Niles Register (Baltimore, Maryland),

September 10, 1831

 

MISCELLANEOUS

 

        Virginia— The troops that marched from Richmond to Southampton have returned. Several of the blacks taken prisoner have already been condemned to death. There is a great deal of force, and truth too, in the following remarks from the Boston Courier on this subject—

 

              We infer, from the tone of the newspaper in Virginia, that the public will not be

              satisfied with anything less than the total extermination of the murderers. Public

              justice would strike only at the leaders, for they, and those whose injudicious

              philanthropy excites their disaffection still more than they, are fairly accountable

              for the mischief; but oppressed as Virginia is with the tremendous evil of slavery, it

              is to be expected that men will take counsel of their fear, rather than their reason.

 

        At an entertainment given at Petersburg to the Richmond light dragoons, John H. Pleasant, esq., offered the following toast: “Henry B. Vaughan—the Jerusalem publican, whose speculated upon the bones of his kindred, which the dragoons went to bury and avenge.”

 

        The idea prevails, that because of the terrible events in Southampton, the white population, in case of like outrages in the future, will retaliate by an indiscriminate slaughter of the blacks—and such, we think, will probably take place !. Indeed, a few days since, in Charles City county, a rising of the negroes being feared, an armed body of white men shot down two blacks, because they attempted to run away. There is much fear and feeling in several of the lower counties of the state; and the white inhabitants seem to be in a constant excitement.

 

 

Henry Irving Tragle, The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation of Source Material (Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1971), 76.