Indeed, the most formidable weapon in the hands of slave-insurgents is always this blind panic they create, and the wild exaggerations which follow.  The worst being possible, every one takes the worst for granted.  Undoubtedly a dozen armed men could have stifled this insurrection, even after it had commenced operations; but it is the fatal weakness of a slaveholding community, that it can never furnish men promptly for such a purpose, “My first intention was,” says one of the most intelligent newspaper narrators of the affair, “to have attacked them with thirty or forty men; but those who had families here were strongly opposed to it.”

As usual, each man was pinioned to his own hearth-stone.  As usual, aid had to be summoned from a distance, and, as usual, the United States troops were the chief reliance.  Colonel House, commanding at Fort Monroe, sent at once three companies of artillery under Lieutenant-Colonel Worth, and embarked them on board the steamer Hampton for Suffolk.  These were joined by detachments from the United States ships Warren and Natchez, the whole amounting to nearly eight hundred men.  Two volunteer companies went from Richmond, four from Petersburg, one from Norfolk, one from Portsmouth, and several from North Carolina.  The militia of Norfolk, Nansemond, and Princess Anne Counties, and the United States troops at Old Point Comfort, were ordered to scour the Dismal Swamp, where it was believed that two or three thousand fugitives were preparing to join the insurgents.  It was even proposed to send two companies from New York and one from New London to the same point.

When these various forces reached Southampton County, they found all labor paralyzed and whole plantations abandoned.  A letter from Jerusalem, dated August 24th, says, “The oldest inhabitant of our county has never experienced such a distressing time as we have had since Sunday night last.....  Every house, room, and corner in this place is full of women and children, driven from home, who had to take the woods until they could get to this place.”  “For many miles around their track,” says another, “the county is deserted by women and children.”  Still another writes, “Jerusalem is full of women, most of them from the other side of the river,—­about two hundred at Vix’s.”  Then follow descriptions of the sufferings of these persons, many of whom had lain night after night in the woods.  But the immediate danger was at an end, the short-lived insurrection was finished, and now the work of vengeance was to begin.  In the frank phrase of a North Carolina correspondent,—­“The massacre of the whites was over, and the white people had commenced the destruction of the negroes, which was continued after our men got there, from time to time, as they could fall in with them, all day yesterday.”  A postscript adds, that “passengers by the Fayetteville stage say, that, by the latest accounts, one hundred and twenty negroes had been killed,”—­this being little more than one day’s work.