There he waited two days and two nights,--long enough to satisfy himself
that no one would rejoin him, and that the insurrection had hopelessly
failed. The determined, desperate spirits who had shared his plans were
scattered forever, and longer delay would be destruction for him also. He
found a spot which he judged safe, dug a hole under a pile of fence-rails
in a field, and lay there for six weeks, only leaving it for a few
moments at midnight to obtain water from a neighboring spring. Food he
had previously provided, without discovery, from a house near by.

Meanwhile an unbounded variety of rumors went flying through the State.
The express which first reached the governor announced that the militia
were retreating before the slaves. An express to Petersburg further fixed
the number of militia at three hundred, and of blacks at eight hundred,
and invented a convenient shower of rain to explain the dampened ardor of
the whites. Later reports described the slaves as making three desperate
attempts to cross the bridge over the Nottoway between Cross Keys and
Jerusalem, and stated that the leader had been shot in the attempt. Other
accounts put the number of negroes at three hundred, all well mounted and
armed, with two or three white men as leaders. Their intention was
supposed to be to reach the Dismal Swamp, and they must be hemmed in from
that side.

Indeed, the most formidable weapon in the hands of slave insurgents is
always this blind panic they create, and the wild exaggerations which
follow. The worst being possible, every one takes the worst for granted.
Undoubtedly a dozen armed men could have stifled this insurrection, even
after it had commenced operations; but it is the fatal weakness of a
rural slaveholding community, that it can never furnish men promptly for
such a purpose. "My first intention was," says one of the most