blow fell on man, woman, and child,—­nothing that had a white skin was spared.  From every house they took arms and ammunition, and from a few, money; on every plantation they found recruits:  those dusky slaves, so obsequious to their master the day before, so prompt to sing and dance before his Northern visitors, were all swift to transform themselves into fiends of retribution now; show them sword or musket and they grasped it, though it were an heirloom from Washington himself.  The troop increased from house to house,—­first to fifteen, then to forty, then to sixty.  Some were armed with muskets, some with axes, some with scythes; some came on their masters’ horses.  As the numbers increased, they could be divided, and the awful work was carried on more rapidly still.  The plan then was for an advanced guard of horsemen to approach each house at a gallop, and surround it till the others came up.  Meanwhile what agonies of terror must have taken place within, shared alike by innocent and by guilty! what memories of wrongs inflicted on those dusky creatures, by some,—­what innocent participation, by others, in the penance!  The outbreak lasted for but forty-eight hours; but during that period fifty-five whites were slain, without the loss of a single slave.

One fear was needless, which to many a husband and father must have intensified the last struggle.  These negroes had been systematically brutalized from childhood; they had been allowed no legalized or permanent marriage; they had beheld around them an habitual licentiousness, such as can scarcely exist except in a Slave State; some of them had seen their wives and sisters habitually polluted by the husbands and the brothers of these fair white women who were now absolutely in their power.  Yet I have looked through the Virginia newspapers of that time in vain for one charge of an indecent outrage on a woman against these triumphant and terrible slaves.  Wherever they went, there went death, and that was all.  Compare this with ordinary wars; compare it with the annals of the French Revolution.  No one, perhaps, has yet painted the wrongs of the French populace so terribly as Dickens in his “Tale of Two Cities”; yet what man, conversant with slave-biographies, can read that narrative without feeling it weak beside the provocations to which fugitive slaves testify?  It is something for human nature that these desperate insurgents revenged such wrongs by death alone.  Even that fearful penalty was to be inflicted only till the object was won.  It was admitted in the “Richmond Enquirer” of the time, that “indiscriminate massacre was not their intention, after they obtained foothold, and was resorted to in the first instance to strike terror and alarm.  Women and children would afterwards have been spared, and men also who ceased to resist.”