Chicago (IL) Tribune, "Previous Insurrections," October 24, 1859

               Previous Insurrections.

            [From the N.Y. Evening Post.]

   It is altogether an error to represent this (Harper's Ferry) as the most daring insurrection that has taken place in the United States. The Southampton movement in 1831, which originated with Nat Turner, a slave preacher, which was concerted among the slaves themselves, and which was only suppressed after the murder, in cold blood, of some fifty or sixty white persons, was a far more formidable manifestation of discontent and ability. Again, the revolt in Tennessee in 1857, the ringleaders of which evinced so much determination, and the ramifications of whose plots were supposed to extend not only over that State, but into Arkansas and Louisiana, assumed more fearful proportions than this Virginia stampede. Those outbreaks were spontaneous movements of the servile class, but this one was chiefly stimulated from the outside, by a few frenzied men, who conceived they could best wreak their vengeance on the slaveholders in that way.