preparations are
making, and all the military are put in preparation to guard against any
attempt of the same kind again; but we have no apprehension of its being
repeated." On Aug. 10, Gov. Bennett wrote the letter already mentioned,
which was printed and distributed as a circular, its object being to
deprecate undue alarm. "Every individual in the State is interested,
whether in regard to his own property, or the reputation of the State, in
giving no more importance to the transaction than it justly merits." Yet,
five days after this,--two months after the first danger had passed,--a
re-enforcement of United-States troops arrived at Fort Moultrie; and,
during the same month, several different attempts were made by small
parties of armed negroes to capture the mails between Charleston and
Savannah, and a reward of two hundred dollars was offered for their
detection.

The first official report of the trials was prepared by the intendant, by
request of the city council. It passed through four editions in a few
months,--the first and fourth being published in Charleston, and the
second and third in Boston. Being, however, but a brief pamphlet, it did
not satisfy the public curiosity; and in October of the same year (1822),
a larger volume appeared at Charleston, edited by the magistrates who
presided at the trials,--Lionel H. Kennedy and Thomas Parker. It contains
the evidence in full, and a separate narrative of the whole affair, more
candid and lucid than any other which I have found in the newspapers or
pamphlets of the day. It exhibits that rarest of all qualities in a
slave-community, a willingness to look facts in the face. This narrative
has been faithfully followed, with the aid of such cross-lights as could
be secured from many other quarters, in preparing the present history.

The editor of the first official report racked his brains to discover the
special causes of the revolt, and never trusted himself to allude to the
general one. The negroes rebelled because they were deluded by
Congressional eloquence; or because they were excited by a church
squabble; or because they had been spoilt by mistaken indulgences, such
as being allowed to learn to read,--"a misguided benevolence," as he
pronounces it. So the Baptist Convention seems to have thought it was
because they were not Baptists; and an Episcopal pamphleteer, because
they were not Episcopalians. It never seems to occur to any of these
spectators, that these people rebelled simply because they were slaves,
and wished to be free.

No doubt, there were enough special torches with which a man so skilful
as Denmark Vesey could kindle up these dusky powder-magazines; but, after
all, the permanent peril lay in the powder. So long as that existed,
every thing was incendiary. Any torn scrap in the street might contain a
Missouri-Compromise speech, or a report of the last battle in St.
Domingo, or one of those able letters of Boyer's which were winning the
praise of all, or one of John Randolph's stirring speeches in England
against the slave-trade. The very newspapers which reported the happy
extinction of the insurrection by the hanging of the last conspirator,
William Garner, reported also, with enthusiastic indignation, the
massacre of the Greeks at Constantinople and at Scio; and then the
Northern editors, breaking from their usual reticence, pointed out the
inconsistency of Southern journals in printing, side by side,
denunciations of Mohammedan slave-sales, and advertisements of those of
Christians.

Of course the insurrection threw the whole slavery question open to the
public. "We are sorry to see," said the _National Intelligencer_ of Aug.
31, "that a discussion of the hateful Missouri question is likely to be
revived, in consequence of the allusions to its supposed effect in
producing the late servile insurrection in South Carolina." A member of
the Board of Public Works of South Carolina published in the Baltimore
_American Farmer_ an essay urging the encouragement of white laborers,
and hinting at the ultimate abolition of slavery "if it should ever be
thought desirable." More boldly still, a pamphlet appeared in Charleston,
under the signature of "Achates," arguing with remarkable sagacity and
force against the whole system of slave-labor _in towns_; and proposing
that all slaves in Charleston should be sold or transferred to the
plantations, and their places supplied by white labor. It is interesting
to find many of the facts and arguments of Helper's "Impending Crisis"
anticipated in this courageous tract, written under the pressure of a
crisis which had just been so narrowly evaded. The author is described in
the preface as "a soldier and patriot of the Revolution, whose name, did
we feel ourselves at liberty to use it, would stamp a peculiar weight and
value on his opinions." It was commonly attributed to Gen. Thomas
Pinckney.

Another pamphlet of the period, also published in Charleston, recommended
as a practical cure for insurrection the copious administration of
Episcopal-Church services, and the prohibition of negroes from attending
Fourth-of-July celebrations. On this last point it is more consistent
than most pro-slavery arguments. "The celebration of the Fourth of July
belongs _exclusively_ to the white population of the United States. The
American Revolution was _a family quarrel among equals_. In this the
negroes had no concern; their condition remained, and must remain,
unchanged. They have no more to do with the celebration of that day than
with the landing of the Pilgrims on the rock at Plymouth. It therefore
seems to me improper to allow these people to be present on these
occasions. In our speeches and orations, much, and sometimes more than is
politically necessary, is said about personal liberty, which negro
auditors know not how to apply except by running the parallel with their
own condition. They therefore imbibe false notions of their own personal
rights, and give reality in their minds to what has no real existence.
The peculiar state of our community must be steadily kept in view. This,
I am gratified to learn, will in some measure be promoted by the
institution of the South Carolina Association."

On the other hand, more stringent laws became obviously necessary to keep
down the advancing intelligence of the Charleston slaves. Dangerous
knowledge must be excluded from without and from within. For the first
purpose the South Carolina Legislature passed, in December, 1822, the Act
for the imprisonment of Northern colored seamen, which afterwards
produced so much excitement. For the second object, the Grand Jury, about
the same time, presented as a grievance "the number of schools which are
kept within the city by persons of color," and proposed their
prohibition. This was the encouragement given to the intellectual
progress of the slaves; while, as a reward for betraying them, Pensil,
the free colored man who advised with Devany, received a present of one
thousand dollars; and Devany himself had what was rightly judged to be
the higher gift of freedom, and was established in business, with liberal
means, as a drayman. He lived long in Charleston, thriving greatly in his
vocation, and, according to the newspapers, enjoyed the privilege of
being the only man of property in the State whom a special statute
exempted from taxation.

More than half a century has passed since the incidents of this true
story closed. It has not vanished from the memories of South Carolinians,
though the printed pages which once told it have gradually disappeared
from sight. The intense avidity which at first grasped at every incident
of the great insurrectionary plot was succeeded by a prolonged distaste
for the memory of the tale; and the official reports which told what
slaves had once planned and dared have now come to be among the rarest of
American historical documents. In 1841, a friend of the writer, then
visiting South Carolina, heard from her hostess, for the first time, the
events which are recounted here. On asking to see the reports of the
trials, she was cautiously told that the only copy in the house, after
being carefully kept for years under lock and key, had been burnt at
last, lest it should reach the dangerous eyes of the slaves. The same
thing had happened, it was added, in many other families. This partially
accounts for the great difficulty now to be found in obtaining a single
copy of either publication; and this is why, to the readers of American
history, Denmark Vesey and Peter Poyas have commonly been but the shadows
of names.




NAT TURNER'S INSURRECTION


During the year 1831, up to the 23d of August, the Virginia newspapers
seem to have been absorbed in the momentous problems which then occupied
the minds of intelligent American citizens: What Gen. Jackson should do
with the scolds, and what with the disreputables? should South Carolina
be allowed to nullify? and would the wives of cabinet ministers call on
Mrs. Eaton? It is an unfailing opiate to turn over the drowsy files of
the Richmond _Enquirer_, until the moment when those dry and dusty pages
are suddenly kindled into flame by the torch of Nat Turner. Then the
terror flared on increasing, until the remotest Southern States were
found shuddering at nightly rumors of insurrection; until far-off
European colonies--Antigua, Martinique, Caraccas, Tortola--recognized by
some secret sympathy the same epidemic alarms; until the very boldest
words of freedom were reported as uttered in the Virginia House of
Delegates with unclosed doors; until an obscure young man named Garrison
was indicted at common law in North Carolina, and had a price set upon
his head by the Legislature of Georgia.

Near the south-eastern border of Virginia, in Southampton County, there
is a neighborhood known as "The Cross Keys." It lies fifteen miles from
Jerusalem, the county-town, or "court-house," seventy miles from Norfolk,
and about as far from Richmond. It is some ten or fifteen miles from
Murfreesborough in North Carolina, and about twenty-five from the Great
Dismal Swamp. Up to Sunday, the 21st of August, 1831, there was nothing
to distinguish it from any other rural, lethargic, slipshod Virginia
neighborhood, with the due allotment of mansion-houses and log huts,
tobacco-fields and "old-fields," horses, dogs, negroes, "poor white
folks," so called, and other white folks, poor without being called so.
One of these last was Joseph Travis, who had recently married the widow
of one Putnam Moore, and had unfortunately wedded to himself her negroes
also.

In the woods on the plantation of Joseph Travis, upon the Sunday just
named, six slaves met at noon for what is called in the Northern States a
picnic, and in the Southern a barbecue. The bill of fare was to be
simple: one brought a pig, and another some brandy, giving to the meeting
an aspect so cheaply convivial that no one would have imagined it to be
the final consummation of a conspiracy which had been for six months in
preparation. In this plot four of the men had been already
initiated--Henry, Hark or Hercules, Nelson, and Sam. Two others were
novices, Will and Jack by name. The party had remained together from
twelve to three o'clock, when a seventh man joined them,--a short, stout,
powerfully built person, of dark mulatto complexion, and strongly marked
African features, but with a face full of expression and resolution. This
was Nat Turner.

He was at this time nearly thirty-one years old, having been born on the
2d of October, 1800. He had belonged originally to Benjamin Turner,--from
whom he took his last name, slaves having usually no patronymic;--had
then been transferred to Putnam Moore, and then to his present owner. He
had, by his own account, felt himself singled out from childhood for some
great work; and he had some peculiar marks on his person, which, joined
to his mental precocity, were enough to occasion, among his youthful
companions, a superstitious faith in his gifts and destiny. He had some
mechanical ingenuity also; experimentalized very early in making paper,
gunpowder, pottery, and in other arts, which, in later life, he was found
thoroughly to understand. His moral faculties appeared strong, so that
white witnesses admitted that he had never been known to swear an oath,
to drink a drop of spirits, or to commit a theft. And, in general, so
marked were his early peculiarities that people said "he had too much
sense to be raised; and, if he was, he would never be of any use as a
slave." This impression of personal destiny grew with his growth: he
fasted, prayed, preached, read the Bible, heard voices when he walked
behind his plough, and communicated his revelations to the awe-struck
slaves. They told him, in return, that, "if they had his sense, they
would not serve any master in the world."

The biographies of slaves can hardly be individualized; they belong to
the class. We know bare facts; it is only the general experience of human
beings in like condition which can clothe them with life. The outlines
are certain, the details are inferential. Thus, for instance, we know
that Nat Turner's young wife was a slave; we know that she belonged to a
different master from himself; we know little more than this, but this is
much. For this is equivalent to saying, that, by day or by night, her
husband had no more power to protect her than the man who lies bound upon
a plundered vessel's deck has power to protect his wife on board the
pirate schooner disappearing in the horizon. She may be well treated, she
may be outraged; it is in the powerlessness that the agony lies. There
is, indeed, one thing more which we do know of this young woman: the
Virginia newspapers state that she was tortured under the lash, after her
husband's execution, to make her produce his papers: this is all.

What his private experiences and special privileges or wrongs may have
been, it is therefore now impossible to say. Travis was declared to be
"more humane and fatherly to his slaves than any man in the county;" but
it is astonishing how often this phenomenon occurs in the contemporary
annals of slave insurrections. The chairman of the county court also
stated, in pronouncing sentence, that Nat Turner had spoken of his master
as "only too indulgent;" but this, for some reason, does not appear in
his printed Confession, which only says, "He was a kind master, and
placed the greatest confidence in me." It is very possible that it may
have been so, but the printed accounts of Nat Turner's person look
suspicious: he is described in Gov. Floyd's proclamation as having a scar
on one of his temples, also one on the back of his neck, and a large knot
on one of the bones of his right arm, produced by a blow; and although
these were explained away in Virginia newspapers as having been produced
by fights with his companions, yet such affrays are entirely foreign to
the admitted habits of the man. It must therefore remain an open
question, whether the scars and the knot were produced by black hands or
by white.

Whatever Nat Turner's experiences of slavery might have been, it is
certain that his plans were not suddenly adopted, but that he had brooded
over them for years. To this day there are traditions among the Virginia
slaves of the keen devices of "Prophet Nat." If he was caught with lime
and lampblack in hand, conning over a half-finished county-map on the
barn-door, he was always "planning what to do if he were blind"; or,
"studying how to get to Mr. Francis's house." When he had called a
meeting of slaves, and some poor whites came eavesdropping, the poor
whites at once became the subjects for discussion: he incidentally
mentioned that the masters had been heard threatening to drive them away;
one slave had been ordered to shoot Mr. Jones's pigs, another to tear
down Mr. Johnson's fences. The poor whites, Johnson and Jones, ran home
to see to their homesteads, and were better friends than ever to Prophet
Nat.

He never was a Baptist preacher, though such vocation has often been
attributed to him. The impression arose from his having immersed himself,
during one of his periods of special enthusiasm, together with a poor
white man named Brantley. "About this time," he says in his Confession,
"I told these things to a white man, on whom it had a wonderful effect;
and he ceased from his wickedness, and was attacked immediately with a
cutaneous eruption, and the blood oozed from the pores of his skin, and
after praying and fasting nine days he was healed. And the Spirit
appeared to me again, and said, as the Saviour had been baptized, so
should we be also; and when the white people would not let us be baptized
by the church, we went down into the water together, in the sight of many
who reviled us, and were baptized by the Spirit. After this I rejoiced
greatly, and gave thanks to God."

The religious hallucinations narrated in his Confession seem to have been
as genuine as the average of such things, and are very well expressed.
The account reads quite like Jacob Behmen. He saw white spirits and black
spirits contending in the skies; the sun was darkened, the thunder
rolled. "And the Holy Ghost was with me, and said, 'Behold me as I stand
in the heavens!' And I looked, and saw the forms of men in different
attitudes. And there were lights in the sky, to which the children of
darkness gave other names than what they really were; for they were the
lights of the Saviour's hands, stretched forth from east to west, even as
they were extended on the cross on Calvary, for the redemption of
sinners." He saw drops of blood on the corn: this was Christ's blood,
shed for man. He saw on the leaves in the woods letters and numbers and
figures of men,--the same symbols which he had seen in the skies. On May
12, 1828, the Holy Spirit appeared to him, and proclaimed that the yoke
of Jesus must fall on him, and he must fight against the serpent when the
sign appeared. Then came an eclipse of the sun in February, 1831: this
was the sign; then he must arise and prepare himself, and slay his
enemies with their own weapons; then also the seal was removed from his
lips, and then he confided his plans to four associates.

When he came, therefore, to the barbecue on the appointed Sunday, and
found not these four only, but two others, his first question to the
intruders was, how they came thither. To this Will answered manfully,
that his life was worth no more than the others, and "his liberty was as
dear to him." This admitted him to confidence; and as Jack was known to
be entirely under Hark's influence, the strangers were no bar to their
discussion. Eleven hours they remained there, in anxious consultation:
one can imagine those dusky faces, beneath the funereal woods, and amid
the flickering of pine-knot torches, preparing that stern revenge whose
shuddering echoes should ring through the land so long. Two things were
at last decided: to begin their work that night; and to begin it with a
massacre so swift and irresistible as to create in a few days more terror
than many battles, and so spare the need of future bloodshed. "It was
agreed that we should commence at home on that night, and, until we had
armed and equipped ourselves and gained sufficient force, neither age nor
sex was to be spared: which was invariably adhered to."

John Brown invaded Virginia with nineteen men, and with the avowed
resolution to take no life but in self-defence. Nat Turner attacked
Virginia from within, with six men, and with the determination to spare
no life until his power was established. John Brown intended to pass
rapidly through Virginia, and then retreat to the mountains. Nat Turner
intended to "conquer Southampton County as the white men did in the
Revolution, and then retreat, if necessary, to the Dismal Swamp." Each
plan was deliberately matured; each was in its way practicable; but each
was defeated by a single false step, as will soon appear.

We must pass over the details of horror, as they occurred during the next
twenty-four hours. Swift and stealthy as Indians, the black men passed
from house to house,--not pausing, not hesitating, as their terrible work
went on. In one thing they were humaner than Indians, or than white men
fighting against Indians: there was no gratuitous outrage beyond the
death-blow itself, no insult, no mutilation; but in every house they
entered, that blow fell on man, woman, and child,--nothing that had a
white skin was spared. From every house they took arms and ammunition,
and from a few money. On every plantation they found recruits: those
dusky slaves, so obsequious to their master the day before, so prompt to
sing and dance before his Northern visitors, were all swift to transform
themselves into fiends of retribution now; show them sword or musket, and
they grasped it, though it were an heirloom from Washington himself. The
troop increased from house to house,--first to fifteen, then to forty,
then to sixty. Some were armed with muskets, some with axes, some with
scythes, some came on their masters' horses. As the numbers increased,
they could be divided, and the awful work was carried on more rapidly
still. The plan then was for an advanced guard of horsemen to approach
each house at a gallop, and surround it till the others came up.
Meanwhile, what agonies of terror must have taken place within, shared
alike by innocent and by guilty! what memories of wrongs inflicted on
those dusky creatures, by some,--what innocent participation, by others,
in the penance! The outbreak lasted for but forty-eight hours; but,
during that period, fifty-five whites were slain, without the loss of a
single slave.

One fear was needless, which to many a husband and father must have
intensified the last struggle. These negroes had been systematically
brutalized from childhood; they had been allowed no legalized or
permanent marriage; they had beheld around them an habitual
licentiousness, such as can scarcely exist except under slavery; some of
them had seen their wives and sisters habitually polluted by the husbands
and the brothers of these fair white women who were now absolutely in
their power. Yet I have looked through the Virginia newspapers of that
time in vain for one charge of an indecent outrage on a woman against
these triumphant and terrible slaves. Wherever they went, there went
death, and that was all. It is reported by some of the contemporary
newspapers, that a portion of this abstinence was the result of
deliberate consultation among the insurrectionists; that some of them
were resolved on taking the white women for wives, but were overruled by
Nat Turner. If so, he is the only American slave-leader of whom we know
certainly that he rose above the ordinary level of slave vengeance; and
Mrs. Stowe's picture of Dred's purposes is then precisely typical of his:
"Whom the Lord saith unto us, 'Smite,' them will we smite. We will not
torment them with the scourge and fire, nor defile their women as they
have done with ours. But we will slay them utterly, and consume them from
off the face of the earth."

When the number of adherents had increased to fifty or sixty, Nat Turner
judged it time to strike at the county-seat, Jerusalem. Thither a few
white fugitives had already fled, and couriers might thence be despatched
for aid to Richmond and Petersburg, unless promptly intercepted. Besides,
he could there find arms, ammunition, and money; though they had already
obtained, it is dubiously reported, from eight hundred to one thousand
dollars. On the way it was necessary to pass the plantation of Mr.
Parker, three miles from Jerusalem. Some of the men wished to stop here
and enlist some of their friends. Nat Turner objected, as the delay might
prove dangerous; he yielded at last, and it proved fatal.

He remained at the gate with six or eight men; thirty or forty went to
the house, half a mile distant. They remained too long, and he went alone
to hasten them. During his absence a party of eighteen white men came up
suddenly, dispersing the small guard left at the gate; and when the main
body of slaves emerged from the house, they encountered, for the first
time, their armed masters. The blacks halted; the whites advanced
cautiously within a hundred yards, and fired a volley; on its being
returned, they broke into disorder, and hurriedly retreated, leaving some
wounded on the ground. The retreating whites were pursued, and were saved
only by falling in with another band of fresh men from Jerusalem, with
whose aid they turned upon the slaves, who in their turn fell into
confusion. Turner, Hark, and about twenty men on horseback retreated in
some order; the rest were scattered. The leader still planned to reach
Jerusalem by a private way, thus evading pursuit; but at last decided to
stop for the night, in the hope of enlisting additional recruits.

During the night the number increased again to forty, and they encamped
on Major Ridley's plantation. An alarm took place during the
darkness,--whether real or imaginary, does not appear,--and the men
became scattered again. Proceeding to make fresh enlistments with the
daylight, they were resisted at Dr. Blunt's house, where his slaves,
under his orders, fired upon them; and this, with a later attack from a
party of white men near Capt. Harris's, so broke up the whole force that
they never re-united. The few who remained together agreed to separate
for a few hours to see if any thing could be done to revive the
insurrection, and meet again that evening at their original rendezvous.
But they never reached it.

Gloomily came Nat Turner at nightfall into those gloomy woods where
forty-eight hours before he had revealed the details of his terrible plot
to his companions. At the outset all his plans had succeeded; every thing
was as he predicted: the slaves had come readily at his call; the masters
had proved perfectly defenceless. Had he not been persuaded to pause at
Parker's plantation, he would have been master before now of the arms and
ammunition at Jerusalem; and with these to aid, and the Dismal Swamp for
a refuge, he might have sustained himself indefinitely against his
pursuers.

Now the blood was shed, the risk was incurred, his friends were killed or
captured, and all for what? Lasting memories of terror, to be sure, for
his oppressors; but, on the other hand, hopeless failure for the
insurrection, and certain death for him. What a watch he must have kept
that night! To that excited imagination, which had always seen spirits in
the sky and blood-drops on the corn and hieroglyphic marks on the dry
leaves, how full the lonely forest must have been of signs and solemn
warnings! Alone with the fox's bark, the rabbit's rustle, and the
screech-owl's scream, the self-appointed prophet brooded over his
despair. Once creeping to the edge of the wood, he saw men stealthily
approach on horseback. He fancied them some of his companions; but before
he dared to whisper their ominous names, "Hark" or "Dred,"--for the
latter was the name, since famous, of one of his more recent
recruits,--he saw them to be white men, and shrank back stealthily
beneath his covert.

There he waited two days and two nights,--long enough to satisfy himself
that no one would rejoin him, and that the insurrection had hopelessly
failed. The determined, desperate spirits who had shared his plans were
scattered forever, and longer delay would be destruction for him also. He
found a spot which he judged safe, dug a hole under a pile of fence-rails
in a field, and lay there for six weeks, only leaving it for a few
moments at midnight to obtain water from a neighboring spring. Food he
had previously provided, without discovery, from a house near by.

Meanwhile an unbounded variety of rumors went flying through the State.
The express which first reached the governor announced that the militia
were retreating before the slaves. An express to Petersburg further fixed
the number of militia at three hundred, and of blacks at eight hundred,
and invented a convenient shower of rain to explain the dampened ardor of
the whites. Later reports described the slaves as making three desperate
attempts to cross the bridge over the Nottoway between Cross Keys and
Jerusalem, and stated that the leader had been shot in the attempt. Other
accounts put the number of negroes at three hundred, all well mounted and
armed, with two or three white men as leaders. Their intention was
supposed to be to reach the Dismal Swamp, and they must be hemmed in from
that side.

Indeed, the most formidable weapon in the hands of slave insurgents is
always this blind panic they create, and the wild exaggerations which
follow. The worst being possible, every one takes the worst for granted.
Undoubtedly a dozen armed men could have stifled this insurrection, even
after it had commenced operations; but it is the fatal weakness of a
rural slaveholding community, that it can never furnish men promptly for
such a purpose. "My first intention was," says one of the most
intelligent newspaper narrators of the affair, "to have attacked them
with thirty or forty men; but those who had families here were strongly
opposed to it."

As usual, each man was pinioned to his own hearth-stone. As usual, aid
had to be summoned from a distance; and, as usual, the United-States
troops were the chief reliance. Col. House, commanding at Fort Monroe,
sent at once three companies of artillery under Lieut.-Col. Worth, and
embarked them on board the steamer "Hampton" for Suffolk. These were
joined by detachments from the United States ships "Warren" and
"Natchez," the whole amounting to nearly eight hundred men. Two volunteer
companies went from Richmond, four from Petersburg, one from Norfolk, one
from Portsmouth, and several from North Carolina. The militia of Norfolk,
Nansemond, and Princess Anne Counties, and the United States troops at
Old Point Comfort, were ordered to scour the Dismal Swamp, where it was
believed that two or three thousand fugitives were preparing to join the
insurgents. It was even proposed to send two companies from New York and
one from New London to the same point.

When these various forces reached Southampton County, they found all
labor paralyzed and whole plantations abandoned. A letter from Jerusalem,
dated Aug. 24, says, "The oldest inhabitant of our county has never
experienced such a distressing time as we have had since Sunday night
last.... Every house, room, and corner in this place is full of women and
children, driven from home, who had to take the woods until they could
get to this place." "For many miles around their track," says another
"the county is deserted by women and children." Still another writes,
"Jerusalem is full of women, most of them from the other side of the
river,--about two hundred at Vix's." Then follow descriptions of the
sufferings of these persons, many of whom had lain night after night in
the woods. But the immediate danger was at an end, the short-lived
insurrection was finished, and now the work of vengeance was to begin. In
the frank phrase of a North Carolina correspondent, "The massacre of the
whites was over, and the white people had commenced the destruction of
the negroes, which was continued after our men got there, from time to
time, as they could fall in with them, all day yesterday." A postscript
adds, that "passengers by the Fayetteville stage say, that, by the latest
accounts, one hundred and twenty negroes had been killed,"--this being
little more than one day's work.

These murders were defended as Nat Turner defended his: a fearful blow
must be struck. In shuddering at the horrors of the insurrection, we have
forgotten the far greater horrors of its suppression.

The newspapers of the day contain many indignant protests against the
cruelties which took place. "It is with pain," says a correspondent of
the _National Intelligencer_, Sept. 7, 1831, "that we speak of another
feature of the Southampton Rebellion; for we have been most unwilling to
have our sympathies for the sufferers diminished or affected by their
misconduct. We allude to the slaughter of many blacks without trial and
under circumstances of great barbarity.... We met with an individual of
intelligence who told us that he himself had killed between ten and
fifteen.... We [the Richmond troop] witnessed with surprise the
sanguinary temper of the population, who evinced a strong disposition to
inflict immediate death on every prisoner."

There is a remarkable official document from Gen. Eppes, the officer in
command, to be found in the Richmond _Enquirer_ for Sept. 6, 1831. It is
an indignant denunciation of precisely these outrages; and though he
refuses to give details, he supplies their place by epithets:
"revolting,"--"inhuman and not to be justified,"--"acts of barbarity and
cruelty,"--"acts of atrocity,"--"this course of proceeding dignifies the
rebel and the assassin with the sanctity of martyrdom." And he ends by
threatening martial law upon all future transgressors. Such general
orders are not issued except in rather extreme cases. And in the parallel
columns of the newspaper the innocent editor prints equally indignant
descriptions of Russian atrocities in Lithuania, where the Poles were
engaged in active insurrection, amid profuse sympathy from Virginia.

The truth is, it was a Reign of Terror. Volunteer patrols rode in all
directions, visiting plantations. "It was with the greatest difficulty,"
said Gen. Brodnax before the House of Delegates, "and at the hazard of
personal popularity and esteem, that the coolest and most judicious among
us could exert an influence sufficient to restrain an indiscriminate
slaughter of the blacks who were suspected." A letter from the Rev. G. W.
Powell declares, "There are thousands of troops searching in every
direction, and many negroes are killed every day: the exact number will
never be ascertained." Petition after petition was subsequently presented
to the Legislature, asking compensation for slaves thus assassinated
without trial.

Men were tortured to death, burned, maimed, and subjected to nameless
atrocities. The overseers were called on to point out any slaves whom
they distrusted, and if any tried to escape they were shot down. Nay,
worse than this. "A party of horsemen started from Richmond with the
intention of killing every colored person they saw in Southampton County.
They stopped opposite the cabin of a free colored man, who was hoeing in
his little field. They called out, 'Is this Southampton County?' He
replied, 'Yes, sir, you have just crossed the line, by yonder tree.' They
shot him dead, and rode on." This is from the narrative of the editor of
the Richmond _Whig_, who was then on duty in the militia, and protested
manfully against these outrages. "Some of these scenes," he adds, "are
hardly inferior in barbarity to the atrocities of the insurgents."

These were the masters' stories. If even these conceded so much, it would
be interesting to hear what the slaves had to report. I am indebted to my
honored friend, Lydia Maria Child, for some vivid recollections of this
terrible period, as noted down from the lips of an old colored woman,
once well known in New York, Charity Bowery. "At the time of the old
Prophet Nat," she said, "the colored folks was afraid to pray loud; for
the whites threatened to punish 'em dreadfully, if the least noise was
heard. The patrols was low drunken whites; and in Nat's time, if they
heard any of the colored folks praying, or singing a hymn, they would
fall upon 'em and abuse 'em, and sometimes kill 'em, afore master or
missis could get to 'em. The brightest and best was killed in Nat's time.
The whites always suspect such ones. They killed a great many at a place
called Duplon. They killed Antonio, a slave of Mr. J. Stanley, whom they
shot; then they pointed their guns at him, and told him to confess about
the insurrection. He told 'em he didn't know any thing about any
insurrection. They shot several balls through him, quartered him, and put
his head on a pole at the fork of the road leading to the court." (This
is no exaggeration, if the Virginia newspapers may be taken as evidence.)
"It was there but a short time. He had no trial. They never do. In Nat's
time, the patrols would tie up the free colored people, flog 'em, and try
to make 'em lie against one another, and often killed them before anybody
could interfere. Mr. James Cole, high sheriff, said, if any of the
patrols came on his plantation, he would lose his life in defence of his
people. One day he heard a patroller boasting how many niggers he had
killed. Mr. Cole said, 'If you don't pack up, as quick as God Almighty
will let you, and get out of this town, and never be seen in it again,
I'll put you where dogs won't bark at you.' He went off, and wasn't seen
in them parts again."

These outrages were not limited to the colored population; but other
instances occurred which strikingly remind one of more recent times. An
Englishman, named Robinson, was engaged in selling books at Petersburg.
An alarm being given, one night, that five hundred blacks were marching
towards the town, he stood guard, with others, on the bridge. After the
panic had a little subsided, he happened to remark, that "the blacks, as
men, were entitled to their freedom, and ought to be emancipated." This
led to great excitement, and he was warned to leave town. He took passage
in the stage, but the stage was intercepted. He then fled to a friend's
house; the house was broken open, and he was dragged forth. The civil
authorities, being applied to, refused to interfere. The mob stripped
him, gave him a great number of lashes, and sent him on foot, naked,
under a hot sun, to Richmond, whence he with difficulty found a passage
to New York.

Of the capture or escape of most of that small band who met with Nat
Turner in the woods upon the Travis plantation, little can now be known.
All appear among the list of convicted, except Henry and Will. Gen.
Moore, who occasionally figures as second in command, in the newspaper
narratives of that day, was probably the Hark or Hercules before
mentioned; as no other of the confederates had belonged to Mrs. Travis,
or would have been likely to bear her previous name of Moore. As usual,
the newspapers state that most, if not all the slaves, were "the property
of kind and indulgent masters."

The subordinate insurgents sought safety as they could. A free colored
man, named Will Artist, shot himself in the woods, where his hat was
found on a stake and his pistol lying by him; another was found drowned;
others were traced to the Dismal Swamp; others returned to their homes,
and tried to conceal their share in the insurrection, assuring their
masters that they had been forced, against their will, to join,--the
usual defence in such cases. The number shot down at random must, by all
accounts, have amounted to many hundreds, but it is past all human
registration now. The number who had a formal trial, such as it was, is
officially stated at fifty-five; of these, seventeen were convicted and
hanged, twelve convicted and transported, twenty acquitted, and four free
colored men sent on for further trial and finally acquitted. "Not one of
those known to be concerned escaped." Of those executed, one only was a
woman, "Lucy, slave of John T. Barrow."

There is one touching story, in connection with these terrible
retaliations, which rests on good authority, that of the Rev. M. B. Cox,
a Liberian missionary, then in Virginia. In the hunt which followed the
massacre, a slaveholder went into the woods, accompanied by a faithful
slave, who had been the means of saving his life during the insurrection.
When they had reached a retired place in the forest, the man handed his
gun to his master, informing him that he could not live a slave any
longer, and requesting him either to free him or shoot him on the spot.
The master took the gun, in some trepidation, levelled it at the faithful
negro, and shot him through the heart. It is probable that this
slaveholder was a Dr. Blunt,--his being the only plantation where the
slaves were reported as thus defending their masters. "If this be true,"
said the Richmond _Enquirer_, when it first narrated this instance of
loyalty, "great will be the desert of these noble-minded Africans."

Meanwhile the panic of the whites continued; for, though all others might
be disposed of, Nat Turner was still at large. We have positive evidence
of the extent of the alarm, although great efforts were afterwards made
to represent it as a trifling affair. A distinguished citizen of Virginia
wrote, three months later, to the Hon. W. B. Seabrook of South Carolina,
"From all that has come to my knowledge during and since that affair, I
am convinced most fully that every black preacher in the country east of
the Blue Ridge was in the secret." "There is much reason to believe,"
says the Governor's Message on Dec. 6, "that the spirit of insurrection
was not confined to Southampton. Many convictions have taken place
elsewhere, and some few in distant counties." The withdrawal of the
United States troops, after some ten days' service, was a signal for
fresh excitement; and an address, numerously signed, was presented to the
United States Government, imploring their continued stay. More than three
weeks after the first alarm, the governor sent a supply of arms into
Prince William, Fauquier, and Orange Counties. "From examinations which
have taken place in other counties," says one of the best newspaper
historians of the affair (in the Richmond _Enquirer_ of Sept. 6), "I fear
that the scheme embraced a wider sphere than I at first supposed." Nat
Turner himself, intentionally or otherwise, increased the confusion by
denying all knowledge of the North Carolina outbreak, and declaring that
he had communicated his plans to his four confederates within six months;
while, on the other hand, a slave-girl, sixteen or seventeen years old,
belonging to Solomon Parker, testified that she had heard the subject
discussed for eighteen months, and that at a meeting held during the
previous May some eight or ten had joined the plot.

It is astonishing to discover, by laborious comparison of newspaper
files, how vast was the immediate range of these insurrectionary alarms.
Every Southern State seems to have borne its harvest of terror. On the
eastern shore of Maryland, great alarm was at once manifested, especially
in the neighborhood of Easton and Snowhill; and the houses of colored men
were searched for arms even in Baltimore. In Delaware, there were similar
rumors through Sussex and Dover Counties; there were arrests and
executions; and in Somerset County great public meetings were held, to
demand additional safeguards. On election-day in Seaford, Del., some
young men, going out to hunt rabbits, discharged their guns in sport; the
men being absent, all the women in the vicinity took to flight; the alarm
spread like the "Ipswich Fright"; soon Seaford was thronged with armed
men; and when the boys returned from hunting, they found cannon drawn out
to receive them.

In North Carolina, Raleigh and Fayetteville were put under military
defence, and women and children concealed themselves in the swamps for
many days. The rebel organization was supposed to include two thousand.
Forty-six slaves were imprisoned in Union County, twenty-five in Sampson
County, and twenty-three at least in Duplin County, some of whom were
executed. The panic also extended into Wayne, New Hanover, and Lenoir
Counties. Four men were shot without trial in Wilmington,--Nimrod,
Abraham, Prince, and "Dan the Drayman," the latter a man of seventy,--and
their heads placed on poles at the four corners of the town. Nearly two
months afterwards the trials were still continuing; and at a still later
day, the governor in his proclamation recommended the formation of
companies of volunteers in every county.

In South Carolina, Gen. Hayne issued a proclamation "to prove the
groundlessness of the existing alarms,"--thus implying that serious
alarms existed. In Macon, Ga., the whole population were roused from
their beds at midnight by a report of a large force of armed negroes five
miles off. In an hour, every woman and child was deposited in the largest
building of the town, and a military force hastily collected in front.
The editor of the Macon _Messenger_ excused the poor condition of his
paper, a few days afterwards, by the absorption of his workmen in patrol
duties and describes "dismay and terror" as the condition of the people
of "all ages and sexes." In Jones, Twiggs, and Monroe Counties, the same
alarms were reported; and in one place "several slaves were tied to a
tree, while a militia captain hacked at them with his sword."

In Alabama, at Columbus and Fort Mitchell, a rumor was spread of a joint
conspiracy of Indians and negroes. At Claiborne the panic was still
greater: the slaves were said to be thoroughly organized through that
part of the State, and multitudes were imprisoned; the whole alarm being
apparently founded on one stray copy of the Boston _Liberator_.

In Tennessee, the Shelbyville _Freeman_ announced that an insurrectionary
plot had just been discovered, barely in time for its defeat, through the
treachery of a female slave. In Louisville, Ky., a similar organization
was discovered or imagined, and arrests were made in consequence. "The
papers, from motives of policy, do not notice the disturbance," wrote one
correspondent to the Portland _Courier_. "Pity us!" he added.

But the greatest bubble burst in Louisiana. Capt. Alexander, an English
tourist, arriving in New Orleans at the beginning of September, found the
whole city in tumult. Handbills had been issued, appealing to the slaves
to rise against their masters, saying that all men were born equal,
declaring that Hannibal was a black man, and that they also might have
great leaders among them. Twelve hundred stand of weapons were said to
have been found in a black man's house; five hundred citizens were under
arms, and four companies of regulars were ordered to the city, whose
barracks Alexander himself visited.

If such was the alarm in New Orleans, the story, of course, lost nothing
by transmission to other slave States. A rumor reached Frankfort, Ky.,
that the slaves already had possession of the coast, both above and below
New Orleans. But the most remarkable circumstance is, that all this seems
to have been a mere revival of an old terror once before excited and
exploded. The following paragraph had appeared in the Jacksonville, Ga.,
_Observer_, during the spring previous:--

    "FEARFUL DISCOVERY.--We were favored, by yesterday's mail, with a
    letter from New Orleans, of May 1, in which we find that an
    important discovery had been made a few days previous in that
    city. The following is an extract: 'Four days ago, as some
    planters were digging under ground, they found a square room
    containing eleven thousand stand of arms and fifteen thousand
    cartridges, each of the cartridges containing a bullet.' It is
    said the negroes intended to rise as soon as the sickly season
    began, and obtain possession of the city by massacring the white
    population. The same letter states that the mayor had prohibited
    the opening of Sunday schools for the instruction of blacks,
    under a penalty of five hundred dollars for the first offence,
    and, for the second, death."

Such were the terrors that came back from nine other slave States, as the
echo of the voice of Nat Turner. And when it is also known that the
subject was at once taken up by the legislatures of other States, where
there was no public panic, as in Missouri and Tennessee; and when,
finally, it is added that reports of insurrection had been arriving all
that year from Rio Janeiro, Martinique, St. Jago, Antigua, Caraccas, and
Tortola,--it is easy to see with what prolonged distress the accumulated
terror must have weighed down upon Virginia during the two months that
Nat Turner lay hid.

True, there were a thousand men in arms in Southampton County, to inspire
security. But the blow had been struck by only seven men before; and
unless there were an armed guard in every house, who could tell but any
house might at any moment be the scene of new horrors? They might kill or
imprison negroes by day, but could they resist their avengers by night?
"The half cannot be told," wrote a lady from another part of Virginia, at
this time, "of the distresses of the people. In Southampton County, the
scene of the insurrection, the distress beggars description. A gentleman
who has been there says that even here, where there has been great alarm,
we have no idea of the situation of those in that county.... I do not
hesitate to believe that many negroes around us would join in a massacre
as horrible as that which has taken place, if an opportunity should
offer."

Meanwhile the cause of all this terror was made the object of desperate
search. On Sept. 17 the governor offered a reward of five hundred dollars
for his capture; and there were other rewards, swelling the amount to
eleven hundred dollars,--but in vain. No one could track or trap him. On
Sept. 30 a minute account of his capture appeared in the newspapers, but
it was wholly false. On Oct. 7 there was another, and on Oct. 18 another;
yet all without foundation. Worn out by confinement in his little cave,
Nat Turner grew more adventurous, and began to move about stealthily by
night, afraid to speak to any human being, but hoping to obtain some
information that might aid his escape. Returning regularly to his retreat
before daybreak, he might possibly have continued this mode of life until
pursuit had ceased, had not a dog succeeded where men had failed. The
creature accidentally smelt out the provisions hid in the cave, and
finally led thither his masters, two negroes, one of whom was named
Nelson. On discovering the formidable fugitive, they fled precipitately,
when he hastened to retreat in an opposite direction. This was on Oct.
15; and from this moment the neighborhood was all alive with excitement,
and five or six hundred men undertook the pursuit.

It shows a more than Indian adroitness in Nat Turner to have escaped
capture any longer. The cave, the arms, the provisions, were found; and,
lying among them, the notched stick of this miserable Robinson Crusoe,
marked with five weary weeks and six days. But the man was gone. For ten
days more he concealed himself among the wheat-stacks on Mr. Francis's
plantation, and during this time was reduced almost to despair. Once he
decided to surrender himself, and walked by night within two miles of
Jerusalem before his purpose failed him. Three times he tried to get out
of that neighborhood, but in vain: travelling by day was of course out of
the question, and by night he found it impossible to elude the patrol.
Again and again, therefore, he returned to his hiding-place; and, during
his whole two months' liberty, never went five miles from the Cross Keys.
On the 25th of October, he was at last discovered by Mr. Francis as he
was emerging from a stack. A load of buckshot was instantly discharged at
him, twelve of which passed through his hat as he fell to the ground. He
escaped even then; but his pursuers were rapidly concentrating upon him,
and it is perfectly astonishing that he could have eluded them for five
days more.

On Sunday, Oct. 30, a man named Benjamin Phipps, going out for the first
time on patrol duty, was passing at noon a clearing in the woods where a
number of pine-trees had long since been felled. There was a motion among
their boughs; he stopped to watch it; and through a gap in the branches
he saw, emerging from a hole in the earth beneath, the face of Nat
Turner. Aiming his gun instantly, Phipps called on him to surrender. The
fugitive, exhausted with watching and privation, entangled in the
branches, armed only with a sword, had nothing to do but to
yield,--sagaciously reflecting, also, as he afterwards explained, that
the woods were full of armed men, and that he had better trust fortune
for some later chance of escape, instead of desperately attempting it
then. He was correct in the first impression, since there were fifty
armed scouts within a circuit of two miles. His insurrection ended where
it began; for this spot was only a mile and a half from the house of
Joseph Travis.

Tom, emaciated, ragged, "a mere scarecrow," still wearing the hat
perforated with buckshot, with his arms bound to his sides, he was driven
before the levelled gun to the nearest house, that of a Mr. Edwards. He
was confined there that night; but the news had spread so rapidly that
within an hour after his arrival a hundred persons had collected, and the
excitement became so intense "that it was with difficulty he could be
conveyed alive to Jerusalem." The enthusiasm spread instantly through
Virginia; M. Trezvant, the Jerusalem postmaster, sent notices of it far
and near; and Gov. Floyd himself wrote a letter to the Richmond
_Enquirer_ to give official announcement of the momentous capture.

When Nat Turner was asked by Mr. T. R. Gray, the counsel assigned him,
whether, although defeated, he still believed in his own Providential
mission, he answered, as simply as one who came thirty years after him,
"Was not Christ crucified?" In the same spirit, when arraigned before the
court, "he answered, 'Not guilty,' saying to his counsel that he did not
feel so." But apparently no argument was made in his favor by his
counsel, nor were any witnesses called,--he being convicted on the
testimony of Levi Waller, and upon his own confession, which was put in
by Mr. Gray, and acknowledged by the prisoner before the six justices
composing the court, as being "full, free, and voluntary." He was
therefore placed in the paradoxical position of conviction by his own
confession, under a plea of "Not guilty." The arrest took place on the
30th of October, 1831, the confession on the 1st of November, the trial
and conviction on the 5th, and the execution on the following Friday, the
11th of November, precisely at noon. He met his death with perfect
composure, declined addressing the multitude assembled, and told the
sheriff in a firm voice that he was ready. Another account says that he
"betrayed no emotion, and even hurried the executioner in the performance
of his duty." "Not a limb nor a muscle was observed to move. His body,
after his death, was given over to the surgeons for dissection."

The confession of the captive was published under authority of Mr. Gray,
in a pamphlet, at Baltimore. Fifty thousand copies of it are said to have
been printed; and it was "embellished with an accurate likeness of the
brigand, taken by Mr. John Crawley, portrait-painter, and lithographed by
Endicott & Swett, at Baltimore." The newly established _Liberator_ said
of it, at the time, that it would "only serve to rouse up other leaders,
and hasten other insurrections," and advised grand juries to indict Mr.
Gray. I have never seen a copy of the original pamphlet; it is not easily
to be found in any of our public libraries; and I have heard of but one
as still existing, although the Confession itself has been repeatedly
reprinted. Another small pamphlet, containing the main features of the
outbreak, was published at New York during the same year, and this is in
my possession. But the greater part of the facts which I have given were
gleaned from the contemporary newspapers.

Who now shall go back thirty years, and read the heart of this
extraordinary man, who, by the admission of his captors, "never was known
to swear an oath, or drink a drop of spirits"; who, on the same
authority, "for natural intelligence and quickness of apprehension was
surpassed by few men," "with a mind capable of attaining any thing"; who
knew no book but his Bible, and that by heart; who devoted himself soul
and body to the cause of his race, without a trace of personal hope or
fear; who laid his plans so shrewdly that they came at last with less
warning than any earthquake on the doomed community around; and who, when
that time arrived, took the life of man, woman, and child, without a
throb of compunction, a word of exultation, or an act of superfluous
outrage? Mrs. Stowe's "Dred" seems dim and melodramatic beside the actual
Nat Turner, and De Quincey's "Avenger" is his only parallel in
imaginative literature. Mr. Gray, his counsel, rises into a sort of
bewildered enthusiasm with the prisoner before him. "I shall not attempt
to describe the effect of his narrative, as told and commented on by
himself, in the condemned-hole of the prison. The calm, deliberate
composure with which he spoke of his late deeds and intentions, the
expression of his fiend-like face when excited by enthusiasm, still
bearing the stains of the blood of helpless innocence about him, clothed
with rags and covered with chains, yet daring to raise his manacled hands
to heaven, with a spirit soaring above the attributes of man,--I looked
on him, and the blood curdled in my veins."

But, the more remarkable the personal character of Nat Turner, the
greater the amazement felt that he should not have appreciated the
extreme felicity of his position as a slave. In all insurrections, the
standing wonder seems to be that the slaves most trusted and best used
should be most deeply involved. So in this case, as usual, men resorted
to the most astonishing theories of the origin of the affair. One
attributed it to Free-Masonry, and another to free whiskey,--liberty
appearing dangerous, even in these forms. The poor whites charged it upon
the free colored people, and urged their expulsion; forgetting that in
North Carolina the plot was betrayed by one of this class, and that in
Virginia there were but two engaged, both of whom had slave wives. The
slaveholding clergymen traced it to want of knowledge of the Bible,
forgetting that Nat Turner knew scarcely any thing else. On the other
hand, "a distinguished citizen of Virginia" combined in one sweeping
denunciation "Northern incendiaries, tracts, Sunday schools, religion,
reading, and writing."

But whether the theories of its origin were wise or foolish, the
insurrection made its mark; and the famous band of Virginia
emancipationists, who all that winter made the House of Delegates ring
with unavailing eloquence,--till the rise of slave-exportation to new
cotton regions stopped their voices,--were but the unconscious
mouthpieces of Nat Turner. In January, 1832, in reply to a member who had
called the outbreak a "petty affair," the eloquent James McDowell thus
described the impression it left behind:--

    "Now, sir, I ask you, I ask gentlemen in conscience to say, was
    that a 'petty affair' which startled the feelings of your whole
    population; which threw a portion of it into alarm, a portion of
    it into panic; which wrung out from an affrighted people the
    thrilling cry, day after day, conveyed to your executive, '_We
    are in peril of our lives; send us an army for defence_'? Was
    that a 'petty affair' which drove families from their
    homes,--which assembled women and children in crowds, without
    shelter, at places of common refuge, in every condition of
    weakness and infirmity, under every suffering which want and
    terror could inflict, yet willing to endure all, willing to meet
    death from famine, death from climate, death from hardships,
    preferring any thing rather than the horrors of meeting it from a
    domestic assassin? Was that a 'petty affair' which erected a
    peaceful and confiding portion of the State into a military camp;
    which outlawed from pity the unfortunate beings whose brothers
    had offended; which barred every door, penetrated every bosom
    with fear or suspicion; which so banished every sense of security
    from every man's dwelling, that, let but a hoof or horn break
    upon the silence of the night, and an aching throb would be
    driven to the heart, the husband would look to his weapon, and
    the mother would shudder and weep upon her cradle? Was it the
    fear of Nat Turner, and his deluded, drunken handful of
    followers, which produced such effects? Was it this that induced
    distant counties, where the very name of Southampton was strange,
    to arm and equip for a struggle? No, sir: it was the suspicion
    eternally attached to the slave himself,--the suspicion that a
    Nat Turner might be in every family; that the same bloody deed
    might be acted over at any time and in any place; that the
    materials for it were spread through the land, and were always
    ready for a like explosion. Nothing but the force of this
    withering apprehension,--nothing but the paralyzing and deadening
    weight with which it falls upon and prostrates the heart of every
    man who has helpless dependants to protect,--nothing but this
    could have thrown a brave people into consternation, or could
    have made any portion of this powerful Commonwealth, for a single
    instant, to have quailed and trembled."

While these things were going on, the enthusiasm for the Polish
Revolution was rising to its height. The nation was ringing with a peal
of joy, on hearing that at Frankfort the Poles had killed fourteen
thousand Russians. The _Southern Religious Telegraph_ was publishing an
impassioned address to Kosciuszko; standards were being consecrated for
Poland in the larger cities; heroes like Skrzynecki, Czartoryski,
Rozyski, Raminski, were choking the trump of Fame with their complicated
patronymics. These are all forgotten now; and this poor negro, who did
not even possess a name, beyond one abrupt monosyllable,--for even the
name of Turner was the master's property,--still lives, a memory of
terror, and a symbol of wild retribution.




APPENDIX OF AUTHORITIES


THE MAROONS OF JAMAICA

1. Dallas, R. C. "The History of the Maroons, from their origin to the
establishment of their chief tribe at Sierra Leone: including the
expedition to Cuba, for the purpose of procuring Spanish chasseurs; and
the state of the Island of Jamaica for the last ten years, with a
succinct history of the island previous to that period." In two volumes.
London, 1803. [8vo.]

2. Edwards, Bryan. "The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British
Colonies in the West Indies. To which is added a general description of
the Bahama Islands, by Daniel M'Kinnen, Esq." In four volumes.
Philadelphia, 1806. [8vo.]

3. Edwards, Bryan. "Proceedings of the Governor and Associates of Jamaica
in regard to the Maroon Negroes, with an account of the Maroons." London,
1796. 8vo.

4. Edwards, Bryan. "Historical Survey of St. Domingo, with an account of
the Maroon Negroes, a history of the war in the West Indies, 1793-94"
[etc.]. London, 1801. 4to.

5. _Edinburgh Review_, ii. 376. [Review of Dallas and Edwards, by Henry
Lord Brougham.]

Also Annual Register, Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, etc.

[There appeared in _Once a Week_ (1865) a paper entitled "The Maroons of
Jamaica," and reprinted in _Every Saturday_ (i. 50, Jan. 31, 1866), in
which Gov. Eyre is quoted as having said, in the London _Times_, "To the
fidelity and loyalty of the Maroons it is due that the negroes did not
commit greater devastation" in the recent insurrection; thus curiously
repeating the encomium given by Lord Balcarres seventy years before.]

       *       *       *       *       *

THE MAROONS OF SURINAM

1. "Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition against the revolted negroes of
Surinam, in Guiana, on the wild coast of South America, from the year
1772 to 1777 ... by Capt. J. G. Stedman." London. Printed for J. Johnson,
St. Paul's Churchyard, and J. Edwards, Pall Mall. 1790. [2 vols. 4to.]

2. "Transatlantic Sketches, comprising visits to the most interesting
scenes in North and South America and the West Indies. With notes on
negro slavery and Canadian emigration. By Capt. J. E. Alexander, 42 Royal
Highlanders." London: Richard Bentley, New Burlington St., 1833. [2 vols.
8vo.]

Also Annual Register, etc.

[The best account of the present condition of the Maroons, or, as they
are now called, bush-negroes, of Surinam, is to be found in a graphic
narrative of a visit to Dutch Guiana, by W. G. Palgrave, in the
_Fortnightly Review_, xxiv. 801; xxv. 194, 536. These papers are
reprinted in _Littell's Living Age_, cxxviii. 154, cxxix. 409. He
estimates the present numbers of these people as approaching thirty
thousand. The "Encyclopaedia Britannica" gives the names of several
publications relating to their peculiar dialect, popularly known as
Negro-English, but including many Dutch words.]

       *       *       *       *       *

GABRIEL'S DEFEAT

The materials for the history of Gabriel's revolt are still very
fragmentary, and must be sought in the contemporary newspapers. No
continuous file of Southern newspapers for the year 1800 was to be found,
when this narrative was written, in any Boston or New-York library,
though the Harvard-College Library contained a few numbers of the
Baltimore _Telegraphe_ and the Norfolk _Epitome of the Times_. My chief
reliance has therefore been the Southern correspondence of the Northern
newspapers, with the copious extracts there given from Virginian
journals. I am chiefly indebted to the Philadelphia _United-States
Gazette_, the Boston _Independent Chronicle_, the Salem _Gazette_ and
_Register_, the New-York _Daily Advertiser_, and the Connecticut
_Courant_. The best continuous narratives that I have found are in the
_Courant_ of Sept. 29, 1800, and the Salem _Gazette_ of Oct. 7, 1800; but
even these are very incomplete. Several important documents I have been
unable to discover,--the official proclamation of the governor, the
description of Gabriel's person, and the original confession of the
slaves as given to Mr. Sheppard. The discovery of these would no doubt
have enlarged, and very probably corrected, my narrative.

       *       *       *       *       *

DENMARK VESEY

1. "Negro Plot. An Account of the late intended insurrection among a
portion of the blacks of the city of Charleston, S.C. Published by the
Authority of the Corporation of Charleston." Second edition. Boston:
printed and published by Joseph W. Ingraham. 1822. 8vo, pp. 50.

[A third edition was printed at Boston during the same year, a copy of
which is in the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society. The
first and fourth editions, which were printed at Charleston, S.C., I have
never seen.]

2. "An Official Report of the trials of sundry negroes, charged with an
attempt to raise an insurrection in the State of South Carolina: preceded
by an introduction and narrative; and in an appendix, a report of the
trials of four white persons, on indictments for attempting to excite the
slaves to insurrection. Prepared and published at the request of the
court. By Lionel H. Kennedy and Thomas Parker, members of the Charleston
bar, and the presiding magistrates of the court." Charleston: printed by
James R. Schenck, 23 Broad St. 1822. 8vo, pp. 188x4.

3. "Reflections occasioned by the late disturbances in Charleston, by
Achates." Charleston: printed and sold by A. E. Miller, No. 4 Broad St.
1822. 8vo, pp. 30.

4. "A Refutation of the Calumnies circulated against the Southern and
Western States, respecting the institution and existence of slavery among
them. To which is added a minute and particular account of the actual
state and condition of their Negro Population, together with Historical
Notices of all the Insurrections that have taken place since the
settlement of the country.--Facts are stubborn things.--_Shakspeare_. By
a South Carolinian." [Edwin C. Holland.] Charleston: printed by A. E.
Miller, No. 4 Broad St. 1822. 8vo, pp. 86.

5. "Rev. Dr. Richard Furman's Exposition of the views of the Baptists
relative to the colored population in the United States, in a
communication to the Governor of South Carolina." Second edition.
Charleston: printed by A. E. Miller, No. 4 Broad St. 1833. 8vo, pp. 16.

[The first edition appeared in 1823. It relates to a petition offered by
a Baptist Convention for a day of thanksgiving and humiliation, in
reference to the insurrection, and to a violent hurricane which had just
occurred.]

6. "Practical Considerations, founded on the Scriptures, relative to the
Slave Population of South Carolina. Respectfully dedicated to the South
Carolina Association. By a South Carolinian." Charleston: printed and
sold by A. E. Miller, No. 4 Broad St. 1823. 8vo, pp. 38.

7. [The letter of Gov. Bennett, dated Aug. 10, 1822, was evidently
printed originally as a pamphlet or circular, though I have not been able
to find it in that form. It may be found reprinted in the _Columbian
Centinel_ (Aug. 31, 1822), _Connecticut Courant_ (Sept. 3), and Worcester
_Spy_ (Sept. 18). It is also printed in Lundy's _Genius of Universal
Emancipation_ for September, 1822 (ii. 42), and reviewed in subsequent
numbers (pp. 81, 131, 142).]

8. "The Liberty Bell, by Friends of Freedom. Boston: Anti-Slavery Bazaar.
1841. 12mo." [This contains an article on p. 158, entitled "Servile
Insurrections," by Edmund Jackson, including brief personal reminiscences
of the Charleston insurrection, during which he resided in that city.]

[Of the above-named pamphlets, all now rare, Nos. 1 and 2 are in my own
possession. Nos. 3, 4, 5, 6, are in the Wendell Phillips collection of
pamphlets in the Boston Public Library.]

       *       *       *       *       *

NAT TURNER'S INSURRECTION

1. "The Confessions of Nat Turner, the leader of the late Insurrection in
Southampton, Va., as fully and voluntarily made to Thomas R. Gray, in the
prison where he was confined, and acknowledged by him to be such when
read before the Court of Southampton, with the certificate under seal of
the court convened at Jerusalem, Nov. 5, 1831, for this trial. Also an
authentic account of the whole insurrection, with lists of the whites who
were murdered, and of the negroes brought before the Court of
Southampton, and there sentenced, etc." New York: printed and published
by C. Brown, 211 Water Street, 1831.

[This pamphlet was reprinted in the _Anglo-African Magazine_ (New York),
December, 1859. Whether it is identical with the work said by the
newspapers of the period to have been published at Baltimore, I have been
unable to ascertain. But if, as was alleged, forty thousand copies of the
Baltimore pamphlet were issued, it seems impossible that they should have
become so scarce. The first reprint of the Confession, so far as I know,
was a partial one in Abdy's "Journal in the United States." London. 1835.
3 vols. 8vo.]

2. "Authentic and Impartial Narrative of the Tragical Scene which was
witnessed in Southhampton County (Va.), on Monday, the 22d of August
last, when Fifty-five of its inhabitants (mostly women and children) were
inhumanly massacred by the blacks! Communicated by those who were
eye-witnesses of the bloody scene, and confirmed by the confessions of
several of the Blacks, while under Sentence of Death." [By Samuel Warner,
New York.] Printed for Warner & West. 1831. 12mo, pp. 36 [or more, copy
incomplete. With a frontispiece]. Among the Wendell Phillips tracts in
the Boston Public Library.

3. "Slave Insurrection in 1831, in Southampton County, Va., headed by Nat
Turner. Also a conspiracy of slaves in Charleston, S.C., in 1822." New
York: compiled and published by Henry Bibb, 9 Spruce St. 1849. 12mo, pp.
12.

[The contemporary newspaper narratives may be found largely quoted in the
first volume of the _Liberator_ (1831), and in Lundy's _Genius of
Universal Emancipation_ (September, 1831). The files of the Richmond
_Enquirer_ have also much information on the subject.]







End of Project Gutenberg's Black Rebellion, by Thomas Wentworth Higginson