[Footnote 2:  Official Report, 24.  Note that this remarkable characterization was given by the judges, Kennedy and Parker, who afterwards condemned the men to death.]

With his lieutenants Vesey finally brought into the plan the Negroes for seventy or eighty miles around Charleston.  The second Monday in July, 1822, or Sunday, July 14, was the time originally set for the attack.  July was chosen because in midsummer many of the white people were away at different resorts; and Sunday received favorable consideration because on that day the slaves from the outlying plantations were frequently permitted to come to the city.  Lists of the recruits were kept.  Peter Poyas is said to have gathered as many as six hundred names, chiefly from that part of Charleston known as South Bay in which he lived; and it is a mark of his care and discretion that of all of those afterwards arrested and tried, not one belonged to his company.  Monday Gell, who joined late and was very prudent, had forty-two names.  All such lists, however, were in course of time destroyed.  “During the period that these enlistments were carrying on, Vesey held frequent meetings of the conspirators at his house; and as arms were necessary to their success, each night a hat was handed round, and collections made, for the purpose of purchasing them, and also to defray other necessary expenses.  A Negro who was a blacksmith and had been accustomed to make edged tools, was employed to make pike-heads and bayonets with sockets, to be fixed at the ends of long poles and used as pikes.  Of these pike-heads and bayonets, one hundred were said to have been made at an early day, and by the 16th June as many as two or three hundred, and between three and four hundred daggers."[1] A bundle containing some of the poles, neatly trimmed and smoothed off, and nine or ten feet long, was afterwards found concealed on a farm on Charleston Neck, where several of the meetings were held, having been carried there to have the pike-heads and bayonets fixed in place.  Governor Bennett stated that the number of poles thus found was thirteen, but so wary were the Negroes that he and other prominent men underestimated the means of attack.  It was thought that the Negroes in Charleston might use their masters’ arms, while those from the country were to bring hoes, hatchets, and axes.  For their main supply of arms, however, Vesey and Peter Poyas depended upon the magazines and storehouses in the city.  They planned to seize the Arsenal in Meeting Street opposite St. Michael’s Church; it was the key to the city, held the arms of the state, and had for some time been neglected.  Poyas at a given signal at midnight was to move upon this point, killing the sentinel.  Two large gun and powder stores were by arrangement to be at the disposal of the insurrectionists; and other leaders, coming from six different directions, were to seize strategic points and thus aid the central work of Poyas.  Meanwhile a body of horse was to keep the streets clear.  “Eat only dry food,” said Gullah Jack as the day approached, “parched corn and ground nuts, and when you join us as we pass put this crab claw in your mouth and you can’t be wounded.”