freedom are reported as uttered in the Virginia House of
Delegates with unclosed doors,--until an obscure young man named
Garrison is indicted at Common Law in North Carolina, and has a price
set upon his head by the Legislature of Georgia. The insurrection
revived in one agonizing reminiscence all the distresses of Gabriel's
Revolt, thirty years before; and its memory endures still fresh, now
that thirty added years have brought the more formidable presence of
General Butler. It is by no means impossible that the very children or
even confederates of Nat Turner may be included at this moment among the
contraband articles of Fort Monroe.

Near the southeastern border of Virginia, in Southampton County, there
is a neighborhood known as "The Cross Keys". It lies fifteen miles from
Jerusalem, the county-town or "court-house", seventy miles from Norfolk,
and about as far from Richmond. It is some ten or fifteen miles from
Murfreesboro in North Carolina, and about twenty-five from the Great
Dismal Swamp. Up to Sunday, the twenty-first of August, 1831, there was
nothing to distinguish it from any other rural, lethargic, slipshod
Virginia neighborhood, with the due allotment of mansion-houses and
log-huts, tobacco-fields and "old-fields", horses, dogs, negroes, "poor
white folks", so called, and other white folks, poor without being
called so. One of these last was Joseph Travis, who had recently married
the widow of one Putnam Moore, and had unfortunately wedded to himself
her negroes also.

In the woods on the plantation of Joseph Travis, upon the Sunday just
named, six slaves met at noon for what is called in the Northern States
a picnic and in the Southern a barbecue. The bill of fare was to be
simple: one brought a pig, and another some brandy, giving to the
meeting an aspect so cheaply convivial that no one would have imagined
it to be the final consummation of a conspiracy which had been for six
months in preparation. In this plot four of the men had been already
initiated,--Henry, Hark or Hercules, Nelson, and Sam. Two others were
novices, Will and Jack by name. The party had remained together from
twelve to three o'clock, when a seventh man joined them,--a short,
stout, powerfully built person, of dark mulatto complexion and
strongly-marked African features, but with a face full of expression and
resolution. This was Nat Turner.

He was at this time nearly thirty-one years old, having been born on
the second of Oct