easants (14) cites--and repudiates--rumors that the slaves involved in the revolt numbered up to 1,200 and that Turner and his followers intended to seize a ship at Norfolk and set sail for Africa and freedom (16). A letter from Petersburg, Virginia, printed in the New York Morning Courier and Enquirer declared that plunder was the objective of the rebellion (ôExtractö 23) and that the conspiracy had been planned at a mass Negro baptism at the river. It turned out that plunder, pillage, and rape were specifically not part of the rebellion (Pleasants 15), and the number of conspirators was limited to six; additional rebels were accumulated along the murder path. As Gray (29) puts it: ôHis object was freedom and indiscriminate carnage his watchword . . . and seemed to be his ultimatum; for farther, he gave no clue to his design.ö
Slave insurrections were also rumored to have broken out in North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, Delaware, and Maryland (ôInsurrectionaryö 78; Garrison 83). In fact, the ôSouthampton Tragedy,ö as newspapers in both the North and South called the revolt, appears to have been highly localized in the rural plantation country of southeastern Virginia, near the North Carolina border. The objectives of the rebels remained mysterious beyond the view that they were ôstimulated exclusively by fanatical revenge, and perhaps misled by some hallucination of [TurnerÆs] imagined spirit of prophecyö (Pleasants 16).
Whites were puzzled about the motives of Turner. By TurnerÆs own account, TurnerÆs mast
...