the whipping-post are in vigorous operation.  Here was a message, which every slave, however ignorant and illiterate could read.  His instinct would tell him, wherever he saw the pictured horror, that a friend, not an enemy, had drawn it, but for what purpose?  What was the secret meaning, which he was to extract from a portrayal of his woes at once so real and terrible.  Was it to be a man, to seize the knife, the torch, to slay and burn his way to the rights and estate of a man?  Garrison had put no such bloody import into the cut.  It was designed not to appeal to the passions of the slaves, but to the conscience of the North.  But the South did not so read it, was incapable, in fact, of so reading it.  What it saw was a shockingly realistic representation of the wrongs of the slaves, the immediate and inevitable effect of which upon the slaves would be to incite them to sedition, to acts of revenge.  Living as the slaveholders were over mines of powder and dynamite, it is not to be marveled at that the first flash of danger filled them with apprehension and terror.  The awful memories of San Domingo flamed red and dreadful against the dark background of every Southern plantation and slave community.  In the “belly” of the Liberator’s picture were many San Domingos.  Extreme fear is the beginning of madness; it is, indeed, a kind of madness.  The South was suddenly plunged into a state of extreme fear toward which the Liberator and “Walker’s Appeal” were hurrying it, by one of those strange accidents or coincidences of history.

This extraordinary circumstance was the slave insurrection in Southampton, Virginia, in the month of August, 1831.  The leader of the uprising was the now famous Nat Turner.  Brooding over the wrongs of his race for several years, he conceived that he was the divinely appointed agent to redress them.  He was cast in the mould of those rude heroes, who spring out of the sides of oppression as isolated trees will sometimes grow out of clefts in a mountain.  With his yearning to deliver his people, there mingled not a little religious frenzy and superstition.  Getting his command from Heaven to arise against the masters, he awaited the sign from this same source of the moment for beginning the work of destruction.  It came at last and on the night of August 21st; he and his confederates made a beginning by massacring first his own master, Mr. Joseph Travis, and his entire family.  Turner’s policy was remorseless enough.  It was to spare no member of the white race, whether man, woman, or child, the very infant at the mother’s breast was doomed to the knife, until he was able to collect such an assured force as would secure the success of the enterprise.  This purpose was executed with terrible severity and exactness.  All that night the work of extermination went on as the slave leader and his followers passed like fate from house to house, and plantation to plantation, leaving a wide swathe of death in their track.