Synopsis
Excerpt from The Letter of Appomatox to the People of Virginia: Exhibiting a Connected View of the Recent Proceedings in the House of Delegates, on the Subject of the Abolition of Slavery
To him when he should commence the great work - by the appearance of the first xsign, which was no other than-the eclipse of the sun in February last - and by the appearance of the sign again, namely, that unusual state of the atmos phere shortly, preceding the outbreaking of the conspiracy, which gave the sun's rays a bluish tint. Prompted and di rected by these supernatural influences, upon the appearance of the first sign, the seal was removed from his lips, and he communicated the great work laid out for him to do, to four in whom he had the greatest confidencef.' and, when the sign appeared again, he got together a petty gang of six followers, whom he' incited, partly by the contagion of the evil spirit with which he was himself possessed, and partly by another Spirit, which he invoked doubtless with better assurance of its, efficacy, the spirit, namely, of brandy, to conspire with him in tire great work. And by these seven men, was the great work commenced. Others joined them in their progress but the whole gang of insurgents, from first to last, seem not to have exceeded sixty men, of whom five were'free negroes. That there was no general plot of insurrection among the slaves of that district of country, or even of the immediate vicinity, is now quite certain. There was no concerted plan of action among the conspirators themselves; no provision of means to accomplish their object; hardly, indeed, any defi nite object. They rose in the dead of night; and, in a thinly peopled neighborhood, where the alarm could not be rapidly Spread, they succeeded, during that night and the following morning, in'murdering ten men, fourteen women, and thirty one children. It was a mere scene of massacre, than which, for the narrow bounds of space and time to' which it was con fined, none ever was more indiscriminate, ruthless and nhomi nable. Their last effort was an attack on Dr. Blunt's house by a party of'twenty; which was repelled by two men and three boys. They were met, as promptly as could possibly have been expected, considering the circumstances of the ou slaught,-by the militia of the county, or rather of the neigh borhood; by whom, before any of the forces wisely ordered.
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Excerpt from The Letter of Appomatox to the People of Virginia: Exhibiting a Connected View of the Recent Proceedings in the House of Delegates, on the Subject of the Abolition of Slavery The insurrection, which occurred in Southampton last summer, was, in every point of view, a most extraordinary event; most extraordinary, whether we have regard to its exciting causes, or its immediate mischiefs, or its general effects. For, as the very peculiar incentives by which it was instigated, could never have been detected by any effort of reason without the positive evidence of facts developed in the trials of the conspirators, and as the gloomiest imagination could hardly have prefigured such a scene of atrocious crime as that which marked the brief career of this rebellion, so no human sagacity could have foreseen, or conjectured, those general and remoter consequences, which have already flowed from it, and which, but too probably, may still flow on; consequences, the direct reverse of what common reason would have anticipated; stranger than the exciting causes of the insurrection; and involving and portending dangers and mischiefs, compared with which the murders perpetrated in its progress, were evils too partial and trivial to deserve a further thought. The proceedings of the house of delegates, would almost seem to justify a belief, that there was something prophetic in that hallucination, by which Nat Turner declared he was himself incited, and instigated to incite others, to that detestable and detested massacre; namely, that "he had repeated revelations from The Spirit, which fully confirmed him in the impression, that he was ordained for some great purpose in the hands of the Almighty." We have this man's own account of those instigations of the devil (to give them the appropriate epithet) which prompted the conspiracy, and directed, throughout, the execution of its designs. It is curious to observe, how exactly, in his confessions, he describes the usual course
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