the woods. But the immediate danger was at an end, the short-lived
insurrection was finished, and now the work of vengeance was to begin. In
the frank phrase of a North Carolina correspondent, "The massacre of the
whites was over, and the white people had commenced the destruction of
the negroes, which was continued after our men got there, from time to
time, as they could fall in with them, all day yesterday." A postscript
adds, that "passengers by the Fayetteville stage say, that, by the latest
accounts, one hundred and twenty negroes had been killed,"--this being
little more than one day's work.

These murders were defended as Nat Turner defended his: a fearful blow
must be struck. In shuddering at the horrors of the insurrection, we have
forgotten the far greater horrors of its suppression.

The newspapers of the day contain many indignant protests against the
cruelties which took place. "It is with pain," says a correspondent of
the _National Intelligencer_, Sept. 7, 1831, "that we speak of another
feature of the Southampton Rebellion; for we have been most unwilling to
have our sympathies for the sufferers diminished or affected by their
misconduct. We allude to the slaughter of many blacks without trial and
under circumstances of great barbarity.... We met with an individual of
intelligence who told us that he himself had killed between ten and
fifteen.... We [the Richmond troop] witnessed with surprise the
sanguinary temper of the population, who evinced a strong disposition to
inflict immediate death on every prisoner."

There is a remarkable official document from Gen. Eppes, the officer in
command, to be found in the Richmond _Enquirer_ for Sept. 6, 1831. It is
an indignant denunciation of precisely these outrages; and though he
refuses to give details, he supplies their place by epithets: