whites at once became the subjects for discussion: he incidentally
mentioned that the masters had been heard threatening to drive them away;
one slave had been ordered to shoot Mr. Jones's pigs, another to tear
down Mr. Johnson's fences. The poor whites, Johnson and Jones, ran home
to see to their homesteads, and were better friends than ever to Prophet
Nat.

He never was a Baptist preacher, though such vocation has often been
attributed to him. The impression arose from his having immersed himself,
during one of his periods of special enthusiasm, together with a poor
white man named Brantley. "About this time," he says in his Confession,
"I told these things to a white man, on whom it had a wonderful effect;
and he ceased from his wickedness, and was attacked immediately with a
cutaneous eruption, and the blood oozed from the pores of his skin, and
after praying and fasting nine days he was healed. And the Spirit
appeared to me again, and said, as the Saviour had been baptized, so
should we be also; and when the white people would not let us be baptized
by the church, we went down into the water together, in the sight of many
who reviled us, and were baptized by the Spirit. After this I rejoiced
greatly, and gave thanks to God."

The religious hallucinations narrated in his Confession seem to have been
as genuine as the average of such things, and are very well expressed.
The account reads quite like Jacob Behmen. He saw white spirits and black
spirits contending in the skies; the sun was darkened, the thunder
rolled. "And the Holy Ghost was with me, and said, 'Behold me as I stand
in the heavens!' And I looked, and saw the forms of men in different
attitudes. And there were lights in the sky, to which the children of
darkness gave other names than what they really were; for they were the
lights of the Saviour's hands, stretched forth from east to west, even as