Nat's second dream comes while he is chained to the bench in court. He dreams of black chldren being sucked down into a fetid swamp. But he has misplaced his Bible and can do nothing to save them.
In court, he tries to pray, but feels his prayers falling to the ground rather than rising up to heaven. He feels he has been abandoned by God and that makes him fear death for the first time.
Listening to the prosecutor, Nat feels the denunciations of the closing arguments flow directly, naturally from his own confessions. He accepts the savagery of his actions.
Nat notes ruefully that Gray has a different speaking manner in front of whites in court: "I had grown only mildly surprised by his voice, filled as it was with eloquence and authority, free of the sloppy patronizing half-literate white-man-to-a-nigger tones he had used in jail.
In Gray's summation, another version of the "cloak" Nat cites as necessary to cloak a Negro's true thoughts. Gray sees it as cloaking baseness, deviance, speaking of: "the evasiveness the Negro uses to cloak and disguise the base quality of his nature."
Nat also winces as Gray speaks with reverance of the slaves who stayed loyal to their masters and defended them from the insurrectionists.
Gray's argument becomes a eugenic pereoration as he explains that what separates Napoleon from Nat is the inadequate cranial capacity of the Negro race.
Nat refers to his first recruits to his conspiracy (Hark, Henry, Nelson, Sam) as "men of God, and messengers of His vengence."
Nat hopes to exclude from his cadre the ungovernable Will who has "the frenzied, mindless quality of a wild boar cornered hopelessly in a thicket, snarling and snapping its brutish and unavailing wrath."
The issue for Nat with Will if clearly that he is unrepressed; he speaks of Will the same way whites speak of "niggers" as a whole. But Will shares, in uncontrolled form, all Nat's mingled hatreds and passions; Nat represses his desire for the white girl Catherine Whitehead (and hates her for her easy intimacy and trust) while Will mutters obsessively under his breath "get me some of that white stuff" and more derisively "old white cunt." Nat excludes Will from his recruitment because it is well known that he "broods upon rape," which Nat has forbidden to his followers.
Nat sentenced to death by Judge Cobb, who summarizes the enormity of his crimes while nevertheless referring to his sympathy for the criminal.
Later, back in jail, Hark relates to Nat from the next cell the vigilante riots that followed the capture of the insurrectionists and the many innocent blacks who were murdered by whites seeking retribution.
Gray comes to Nat's cell to tell him he's been denied access to a Bible.
He then lectures Nat that "Christianity is finished" chiding Nat that "the message contained in Holy Scripture was the cause, the prime mover of the entire miserable catastrophe" -- causing the deaths of Nat's followers, of their 55 white victims, and of the innocent blacks killed in the ensuing mob violence.
"Don't you see,". Gray asks, "the plain ordinary evil of your dad-burned Bible?"
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