In the 1830s, the growing abolitionist movement among northern middle-class evangelicals openly challenged the South on the issue of slavery. Although the South had seen a few attempts at slave uprisings in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the rebellion of Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831 was the first sustained uprising that had an impact. At least fifty white people died in the rebellion before Turner and his fellows were captured and hanged. After Turner’s rebellion, southerners grew increasingly paranoid about attacks on the institution of slavery. Critics of the institution faced censorship, repression, and lynch mobs, and southern intellectuals began crafting a defense of slavery as a positive social good for racially inferior black slaves. In 1836 southerners secured a gag resolution in Congress that precluded from debate all antislavery appeals.