National Response

Newspapers and individual citizens across the nation reacted to the events in Southampton in a variety of ways, both publicly and privately. Responses ranged from indignation and horror to and sympathy and even satisfaction. Black and white adherents to the emerging abolitionist cause stressed the inevitability of the kind of large-scale rebellion that the slaves in Southampton County had effected and the culpability of southern slaveholders in the bloodshed. Other northerners offered their support to southern whites at such a time; some white southerners acknowledged these sentiments and voiced their appreciation.