throb of compunction, a word of exultation, or an act of superfluous outrage?  Mrs. Stowe’s “Dred” seems dim and melodramatic beside the actual Nat Turner.  De Quincey’s “Avenger” is his only parallel in imaginative literature:  similar wrongs, similar retribution.  Mr. Gray, his self-appointed confessor, rises into a sort of bewildered enthusiasm, with the prisoner before him.  “I shall not attempt to describe the effect of his narrative, as told and commented on by himself, in the condemned-hole of the prison.  The calm, deliberate composure with which he spoke of his late deeds and intentions, the expression of his fiend-like face when excited by enthusiasm, still bearing the stains of the blood of helpless innocence about him, clothed with rags and covered with chains, yet daring to raise his manacled hands to heaven, with a spirit soaring above the attributes of man,—­I looked on him, and the blood curdled in my veins.”

But the more remarkable the personal character of Nat Turner, the greater the amazement felt that he should not have appreciated the extreme felicity of his position as a slave.  In all insurrections, the standing wonder seems to be that the slaves most trusted and best used should be most deeply involved.  So in this case, as usual, they resorted to the most astonishing theories of the origin of the affair.  One attributed it to Free-Masonry, and another to free whiskey,—­liberty appearing dangerous, even in these forms.  The poor whites charged it upon the free colored people, and urged their expulsion, forgetting that in North Carolina the plot was betrayed by one of this class, and that in Virginia there were but two engaged, both of whom had slave-wives.  The slaveholding clergymen traced it to want of knowledge of the Bible, forgetting that Nat Turner knew scarcely anything else.  On the other hand, “a distinguished citizen of Virginia” combined in one sweeping denunciation “Northern incendiaries, tracts, Sunday-schools, religion, reading, and writing.”

But whether the theories of its origin were wise or foolish, the insurrection made its mark, and the famous band of Virginia emancipationists who all that winter made the House of Delegates ring with unavailing eloquence—­till the rise of slave-exportation to new cotton regions stopped their voices—­were but the unconscious mouth-pieces of Nat Turner.  In January, 1832, in reply to a member who had called the outbreak a “petty affair,” the eloquent James McDowell thus described the impression it left behind:—­

“Now, Sir, I ask you, I ask gentlemen, in conscience to say, was that a ‘petty affair’ which startled the feelings of your whole population,—­which threw a portion of it into alarm, a portion of it into panic,—­which wrung out from an affrighted people the thrilling cry, day after day, conveyed to your executive, ’We are in peril of our lives; send us an army for defence’?  Was that a ‘petty affair’ which drove families from their homes,—­which assembled