ves of the community forever, deprived of every civil
right which white men, their neighbors, were bound to respect. For
instance, were he wronged in his person or property by any member of the
dominant race, be the offender man, woman, or child, Vesey could have
had no redress in the courts, in case, the proof of his complaint or the
enforcement of his claim depended exclusively upon the testimony of
himself and of that of black witnesses, however respectable.

Such a man, we may be sure, was conscious of the possession,
notwithstanding his black skin and blacker social and civil condition,
of longings, aspirations, which the Slave-Code made it a crime for him
to satisfy. He must have felt the stir of forces and faculties within
him, which, under the heaviest pains and penalties, he was forbidden to
exercise. Thus robbed of freedom, ravished of manhood, what was he to
do? Ay, what ought he to have done under the circumstances? Ought he to
have done what multitudes had done before him, meek and submissive folk,
generations and generations of them, borne tamely like them his chains,
without an effort to break them, and break instead his lion's spirit?
Ought he to have contented himself with such a woeful existence, and to
have been willing at its end to mingle his ashes with the miserable dust
of all those countless masses of forgotten and unresisting slaves?
"Never!" replied what was bravest and worthiest of respect in the breast
of this truly great-hearted man. The burning wrong which he felt against
slavery had sunk in his mind below the reach of the grappling tongs of
reason. It lay like a charge of giant powder, with its slow match
attachment in the unplumbed depths of a soul which knew not fear; of a
soul which was as hot with smouldering hate and rage as is a live
volcano with its unvomited flame and lava. As well, under the
circumstances, have tried to subdue the profound fury of the one with
argument, as to quench the hidden fires of the other with water.

He knew, none better, that his oppressors were strong and that he was
weak; that he had but one slender chance in a hundred of redressing by
force the wrongs of himself and race. He knew too, that failure in such
a desperate enterprise could have for himself but a single issue, viz.:
certain death. But he believed that success on the other hand meant for
him and his the gain of that which alone was able to make their lives
worth the living, to wit.: a free man