ere was a
motion among their boughs; he stopped to watch it; and through a gap in
the branches he saw, emerging from a hole in the earth beneath, the
face of Nat Turner. Aiming his gun instantly, Phipps called on him
to surrender. The fugitive, exhausted with watching and privation,
entangled in the branches, armed only with a sword, had nothing to do
but to yield; sagaciously reflecting, also, as he afterwards explained,
that the woods were full of armed men, and that he had better trust
fortune for some later chance of escape, instead of desperately
attempting it then. He was correct in the first impression, since there
were fifty armed scouts within a circuit of two miles. His insurrection
ended where it began; for this spot was only a mile and a half from the
house of Joseph Travis.

Torn, emaciated, ragged, "a mere scarecrow," still wearing the hat
perforated with buckshot, with his arms bound to his sides, he was
driven before the levelled gun to the nearest house, that of a Mr.
Edwards. He was confined there that night; but the news had spread so
rapidly that within an hour after his arrival a hundred persons had
collected, and the excitement became so intense "that it was with
difficulty he could be conveyed alive to Jerusalem." The enthusiasm
spread instantly through Virginia; Mr. Trezvant, the Jerusalem
postmaster, sent notices of it far and near; and Governor Floyd himself
wrote a letter to the "Richmond Enquirer" to give official announcement
of the momentous capture.

When Nat Turner was asked by Mr. T.R. Gray, the counsel assigned him,
whether, although defeated, he still believed in his own Providential
mission, he answered, as simply as one who came thirty years after him,
"Was not Christ crucified?" In the same spirit, when arraigned before
the court, "he answered, 'Not guilty,' saying to his counsel that he did
not feel so." But apparently no argument was made in his favor by his
counsel, nor were any witnesses called,--he being convicted on the
testimony of Levi Waller, and upon his own confession, which was put in
by Mr. Gray, and acknowledged by the prisoner before the six justices
composing the court, as being "full, free, and voluntary." He was
therefore placed in the paradoxical position of conviction by his own
confession, under a plea of "Not guilty." The arrest took place on the
thirtieth of October, 1831, the confession on the first of November, the
trial and conviction on the fifth, and th