Every one of these statements appears to be absolutely erroneous. Gabriel lived and died a slave, and was probably never out of Virginia. His plot was voluntarily revealed by accomplices. The rewards offered for his arrest amounted to three hundred dollars only. He concealed himself on board the schooner Mary, bound to Norfolk, and was discovered by the police. He died on the gallows, with ten associates, having made no address to the court or the people. All the errors of the statement were contradicted when it was first made public, but they have proved very hard to kill.
It is stated at the close of this newspaper romance,--and it may nevertheless be true,--that these events were embodied in a song bearing the same title with this essay, "Gabriel's Defeat," and set to a tune of the same name, both being composed by a colored man. The reporter claims to have heard it in Virginia, as a favorite air at the dances of the white people, as well as in the huts of the slaves. It would certainly be one of history's strange parallelisms, if this fatal enterprise, like that of John Brown afterwards, should thus triumphantly have embalmed itself in music. But I have found no other trace of such a piece of border-minstrelsy, and it is probable that even this plaintive memorial has at length disappeared.
Yet, twenty-two years after these events their impression still remained vivid enough for Benjamin Lundy, in Tennessee, to write,--"So well had they matured their plot, and so completely had they organized their system of operations, that nothing but a seemingly miraculous intervention of the arm of Providence was supposed to have been capable of saving the city from pillage and flames, and the inhabitants thereof from butchery. So dreadful was the alarm and so great the consternation produced on this occasion, that a member of Congress from that State was some time after heard to express himself in his place as follows: 'The night-bell is never heard to toll in the city of Richmond but the anxious mother presses her infant more closely to her bosom.'" The Congressman was John Randolph of Roanoke, and it was Gabriel who had taught him the lesson.
And longer than the melancholy life of that wayward statesman,--down even to the beginning of the present civil war, and perhaps to this very moment,--there lingered in Richmond a memorial of those days, most peculiar and most instructive. Before the days of Secession, when the Northern traveller in Virginia, after traversing for weary leagues its miry ways, its desolate fields, and its flowery forests, rode at last into its metropolis,--now slowly expanded into a city of twenty-eight thousand inhabitants,--he was sure to be guided erelong to visit its stately Capitol, modelled by Jefferson, when French minister, from the Maison Carrée. Standing before it, he might admire undisturbed the Grecian outline of its exterior, or criticize at will the unsightly cheapness of its stucco imitations; but he found himself forbidden to enter, save by passing an armed and uniformed sentinel at the door-way. No other State of the Union has thus found it necessary in time of profoundest quiet to protect its State-House by a permanent cordon of bayonets; indeed, the Constitution expressly prohibits to any State a standing army, however small. Yet there for sixty years has stood sentinel the "Public Guard" of Virginia, wearing the suicidal motto of that decaying Commonwealth, "_Sic semper Tyrannis_"; and when one asked the origin of the precaution, one learned that it was the lasting memorial of Gabriel's insurrection, the stern heritage of terror bequeathed by his defeat.