in his project for insurrection.  But before the plot was ripe it was betrayed by a slave woman, and several negroes were arrested.  Boxley thereupon marched with a dozen followers on a Quixotic errand of release, but on the road the blacks fell away, and he, after some time in hiding, surrendered himself.  Six of the negroes after conviction were hanged and a like number transported; but Boxley himself broke jail and escaped.[69]

[Footnote 68:  Calendar of Virginia State Papers, X, 62, 63, 97, 368.]

[Footnote 69:  Ibid., X, 433-436; Louisiana Gazette (New Orleans), Apr. 18 and 24 (Reprinting a report from the Virginia Herald of Mch. 9), and July 12, 1816; MS. Vouchers in the Virginia State Library recording public payments for convicted slaves.]

In the lower South a plot at Camden, South Carolina, in 1816[70] and another at Augusta, Georgia,[71] three years afterward had like plans of setting houses afire at night and then attacking other quarters of the respective towns when the white men had left their homes defenceless.  Both plots were betrayed, and several participants in each were executed.  These conspiracies were eclipsed in turn by the elaborate Vesey plot at Charleston in 1822, which, for the variety of the negro types involved, the methods of persuasion used by the leading spirits and the sobriety of the whites on the occasion is one of the most notable of such episodes on record.

[Footnote 70:  [Edwin C. Holland], A Refutation of the Calumnies circulated against the Southern and Western States, with historical notes of insurrections (Charleston, 1822), pp. 75-77; H.T.  Cook, Life and Legacy of David R. Williams, p. 131; H.M.  Henry, Police Control of the Slave in South Carolina, pp. 151, 152.]

[Footnote 71:  News item from Augusta in the Louisiana Courier (New Orleans), June 15, 1819.]

Denmark Vesey, brought from Africa in his youth, had bought his freedom with part of a $1500 prize drawn by him in a lottery, and was in this period an independent artisan.  Harboring a deep resentment against the whites, however, he began to plan his plot some four years before its maturity.  He familiarized himself with the Bible account of the deliverance of the children of Israel, and collected pamphlet and newspaper material on anti-slavery sentiment in England and the North and on occurrences in San Domingo, with all of which on fit occasions he regaled the blacks with whom he came into touch.  Arguments based on such data brought concurrence of negroes of the more intelligent sort, prominent among whom were certain functionaries of the African Church who were already nursing grievances on the score of the suppression of their ecclesiastical project by the Charleston authorities.[72] The chief minister of that church, Morris Brown, however, was carefully left out of the conspiracy.  In appealing to the more ignorant and superstitious element, on