This purpose was executed with terrible severity and exactness.

All that night the work of extermination went on as the slave leader and his followers passed like fate from house to house, and plantation to plantation, leaving a wide swathe of death in their track.

Terror filled the night, terror filled the State, the most abject terror clutched the bravest hearts.

The panic was pitiable, horrible.

James McDowell, one of the leaders of the Old Dominion, gave voice to the awful memories and sensations of that night, in the great anti-slavery debate, which broke out in the Virginia Legislature, during the winter afterward.