's portion, his opportunity for the
full development and free play of all of his powers amid that society in
which was cast his lot. And for that portion, so precious, he was ready
to take the one chance with all of its tremendous risks, to stake that
miserable modicum of freedom which he possessed, the wealth laboriously
accumulated by him, and life itself.

It is impossible to fix exactly the time when the bold idea of resistance
entered his brains, or to say when he began to plan for its realization,
and after that to prepare the blacks for its reception. Before embarking
on his perilous enterprise he must have carefully reckoned on time, long
and indefinite, as an essential factor in its successful achievement.
For, certain it is, he took it, years in fact, made haste slowly and with
supreme discretion and self-control. He appeared to have thoroughly
acquainted himself with the immense difficulties which beset an uprising
of the blacks. Not once, I think, did he underestimate the strength of
his foes. A past grand master in the art of intrigue among the servile
population, he was equally adept in knowledge of the weak spots for
attack in the defences of the slave system, knew perfectly where the
masters could best be taken at a disadvantage. All the facts of his
history combine to give him a character for profound acting. In the
underground agitation, which during a period of three or four years, he
conducted in the city of Charleston and over a hundred miles of the
adjacent country, he seemed to have been gifted with a sort of Protean
ability. His capacity for practicing secrecy and dissimulation where
they were deemed necessary to his end, must have been prodigious, when
it is considered that during the years covered by his underground
agitation, it is not recorded that he made a single false note, or took
a single false step to attract attention to himself and movement, or to
arouse over all that territory included in that agitation and among all
those white people involved in its terrific consequences, the slightest
suspicion of danger.

In his underground agitation, Vesey, with an instinct akin to genius,
seemed to have excluded from his preliminary action everything like
conscious combination or organization among his disciples, and to have
confined himself strictly to the immediate business in hand at that
stage of his plot, which was the sowing of seeds of discontent, the
fomenting of hatred among the black