s.
Invention, care, forethought were as good as unknown among them. Slave
labor proved incompetent even for agriculture, impoverishing the richest
soil in comparatively few years, whence the perpetual impulse of the
slave-owners to acquire new territory. The dishonesty of blacks and the
danger of slave insurrections made property insecure, at the same time
that the system diminished in every community the number of its natural
defenders. The result was that the South, the superior of the North in
natural resources, was, by 1800, rapidly becoming the inferior in every
single element of prosperity.

[1831]

One of these insurrections was the event of 1831 in Virginia,
originating near the southern border. Four slaves in alliance with three
whites commenced it by killing several families and pressing all the
slaves they could find into their service, until the force was nearly
two hundred. They spread desolation everywhere. Fifty-five white persons
were murdered before the insurrection was in hand. Virginia and North
Carolina called out troops, and at last all the insurgents were captured
or killed. The leader was a black named Nat Turner, who believed himself
called of God to give his people freedom. He had heard voices in the air
and seen signs on the sky, which, with many other portents, he
interpreted as proofs of his divine commission. When all was over Turner
escaped to the woods, dug a hole under some fence-rails and lived there
for six weeks, coming out only at midnight for food. Driven thence by
discovery, he still managed to hide here and there about the plantations
in spite of a whole country of armed men in search of him, until at last
he was accidentally confronted in the bush by a white man with levelled
rifle. He was hanged, November 11th, and sixteen others later. His wife
was tortured for evidence, but in vain. Twelve negroes were transported.
Very many were, without trial, punished in inhuman ways, the heads of
some impaled along the highway as a warning. Partly in consequence of
this horrible affair, originated a stout movement for the abolition of
slavery in Virginia. This was favored by many of the ablest men in the
Old Dominion, but they were overruled.

[Illustration: Turner, holding a short sword and another man pointing a
rifle at him.]
The Discovery of Nat Turner.

Danger from the blacks necessitated the most rigid laws concerning them.
Time had been when it was thought not dangerous to t