The next salient occurrence in the series was the outbreak which brought fame to Nat Turner and the devoted Virginia county of Southampton.  Nat, a slave who by the custom of the country had acquired the surname of his first master, was the foreman of a small plantation, a Baptist exhorter capable of reading the Bible, and a pronounced mystic.  For some years, as he told afterward when in custody, he had heard voices from the heavens commanding him to carry on the work of Christ to make the last to be first and the first last; and he took the sun’s eclipse in February, 1831, as a sign that the time was come.  He then enlisted a few of his fellows in his project, but proceeded to spend his leisure for several months in prayer and brooding instead of in mundane preparation.  When at length on Sunday night, August 21, he began his revolt he had but a petty squad of companions, with merely a hatchet and a broad-axe as weapons, and no definite plan of campaign.  First murdering his master’s household and seizing some additional equipment, he took the road and repeated the process at whatever farmhouses he came upon.  Several more negroes joined the squad as it proceeded, though in at least one instance a slave resisted them in defense of his master’s family at the cost of his own life.  The absence of many whites from the neighborhood by reason of their attendance at a camp-meeting across the nearby North Carolina line reduced the number of victims, and on the other hand made the rally of the citizens less expeditious and formidable when the alarm had been spread.  By sunrise the rebels numbered fifteen, part of whom were mounted, and their outfit comprised a few firearms.  Throughout the morning they continued their somewhat aimless roving, slaughtering such white households as they reached, enlisting recruits by persuasion or coercion, and heightening their courage by draughts upon the apple-brandy in which the county, by virtue of its many orchards and stills, abounded.  By noon there were some sixty in the straggling ranks, but when shortly afterward they met a squad of eighteen rallying whites, armed like themselves mainly with fowling pieces with birdshot ammunition, they fled at the first fire, and all but a score dispersed.  The courage of these whites, however, was so outweighed by their caution that Nat and his fellows were able to continue their marauding course in a new direction, gradually swelling their numbers to forty again.  That night, however, a false alarm stampeded their bivouac and again dispersed all the faint-hearted.  Nat with his remaining squad then attacked a homestead just before daybreak on Tuesday, but upon repulse by the five white men and boys with several slave auxiliaries who were guarding it they retreated only to meet a militia force which completed the dispersal.  All were promptly killed or taken except Nat who secreted himself near his late master’s home until his capture was accomplished six weeks afterward.  The whites slain by the rebels numbered ten men, fourteen women and thirty-one children.