Not so with Denmark Vesey.  The plans of years were frustrated; his own life and liberty were thrown away; many others were sacrificed through his leader ship; and one more added to the list of unsuccessful insurrections.  All these disastrous certainties he faced calmly, and gave his whole mind composedly to the conducting of his defence.  With his arms tightly folded and his eyes fixed on the floor, he attentively followed every item of the testimony.  He heard the witnesses examined by the Court, and cross-examined by his own counsel, and it is evident from the narrative of the presiding judge that he showed no small skill and policy in the searching cross-examination which he then applied.  The fears, the feelings, the consciences of those who had betrayed him, all were in turn appealed to; but the facts were too overpowering, and it was too late to aid his comrades or himself.  Then turning to the Court, he skilfully availed himself of the point which had so much impressed the community, the intrinsic improbability that a man in his position of freedom and prosperity should sacrifice everything to free other people.  If they thought it so incredible, why not give him the benefit of the incredibility?  The act being, as they stated, one of infatuation, why convict him of it on the bare word of men who, by their own showing, had not only shared the infatuation, but proved traitors to it?  An ingenious defence,—­indeed, the only one which could by any possibility be suggested, anterior to the days of Choate and somnambulism; but in vain.  He was sentenced, and it was not, apparently, till the judge reproached him for the destruction he had brought on his followers that he showed any sign of emotion.  Then the tears came into his eyes.  But he said not another word.

The executions took place on five different days, and, bad as they were, they might have been worse.  After the imaginary Negro Plot of New York, in 1741, thirteen negroes had been judicially burned alive; two had suffered the same sentence at Charleston in 1808; and it was undoubtedly some mark of progress that in this case the gallows took the place of the flames.  Six were hanged on July 2d, upon Blake’s lands, near Charleston,—­Denmark Vesey, Peter Poyas, Jess, Ned, Rolla, and Batteau,—­the last three being slaves of the Governor himself.  Gullah Jack and John were executed “on the Lines,” near Charleston, on July 12th, and twenty-two more on July 26th.  Four others suffered their fate on July 30th; and one more, William Garner, effected a temporary escape, was captured and tried by a different court, and was finally executed on August 9th.