with watching and privation, entangled in the branches, armed only with a sword, had nothing to do but to yield; sagaciously reflecting, also, as he afterwards explained, that the woods were full of armed men, and that he had better trust fortune for some later chance of escape, instead of desperately attempting it then.  He was correct in the first impression, since there were fifty armed scouts within a circuit of two miles.  His insurrection ended where it began; for this spot was only a mile and a half from the house of Joseph Travis.

Torn, emaciated, ragged, “a mere scarecrow,” still wearing the hat perforated with buckshot, with his arms bound to his sides, he was driven before the levelled gun to the nearest house, that of a Mr. Edwards.  He was confined there that night; but the news had spread so rapidly that within an hour after his arrival a hundred persons had collected, and the excitement became so intense “that it was with difficulty he could be conveyed alive to Jerusalem.”  The enthusiasm spread instantly through Virginia; Mr. Trezvant, the Jerusalem postmaster, sent notices of it far and near; and Governor Floyd himself wrote a letter to the “Richmond Enquirer” to give official announcement of the momentous capture.

When Nat Turner was asked by Mr. T.R.  Gray, the counsel assigned him, whether, although defeated, he still believed in his own Providential mission, he answered, as simply as one who came thirty years after him, “Was not Christ crucified?” In the same spirit, when arraigned before the court, “he answered, ‘Not guilty,’ saying to his counsel that he did not feel so.”  But apparently no argument was made in his favor by his counsel, nor were any witnesses called,—­he being convicted on the testimony of Levi Waller, and upon his own confession, which was put in by Mr. Gray, and acknowledged by the prisoner before the six justices composing the court, as being “full, free, and voluntary.”  He was therefore placed in the paradoxical position of conviction by his own confession, under a plea of “Not guilty.”  The arrest took place on the thirtieth of October, 1831, the confession on the first of November, the trial and conviction on the fifth, and the execution on the following Friday, the eleventh of November, precisely at noon.  He met his death with perfect composure, declined addressing the multitude assembled, and told the sheriff in a firm voice that he was ready.  Another account says that he “betrayed no emotion, and even hurried the executioner in the performance of his duty.”  “Not a limb nor a muscle was observed to move.  His body, after his death, was given over to the surgeons for dissection.”