d illiterate could read.
His instinct would tell him, wherever he saw the pictured horror, that a
friend, not an enemy, had drawn it, but for what purpose? What was the
secret meaning, which he was to extract from a portrayal of his woes at
once so real and terrible. Was it to be a man, to seize the knife, the
torch, to slay and burn his way to the rights and estate of a man?
Garrison had put no such bloody import into the cut. It was designed not
to appeal to the passions of the slaves, but to the conscience of the
North. But the South did not so read it, was incapable, in fact, of so
reading it. What it saw was a shockingly realistic representation of the
wrongs of the slaves, the immediate and inevitable effect of which upon
the slaves would be to incite them to sedition, to acts of revenge.
Living as the slaveholders were over mines of powder and dynamite, it is
not to be marveled at that the first flash of danger filled them with
apprehension and terror. The awful memories of San Domingo flamed red
and dreadful against the dark background of every Southern plantation
and slave community. In the "belly" of the _Liberator's_ picture were
many San Domingos. Extreme fear is the beginning of madness; it is,
indeed, a kind of madness. The South was suddenly plunged into a state
of extreme fear toward which the _Liberator_ and "Walker's Appeal" were
hurrying it, by one of those strange accidents or coincidences of
history.

This extraordinary circumstance was the slave insurrection in
Southampton, Virginia, in the month of August, 1831. The leader of the
uprising was the now famous Nat Turner. Brooding over the wrongs of his
race for several years, he conceived that he was the divinely appointed
agent to redress them. He was cast in the mould of those rude heroes,
who spring out of the sides of oppression as isolated trees will
sometimes grow out of clefts in a mountain. With his yearning to deliver
his people, there mingled not a little religious frenzy and
superstition. Getting his command from Heaven to arise against the
masters, he awaited the sign from this same source of the moment for
beginning the work of destruction. It came at last and on the night of
August 21st; he and his confederates made a beginning by massacring
first his own master, Mr. Joseph Travis, and his entire family. Turner's
policy was remorseless enough. It was to spare no member of the white
race, whether man, woman, or child, the very infant at