Richmond Compiler,

reprinted in New York Daily Sentinel, October 11, 1831

The author of this newspaper article expressed views similar to those in Governor John Floyd's message to the Virginia General Assembly on December 6, 1831. 

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        The black missionaries must be prevented from travelling about. The black preachers must be disbanded. All unlawful meetings must be suspended and the laws for that purpose should be enforced. Slaves must be confined to their own plantations - not permitted to go off, but upon urgent considerations. The attendance of large collections of blacks from distant places at some central point must be restricted - for these meetings are poinr d'appui, where they may give and recieve information, form plans, and communicate signs and watch-words.

        Further still. - The laws forbidding schools and education, must be enforced, as they have been in this city - since the law of the last Legislature [barring the education of blacks] was to go into force

        Further. - Regular patrols ought to be established in the counties and cities. Arms ought to be distributed among the whites, where necessary, and proper means taken to perserve them, to prevent their being stolen and lost. Uniform companies ough to be encouraged, and a good corps of cavalry especially organized in the towns and counties.

        In fine, every means ought to be taken, to give a more effective organization to the one part, and to prevent concert and communication in the other.

        Here many persons might stop, but others would go further still, and ask, if some means had not better be devised for striking a gradual stroke at the root of the evil.

Eric Foner, editor, Nat Turner (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971), 94.