To provide for a more general riddance of suspected negroes the legislature made secret overtures to the federal government looking to the creation of a territorial reservation to receive such colonists; but for the time being this came to naught.  The legislature furthermore created a permanent guard for the capitol, and it liberated at the state’s expense Tom and Pharaoh, slaves of the Sheppard family, as reward for their services in helping to foil the plot.[63]

[Footnote 63:  T.W.  Higginson, “Gabriel’s Defeat,” in the Atlantic Monthly, X, 337-345, reprinted in the same author’s Travellers and Outlaws (Boston, 1889), pp. 185-214; J.C.  Ballagh, History of Slavery in Virginia, p. 92; J.H.  Russell, The Free Negro in Virginia, p. 65; MS. vouchers in the Virginia State Library recording public payments for convicted slaves.]

Set on edge by Gabriel’s exploit, citizens far and wide were abnormally alert for some time thereafter; and perhaps the slaves here and there were unusually restive.  Whether the one or the other of these conditions was most responsible, revelations and rumors were for several years conspicuously numerous.  In 1802 there were capital convictions of fourteen insurgent or conspiring slaves in six scattered counties of Virginia;[64] and panicky reports of uprisings were sent out from Hartford and Bertie Counties, North Carolina.[65] In July, 1804, the mayor of Savannah received from Augusta “information highly important to the safety, peace and security” of his town, and issued appropriate orders to the local militia.[66] Among rumors flying about South Carolina in this period, one on a December day in 1805 telling of risings above and below Columbia led to the planting of cannon before the state house there and to the instruction of the night patrols to seize every negro found at large.  An over-zealous patrolman thereupon shot a slave who was peacefully following his own master, and was indicted next day for murder.  The peaceful passing of the night brought a subsidence of the panic with the coming of day.[67]

[Footnote 64:  Vouchers as above.]

[Footnote 65:  Augusta, Ga., Chronicle, June 26, 1802.]

[Footnote 66:  Thomas Gamble, Jr., History of the City Government of Savannah [Savannah, 1900], p. 68.]

[Footnote 67:  “Diary of Edward Hooker,” in the American Historical Association Report for 1896, pp. 881, 882.]

In Virginia, again, there were disturbing rumors at one place or another every year or two from 1809 to 1814,[68] but no occurrence of tangible character until the Boxley plot of 1816 in Spottsylvania and Louisa Counties.  George Boxley, the white proprietor of a country store, was a visionary somewhat of John Brown’s type.  Participating in the religious gatherings of the negroes and telling them that a little white bird had brought him a holy message to deliver his fellowmen from bondage, he enlisted many blacks