The editor of the first official report racked his brains to discover the special causes of the revolt, and never trusted himself to allude to the general one.  The negroes rebelled because they were deluded by Congressional eloquence, or because they were excited by a Church squabble, or because they had been spoilt by mistaken indulgences, such as being allowed to learn to read, “a misguided benevolence,” as he pronounces it.  So the Baptist Convention seems to have thought it was because they were not Baptists, and an Episcopal pamphleteer because they were not Episcopalians.  It never seems to occur to any of these spectators that these people rebelled simply because they were slaves and wished to be free.

No doubt, there were enough special torches with which a man so skilful as Denmark Vesey could kindle up these dusky powder-magazines; but, after all, the permanent peril lay in the powder.  So long as that existed, everything was incendiary.  Any torn scrap in the street might contain a Missouri-Compromise speech, or a report of the last battle in St. Domingo, or one of those able letters of Boyer’s which were winning the praise of all, or one of John Randolph’s stirring speeches in England against the slave-trade.  The very newspapers which reported the happy extinction of the insurrection by the hanging of the last conspirator, William Garner, reported also, with enthusiastic indignation, the massacre of the Greeks at Constantinople and at Scio; and then the Northern editors, breaking from their usual reticence, pointed out the inconsistency of Southern journals in printing, side by side, denunciations of Mohammedan slave-sales and advertisements of Christian ones.

Of course, the insurrection threw the whole slavery question open to the public.  “We are sorry to see,” said the “National Intelligencer” of August 31st, “that a discussion of the hateful Missouri question is likely to be revived, in consequence of the allusions to its supposed effect in producing the late servile insurrection in South Carolina.”  A member of the Board of Public Works of South Carolina published in the Baltimore “American Farmer” an essay urging the encouragement of white laborers, and hinting at the ultimate abolition of slavery, “if it should ever be thought desirable.”  More boldly still, a pamphlet appeared in Charleston under the signature of “Achates,” arguing with remarkable sagacity and force against the whole system of slave-labor in towns, and proposing that all slaves in Charleston should be sold or transferred to the plantations, and their places supplied by white labor.  It is interesting to find many of the facts and arguments of Helper’s “Impending Crisis” anticipated in this courageous tract, written under the pressure of a crisis which had just been so narrowly evaded.  The author is described in the preface as “a soldier and patriot of the Revolution, whose name, did we feel ourselves at liberty to use it, would stamp a peculiar weight and value on his opinions.”  It was commonly attributed to General Thomas Pinckney.