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SEPTEMBER, 1861.    DOUGLASS' MONTHLY    521

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 amunition, 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 in a slave State; 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.  Compare this with ordinary wars; compare it with the annals of the French Revolution.  No one, perhaps, has yet painted the wrongs of the French populace so terribly as Dickens in his 'Tale of Two Cities;' yet what man, conversant with slave-biographies, can read that narrative without feeling it weak beside the provocations to which fugitive slaves testify?  It is something for human nature that these desperate insurgents revenged such wrongs by death alone.  Even that fearful penalty was to be inflicted until the object was won.  It was admitted in the Richmond Enquirer of the time, that 'indiscriminate massacre was not their intention, after they obtained foothold, and was resorted to in the first instance to strike terror and alarm.  Women and children would afterwards have been spared, and men also who ceased to resist.'

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 dispatched 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 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 Captain Harris's, so broke up the whole force that they never reunited.  The few who remained together agreed to separate for a few hours to see if anything could be done to revive the insurrection, and meet again that evening at their original rendezvous.  But they never reached it.
 
Sadly 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; everything 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 weary days and two melancholy 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 reach 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 we 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 slaveholding community, that it can never furnish men promptly for such a purpose.— 'My first intention was,' said 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.  Colonel House, commanding at Fortress Monroe, sent at once three companies of artillery under Lieut. Col. Worth, and embarked them on board the steamer Hampton or 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 August 24th, 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 

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Reviewed - removed unnecessary descriptions of format - see Instructions... & fixed a couple of typos