in the penance! The outbreak lasted for but forty-eight hours; but,
during that period, fifty-five whites were slain, without the loss of a
single slave.

One fear was needless, which to many a husband and father must have
intensified the last struggle. These negroes had been systematically
brutalized from childhood; they had been allowed no legalized or
permanent marriage; they had beheld around them an habitual
licentiousness, such as can scarcely exist except under slavery; some of
them had seen their wives and sisters habitually polluted by the husbands
and the brothers of these fair white women who were now absolutely in
their power. Yet I have looked through the Virginia newspapers of that
time in vain for one charge of an indecent outrage on a woman against
these triumphant and terrible slaves. Wherever they went, there went
death, and that was all. It is reported by some of the contemporary
newspapers, that a portion of this abstinence was the result of
deliberate consultation among the insurrectionists; that some of them
were resolved on taking the white women for wives, but were overruled by
Nat Turner. If so, he is the only American slave-leader of whom we know
certainly that he rose above the ordinary level of slave vengeance; and
Mrs. Stowe's picture of Dred's purposes is then precisely typical of his:
"Whom the Lord saith unto us, 'Smite,' them will we smite. We will not
torment them with the scourge and fire, nor defile their women as they
have done with ours. But we will slay them utterly, and consume them from
off the face of the earth."

When the number of adherents had increased to fifty or sixty, Nat Turner
judged it time to strike at the county-seat, Jerusalem. Thither a few
white fugitives had already fled, and couriers might thence be despatched
for aid to Richmond and Petersburg, unless promptly intercepted. Besides,