The militia in scouring the countryside were prompted by the panic and its vindictive reaction to shoot down a certain number of innocent blacks along with the guilty and to make display of some of their severed heads.  The magistrates were less impulsive.  They promptly organized a court comprising all the justices of the peace in the county and assigned attorneys for the defense of the prisoners while the public prosecutor performed his appointed task.  Forty-seven negroes all told were brought before the court.  As to the five free blacks included in this number the magistrates, who had only preliminary jurisdiction in their cases, discharged one and remanded four for trial by a higher court.  Of the slaves four, and perhaps a fifth regarding whom the record is blank, were discharged without trial, and thirteen more were acquitted.  Of those convicted seven were sentenced to deportation, and seventeen with the ringleader among them, to death by hanging.  In addition there were several slaves convicted of complicity in neighboring counties.[76]

[Footnote 76:  W.S.  Drewry, Slave Insurrections in Virginia, 1830-1865 (Washington, 1900), recounts this revolt in great detail, and gives a bibliography.  The vouchers in the Virginia archives record only eleven executions and four deportations of Southampton slaves in this period.  It may be that the rest of those convicted were pardoned.]

This extraordinary event, occurring as it did after a century’s lapse since last an appreciable number of whites on the continent had lost their lives in such an outbreak, set nerves on edge throughout the South, and promptly brought an unusually bountiful crop of local rumors.  In North Carolina early in September it was reported at Raleigh that the blacks of Wilmington had burnt the town and slaughtered the whites, and that several thousand of them were marching upon Raleigh itself.[77] This and similarly alarming rumors from Edenton were followed at once by authentic news telling merely that conspiracies had been discovered in Duplin and Sampson Counties and also in the neighborhood of Edenton, with several convictions resulting in each locality.[78]

[Footnote 77:  News item dated Warrenton, N.C., Sept. 15, 1831, in the New Orleans Mercantile Advertiser, Oct. 4, 1831.]

[Footnote 78:  Federal Union (Milledgeville, Ga.), Oct. 6, 1831, citing the Fayetteville, N.C. Observer of Sept. 14; Niles’ Register, XLI, 266.]

At Milledgeville, the village capital of Georgia where in the preceding year the newspapers and the town authorities had been fluttered by the discovery of incendiary pamphlets in a citizen’s possession,[79] a rumor spread on October 4, 1831, that a large number of slaves had risen a dozen miles away and were marching upon the town to seize the weapons in the state arsenal there.  Three slaves within the town, and a free mulatto preacher as well, were seized on suspicion