the mother's
breast was doomed to the knife, until he was able to collect such an
assured force as would secure the success of the enterprise. This
purpose was executed with terrible severity and exactness. All that
night the work of extermination went on as the slave leader and his
followers passed like fate from house to house, and plantation to
plantation, leaving a wide swathe of death in their track. Terror filled
the night, terror filled the State, the most abject terror clutched the
bravest hearts. The panic was pitiable, horrible. James McDowell, one of
the leaders of the Old Dominion, gave voice to the awful memories and
sensations of that night, in the great anti-slavery debate, which broke
out in the Virginia Legislature, during the winter afterward. One of the
legislators, joined to his idol, and who now, that the peril had passed,
laughed at the uprising as a "petty affair." McDowell retorted--"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,_--a
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."

Sixty one whites and more than a hundred blacks perished in this
catastrophe. The news produced a profound sensation in the Union.
Garrison himself, as he records, was horror-struck at the tidings. Eight
months before he had in a strain of prophecy penetrated the future and
caught a glimpse of just such an appalling tragedy:

"Wo, if it come with storm, and blood, and fire,
When midnight darkness veils the earth and sky!
Wo to the innocent babe--the guilty