new and wild sensations in the abysses of that under world
of the slave-race. Down deep below the ken of the masters was toiling
this volcanic man, forming the lava-floods, the flaming furies, and the
awful horrors of a slave uprising.

Nowhere idle was that underground plotter against the whites. Even on
the street where he happened to meet two or three blacks, he would bring
the conversation to his one consuming subject, and preach to them his
one unending sermon of freedom and hate. It was then as if his stern
voice, with its deep organ chords of passion, was saying to those men:
"Forget not, oh my brothers your misery. Remember how ye are wronged
every day and hour, ye and your mothers and sisters, your wives and
children. Remember the generations gone weeping and clanking heavy chains
from the cradle to the grave. Remember the oppression of the living, who
with heart-break and death-wounds, are treading their mournful way in
bitter anguish and despair across burning desert sands, with parched soul
and shriveled minds, with piteous thirsts, and terrible tortures of body
and spirit. Weep for them, weep for yourselves too, if ye will, but learn
to hate, ay, to hate with such hatred as blazes within me, the wicked
slave-system and the wickeder white men who oppress and wrong us thus."

Ever on the alert was he for a text or a pretext to advance his
underground movement. Did he and fellow blacks for example, encounter a
white person on the street, and did Vesey's companions make the
customary bow, which blacks were wont to make to whites, a form of
salutation born of generations of slave-blood, meanly humble and
cringingly self-effacing, rebuking such an exhibition of sheer and
shameless servility and lack of proper self-respect, he would thereupon
declare to them the self-evident truth that all men were born free and
equal, that the master, with his white skin, was in the sight of God no
whit better than his black slaves, and that for himself he would not
cringe like that to any man.

Should the sorry wretches, bewildered by Vesey's boldness and dazed by
his terrifying doctrines, reply defensively "we are slaves," the harsh
retort "you deserve to remain so," was, without doubt, intended to sting
if possible, their abject natures into sensibility on the subject of
their wrongs, to galvanize their rotting souls back to manhood, and to
make their base and sieve-like minds capable of receiving and retaining,
at least, a