These murders were defended as Nat Turner defended his:  a fearful blow must be struck.  In shuddering at the horrors of the insurrection, we have forgotten the far greater horrors of its suppression.

The newspapers of the day contain many indignant protests against the cruelties which took place.  “It is with pain,” says a correspondent of the “National Intelligencer,” September 7, 1831, “that we speak of another feature of the Southampton Rebellion; for we have been most unwilling to have our sympathies for the sufferers diminished or affected by their misconduct.  We allude to the slaughter of many blacks without trial and under circumstances of great barbarity.....  We met with an individual of intelligence who told us that he himself had killed between ten and fifteen.....  We [the Richmond troop] witnessed with surprise the sanguinary temper of the population, who evinced a strong disposition to inflict immediate death on every prisoner.”

There is a remarkable official document from General Eppes, the officer in command, to be found in the “Richmond Enquirer” for September 6, 1831.  It is an indignant denunciation of precisely these outrages; and though he refuses to give details, he supplies their place by epithets:  “revolting,”—­“inhuman and not to be justified,”—­“acts of barbarity and cruelty,”—­“acts of atrocity,”—­“this course of proceeding dignifies the rebel and the assassin with the sanctity of martyrdom.”  And he ends by threatening martial law upon all future transgressors.  Such general orders are not issued except in rather extreme cases.  And in the parallel columns of the newspaper the innocent editor prints equally indignant descriptions of Russian atrocities in Lithuania, where the Poles were engaged in active insurrection, amid profuse sympathy from Virginia.

The truth is, it was a Reign of Terror.  Volunteer patrols rode in all directions, visiting plantations.  “It was with the greatest difficulty,” said General Brodnax before the House of Delegates, “and at the hazard of personal popularity and esteem, that the coolest and most judicious among us could exert an influence sufficient to restrain an indiscriminate slaughter of the blacks who were suspected.”  A letter from the Rev. G.W.  Powell declares, “There are thousands of troops searching in every direction, and many negroes are killed every day:  the exact number will never be ascertained.”  Petition after petition was subsequently presented to the legislature, asking compensation for slaves thus assassinated without trial.

Men were tortured to death, burned, maimed, and subjected to nameless atrocities.  The overseers were called on to point out any slaves whom they distrusted, and if any tried to escape, they were shot down.  Nay, worse than this.  “A party of horsemen started from Richmond with the intention of killing every colored person they saw in Southampton County.  They stopped opposite the cabin of a free colored man,