What most troubled Hammond and his fellow Southerners was the rapid intensification of antislavery sentiment in the North, epitomized in 1831 by William Lloyd Garrison’s founding in Boston of his abolitionist newspaper the Liberator. Antislavery societies soon proliferated and began bombarding the South with pamphlets and broadsides that depicted slavery as an unalloyed evil. Many Virginians blamed Garrison’s rhetoric for igniting the Nat Turner Rebellion of August 21–22, 1831, in which Turner and coconspirators killed fifty-five whites.
