Certainly, Bird did not want his play to be "damned" in the south. And while Bird himself was worried that, "The Gladiator" produced in a Slave state would lead to, "the managers, players, and perhaps myself ... rewarded with the Penitentiary," he also differentiated between "nobel" Thracian rebels and "violent" African American slaves. Writing in his journal of the Nat Turner slave rebellion, Bird remarks, "if they had had a Spartacus among them to organize the half million of Virginia, the hundreds of thousands of the [other] states, and lead them on in the Crusade of Massacre, what a blessed example might they not give the world of the excellence of slavery."