More than a third of a century has passed since the incidents of this true story closed.  It has not vanished from the memories of South Carolinians, though the printed pages which once told it have been gradually withdrawn from sight.  The intense avidity which at first grasped at every incident of the great insurrectionary plot was succeeded by a distaste for the memory of the tale; and the official reports which told what slaves had once planned and dared have now come to be among the rarest of American historical documents.  In 1841, a friend of the writer, then visiting South Carolina, heard from her hostess for the first time the events which are recounted here.  On asking to see the reports of the trials, she was cautiously told that the only copy in the house, after being carefully kept for years under lock and key, had been burnt at last, lest it should reach the dangerous eyes of the slaves.  The same thing had happened, it was added, in many other families.  This partially accounts for the great difficulty now to be found in obtaining a single copy of either publication; and this is why, to the readers of American history, Denmark Vesey and Peter Poyas have been heretofore but the shadows of names.

* * * * *

NEW YORK SEVENTH REGIMENT.

OUR MARCH TO WASHINGTON.

THROUGH THE CITY.

At three o’clock in the afternoon of Friday, April 19th, we took our peacemaker, a neat twelve-pound brass howitzer, down from the Seventh Regiment Armory, and stationed it in the rear of the building.  The twin peacemaker is somewhere near us, but entirely hidden by this enormous crowd.

An enormous crowd! of both sexes, of every age and condition.  The men offer all kinds of truculent and patriotic hopes; the women shed tears, and say, “God bless you, boys!”

This is a part of the town where baddish cigars prevail.  But good or bad, I am ordered to keep all away from the gun.  So the throng stands back, peers curiously over the heads of its junior members, and seems to be taking the measure of my coffin.

After a patient hour of this, the word is given, we fall in, our two guns find their places at the right of the line of march, we move on through the thickening crowd.

At a great house on the left, as we pass the Astor Library, I see a handkerchief waving for me.  Yes! it is she who made the sandwiches in my knapsack.  They were a trifle too thick, as I afterwards discovered, but otherwise perfection.  Be these my thanks and the thanks of hungry comrades who had bites of them!

At the corner of Great Jones Street we halted for half an hour,—­then, everything ready, we marched down Broadway.

It was worth a life, that march.  Only one who passed, as we did, through that tempest of cheers, two miles long, can know the terrible enthusiasm of the occasion.  I could hardly hear the rattle of our own gun-carriages, and only once or twice the music of our band came to me muffled and quelled by the uproar.  We knew now, if we had not before divined it, that our great city was with us as one man, utterly united in the great cause we were marching to sustain.