n the premises.[75]

[Footnote 74: _Memorial of the Citizens of Charleston to the Senate and
House of Representatives of the State of South Carolina_ (Charleston,
1822), reprinted in _Plantation and Frontier_, II, 103-116.]

[Footnote 75: Address of the association, in the Charleston _City Gazette_,
Aug. 5, 1825.]

The next salient occurrence in the series was the outbreak which brought
fame to Nat Turner and the devoted Virginia county of Southampton. Nat,
a slave who by the custom of the country had acquired the surname of his
first master, was the foreman of a small plantation, a Baptist exhorter
capable of reading the Bible, and a pronounced mystic. For some years, as
he told afterward when in custody, he had heard voices from the heavens
commanding him to carry on the work of Christ to make the last to be first
and the first last; and he took the sun's eclipse in February, 1831, as a
sign that the time was come. He then enlisted a few of his fellows in his
project, but proceeded to spend his leisure for several months in prayer
and brooding instead of in mundane preparation. When at length on Sunday
night, August 21, he began his revolt he had but a petty squad of
companions, with merely a hatchet and a broad-axe as weapons, and no
definite plan of campaign. First murdering his master's household and
seizing some additional equipment, he took the road and repeated the
process at whatever farmhouses he came upon. Several more negroes joined
the squad as it proceeded, though in at least one instance a slave resisted
them in defense of his master's family at the cost of his own life. The
absence of many whites from the neighborhood by reason of their attendance
at a camp-meeting across the nearby North Carolina line reduced the number
of victims, and on the other hand made the rally of the citizens less
expeditious and formidable when the alarm had been spread. By sunrise
the rebels numbered fifteen, part of whom were mounted, and their outfit
comprised a few firearms. Throughout the morning they continued their
somewhat aimless roving, slaughtering such white households as they
reached, enlisting recruits by persuasion or coercion, and heightening
their courage by draughts upon the apple-brandy in which the county, by
virtue of its many orchards and stills, abounded. By noon there were some
sixty in the straggling ranks, but when shortly afterward they met a squad
of eighteen rallying whites, armed like themselves m