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. Terror filled the night, terror filled the State, the most abject terror clutched the bravest hearts. The panic was pitiable, horrible. James McDowell, one of the leaders of the Old Dominion, gave voice to the awful memories and sensations of that night, in the great anti-slavery debate, which broke out in the Virginia Legislature, during the winter afterward. One of the legislators, joined to his idol, and who now, that the peril had passed, laughed at the uprising as a "petty affair." McDowell retorted--"Was that a 'petty affair,' which erected a peaceful and confiding portion of the State into a military camp, which outlawed from pity the unfortunate beings whose brothers had offended; which barred every door, penetrated every bosom with fear or suspicion, which so banished every sense of security from every man's dwelling, that let but a hoof or horn break upon the silence of the night, and an aching throb would be driven to the heart? The husband would look to his weapon, and the mother would shudder and weep upon her cradle. Was it the fear of Nat Turner and his deluded, drunken handful of followers which produced such effects? Was it this that induced distant counties, where the very name of Southampton was strange, to arm and equip for a struggle? No, sir, it was the _suspicion eternally attached to the slave himself,_--a suspicion that a Nat Turner might be in every family, that the same bloody deed might be acted over at any time and in any place, that the materials for it were spread through the land, and were always ready for