On Sept. 8, 1800, a Virginia correspondent wrote thus to the Philadelphia
_United-States Gazette:_--

"For the week past, we have been under momentary expectation of a
rising among the negroes, who have assembled to the number of
nine hundred or a thousand, and threatened to massacre all the
whites. They are armed with desperate weapons, and secrete
themselves in the woods. God only knows our fate: we have strong
guards every night under arms."

It was no wonder, if there were foundation for such rumors. Liberty was
the creed or the cant of the day. France was being disturbed by
revolution, and England by Clarkson. In America, slavery was habitually
recognized as a misfortune and an error, only to be palliated by the
nearness of its expected end. How freely anti-slavery pamphlets had been
circulated in Virginia, we know from the priceless volumes collected and
annotated by Washington, and now preserved in the Boston Athenaeum.
Jefferson's "Notes on Virginia," itself an anti-slavery tract, had passed
through seven editions. Judge St. George Tucker, law-professor in William
and Mary College, had recently published his noble work, "A Dissertation
on Slavery, with a Proposal for the Gradual Abolition of it in the State
of Virginia." From all this agitation, a slave insurrection was a mere
corollary. With so much electricity in the air, a single flash of
lightning foreboded all the terrors of the tempest. Let but a single
armed negro be seen or suspected, and at once, on many a lonely
plantation, there were trembling hands at work to bar doors and windows
that seldom had been even closed before, and there was shuddering when a
gray squirrel scrambled over the roof, or a shower of walnuts came down
clattering from the overhanging boughs.