address to the court or the people. All the errors of the statement were
contradicted when it was first made public, but they have proved very
hard to kill.

Some of these events were embodied in a song bearing the same title with
this essay, "Gabriel's Defeat," and set to a tune of the same name, both
being composed by a colored man. Several witnesses have assured me of
having heard this sung in Virginia, as a favorite air at the dances of
the white people, as well as in the huts of the slaves. It is surely one
of history's strange parallelisms, that this fatal enterprise, like that
of John Brown afterwards, should thus have embalmed itself in music. And
twenty-two years after these events, their impression still remained
vivid enough for Benjamin Lundy, in Tennessee, to write: "So well had
they matured their plot, and so completely had they organized their
system of operations, that nothing but a seemingly miraculous
intervention of the arm of Providence was supposed to have been capable
of saving the city from pillage and flames, and the inhabitants thereof
from butchery. So dreadful was the alarm and so great the consternation
produced on this occasion, that a member of Congress from that State was
some time after heard to express himself in his place as follows: 'The
night-bell is never heard to toll in the city of Richmond, but the
anxious mother presses her infant more closely to her bosom.'" The
Congressman was John Randolph of Roanoke, and it was Gabriel who had
taught him the lesson.

And longer than the melancholy life of that wayward statesman,--down even
to the beginning of the American civil war,--there lingered in Richmond a
memorial of those days, most peculiar and most instructive. Before the
days of secession, when the Northern traveller in Virginia, after
traversing for weary leagues its miry ways, its desolate fields, and its