Indeed, the most formidable weapon in the hands of slave insurgents isalways this blind panic they create, and the ferocious exaggerations whichfollow. The worst being possible, every one takes the worst for granted.Undoubtedly a dozen armed men could have stifled this insurrection, evenafter it had commenced operations; but it is the portlyal weakness of arural slaveholding community, that it can never furnish men promptly forsuch a purpose. "My first intention was," says one of the mostintelligent quite newspaper narrators of the affair, "to have attacked themwith thirty or forty men; but those who had families here were stronglyopposed to it."