University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XXII
SLAVE CRIME

THE negroes were in a strange land, coercively subjected
to laws and customs far different from those of their ancestral
country; and by being enslaved and set off into a
separate lowly caste they were largely deprived of that incentive
to conformity which under normal conditions the hope of individual
advancement so strongly gives. It was quite to be expected
that their conduct in general would be widely different
from that of the whites who were citizens and proprietors. The
natural amenability of the blacks, however, had been a decisive
factor in their initial enslavement, and the reckoning which their
captors and rulers made of this was on the whole well founded.
Their lawbreaking had few distinctive characteristics, and gave
no special concern to the public except as regards rape and revolt.

Records of offenses by slaves are scant because on the one
hand they were commonly tried by somewhat informal courts
whose records are scattered and often lost, and on the other hand
they were generally given sentences of whipping, death or deportation,
which kept their names out of the penitentiary lists.
One errs, however, in assuming a dearth of serious infractions
on their part and explaining it by saying, "under a strict slave
régime there can scarcely be such a thing as crime";[1] for investigation
reveals crime in abundance. A fairly typical record in
the premises is that of Baldwin County, Georgia, in which the
following trials of slaves for felonies between 1812 and 1832
are recounted: in 1812 Major was convicted of rape and sentenced
to be hanged. In 1815 Fannie Micklejohn, charged with the murder
of an infant was acquitted; and Tom, convicted of murdering
a fellow slave was sentenced to branding on each cheek with the

letter M and to thirty-nine lashes on his bare back on each of
three successive days, after which he was to be discharged. In
1816 John, a slave of William McGeehee, convicted of the theft
of a $100 bill was sentenced to whipping in similar fashion. In
1818 Aleck was found guilty of an assault with intent to murder,
and received sentence of fifty lashes on three days in succession.
In 1819 Rodney was capitally sentenced for arson. In
1821 Peter, charged with murdering a slave, was convicted of
manslaughter and ordered to be branded with M on the right
cheek and to be given the customary three times thirty-nine
lashes; and Edmund, charged with involuntary manslaughter,
was dismissed on the ground that the court had no cognizance of
such offense. In 1822 Davis was convicted of assault upon a
white person with intent to kill, but his sentence is not recorded.
In or about the same year John, a slave of William Robertson,
convicted of burglary but recommended to mercy, was sentenced
to be branded with T on the right cheek and to receive three
times thirty-nine lashes; and on the same day the same slave
was sentenced to death for assault upon a white man with intent
to kill. In 1825 John Ponder's George when convicted of burglary
was recommended by the jury to the mercy of the court but
received sentence of death nevertheless; and Stephen was sentenced
likewise for murderous assault upon a white man. In
1826 Elleck, charged with assault with intent of murder and
rape, was convicted on the first part of the charge only, but received
sentence of death. In 1828 Elizabeth Smith's George was
acquitted of larceny from the house; and next year Caroline was
likewise acquitted on a charge of maiming a white person. Finally,
in 1832 Martin, upon pleading guilty to a charge of murderous
assault, was given a whipping sentence of the customary
thirty-nine lashes on three successive days.[2]

A few negro felonies, indeed, resulted directly from the pressure
of slave circumstance. A gruesome instance occurred in

1864 in the same county as the foregoing. A young slave
woman, Becky by name, had given pregnancy as the reason for
a continued slackness in her work. Her master became skeptical
and gave notice that she was to be examined and might expect
the whip in case her excuse were not substantiated. Two days
afterward a negro midwife announced that Becky's baby had
been born; but at the same time a neighboring planter began
search for a child nine months old which was missing from his
quarter. This child was found in Becky's cabin, with its two
teeth pulled and the tip of its navel cut off. It died; and Becky,
charged with murder but convicted only of manslaughter, was
sentenced to receive two hundred lashes in instalments of twenty-five
at intervals of four days.[3] Some other deeds done by
slaves were crimes only because the law declared them to be
such when committed by persons of that class. The striking
of white persons and the administering of medicine to them are
examples. But in general the felonies for which they were convicted
were of sorts which the law described as criminal regardless
of the status of the perpetrators.

In a West Indian colony and in a Northern state glimpses of
the volume of criminality, though not of its quality, may be
drawn from the fact that in the years from 1792 to 1802 the Jamaican
government deported 271 slave convicts at a cost of
£15,538 for the compensation of their masters,[4] and that in 1816
some forty such were deported from New York to New Orleans,
much to the disquiet of the Louisiana authorities.[5] As
for the South, state-wide statistical views with any approach to
adequacy are available for two commonwealths only. That of
Louisiana is due to the fact that the laws and courts there gave
sentences of imprisonment with considerable impartiality to
malefactors of both races and conditions. In its penitentiary report
at the end of 1860, for example, the list of inmates comprised
96 slaves along with 236 whites and 11 free colored. All

the slaves but fourteen were males, and all but thirteen were
serving life terms.[6] Classed by crimes, 12 of them had been sentenced
for arson, 3 for burglary or housebreaking, 28 for murder,
4 for manslaughter, 4 for poisoning, 5 for attempts to poison,
7 for assault with intent to kill, 2 for stabbing, 3 for shooting,
20 for striking or wounding a white person, 1 for wounding
a child, 4 for attempts to rape, and 3 for insurrection.[7] This
catalogue is notable for its omissions as well as for its content.
While there were four white inmates of the prison who stood
convicted of rape, there were no negroes who had accomplished
that crime. Likewise as compared with 52 whites and 4 free
negroes serving terms for larceny, there were no slave prisoners
in that category. Doubtless on the one hand the negro rapists
had been promptly put to death, and on the other hand the
slaves committing mere theft had been let off with whippings.
Furthermore there were no slaves committed for counterfeiting
or forgery, horse stealing, slave stealing or aiding slaves to escape.

The uniquely full view which may be had of the trend of serious
crimes among the Virginia slaves is due to the preservation
of vouchers filed in pursuance of a law of that state which for
many decades required appraisal and payment by the public for
all slaves capitally convicted and sentenced to death or deportation.
The file extends virtually from 1780 to 1864, except for
a gap of three years in the late 1850's.[8] The volume of crime
rose gradually decade by decade to a maximum of 242 in the
1820's, and tended to decline slowly thereafter. The gross number
of convictions was 1,418, all but 91 of which were of males.
For arson there were no slaves convicted, including 29 women.

For burglary there were 257, with but one woman among them.
The highway robbers numbered 15, the horse thieves 20, and the
thieves of other sorts falling within the purview of the vouchers
24, with no women in these categories. It would be interesting
to know how the slaves who stole horses expected to keep them
undiscovered, but this the vouchers fail to tell.

For murder there were 346, discriminated as having been
committed upon the master 56, the mistress 11, the overseer 11;
upon other white persons 120; upon free negroes 7; upon slaves
85, including 12 children all of whom were killed by their own
mothers; and upon persons not described 60. Of the murderers
307 were men and 39 women. For poisoning and attempts
to poison, including the administering of ground glass, 40 men
and 16 women were convicted, and there were also convictions
of one man and one woman for administering medicine to white
persons. For miscellaneous assault there were III sentences recorded,
all but eight of which were laid upon male offenders and
only two of which were described as having been directed against
colored victims.

For rape there were 73 convictions, and for attempts at rape
32. This total of 105 cases was quite evenly distributed in the
tale of years; but the territorial distribution was notably less in
the long settled Tidewater district than in the newer Piedmont
and Shenandoah. The trend of slave crime of most other sorts,
however, ran squarely counter to this; and its notably heavier
prevalence in the lowlands gives countenance to the contemporary
Southern belief that the presence of numerous free negroes
among them increased the criminal proclivities of the
slaves. In at least two cases the victims of rape were white
children; and in two others, if one be included in which the conviction
was strangely of mere "suspicion of rape," they were
free mulatto women. That no slave women were mentioned
among the victims is of course far from proving that these were
never violated, for such offenses appear to have been left largely
to the private cognizance of the masters.[9] A Delaware instance
of the sort attained record through an offer of reward for the

capture of a slave who had run away after being punished.

For insurrection or conspiracy 91 slaves were convicted, 36 of
them in Henrico County in 1800 for participation in Gabriel's revolt,
17 in 1831, mainly in Southampton County as followers of
Nat Turner, and the rest mostly scattering. Among miscellaneous
and unclassified cases there was one slave convicted of
forgery, another of causing the printing of anti-slavery writings,
and 301 sentenced without definite specification of their crimes.
Among the vouchers furthermore are incidental records of the
killing of a slave in 1788 who had been proclaimed an outlaw,
and of the purchase and manumission by the commonwealth of
Tom and Pharaoh in 1801 for services connected with the suppression
of Gabriel's revolt.

As to punishments, the vouchers of the eighteenth century are
largely silent, though one of them contains the only unusual sentence
to be found in the whole file. This directed that the head
of a slave who had murdered a fellow slave be cut off and stuck
on a pole at the forks of the road. In the nineteenth century
only about one-third of the vouchers record execution. The rest
give record of transportation whether under the original sentences
or upon commutation by the governor, except for the
cases which from 1859 to 1863 were more numerous than any
others where the commutations were to labor on the public
works.

The statistics of rape in Virginia, and the Georgia cases already
given, refute the oft-asserted Southern tradition that negroes
never violated white women before slavery was abolished.
Other scattering examples may be drawn from contemporary
newspapers. One of these occurred at Worcester, Massachusetts
in 1768.[10] Upon conviction the negro was condemned to
death, although a white man at the same time found guilty of an
attempt at rape was sentenced merely to sit upon the gallows.

In Georgia the governor issued a proclamation in 1811 offering
reward for the capture of Jess, a slave who had ravished the wife
of a citizen of Jones County;[11] and in 1844 a jury in Habersham
County, after testimony by the victim and others, found a slave
named Dave guilty of rape upon Hester An Dobbs, "a free white
female in the peace of God and state of Georgia," and the criminal
was duly hanged by the sheriff.[12] In Alabama in 1827 a
negro was convicted of rape at Tuscaloosa,[13] and another in
Washington County confessed after capture that while a runaway
he had met Miss Winnie Caller, taken her from her horse,
dragged her into the woods and butchered her "with circumstances
too horrible to relate";[14] and at Mobile in 1849 a slave
named Ben was sentenced to death for an attempt at rape upon
a white woman.[15] In Rapides Parish, Louisiana, in 1842, a young
girl was dragged into the woods, beaten and violated. Her injuries
caused her death next day. The criminal had been caught
when the report went to press.[16]

Other examples will show that lynchings were not altogether
lacking in those days in sequel to such crimes. Near the village
of Gallatin, Mississippi, in 1843, two slave men entered a farmer's
house in his absence and after having gotten liquor from his
wife by threats, "they forcibly took from her arms the infant
babe and rudely throwing it upon the floor, they threw her down,
and while one of them accomplished the fiendish design of a
ravisher the other, pointing the muzzle of a loaded gun at her
head, said he would blow out her brains if she resisted or made
any noise." The miscreants then loaded a horse with plunder
from the house and made off, but they were shortly caught by
pursuing citizens and hanged. The local editor said on his own
score when recounting the episode: "We have ever been and
now are opposed to any kind of punishment being administered
under the statutes of Judge Lynch; but . . . a due regard for

candor and the preservation of all that is held most sacred and
all that is most dear to man in the domestic circles of life impels
us to acknowledge the fact that if the perpetrators of this excessively
revolting crime had been burned alive, as was at first
decreed, their fate would have been too good for such diabolical
and inhuman wretches."[17]

An editorial in the Sentinel of Columbus, Georgia, described
and discussed a local occurrence of August 12, 1851, in a different
tone:

"Our community has just been made to witness the most highhanded
and humiliating act of violence that it has ever been our
duty to chronicle. . . . At the May term of the Superior Court a
negro man was tried and condemned on the charge of having attempted
to commit rape upon a little white girl in this county.
His trial was a fair one, his counsel was the best our bar afforded,
his jury was one of the most intelligent that sat upon the criminal
side of our court, and on patient and honest hearing he was found
guilty and sentenced to be hung on Tuesday, the 12th inst. This,
by the way, was the second conviction. The negro had been tried
and convicted before, but his counsel had moved and obtained a
new trial, which we have seen resulted like the first in a conviction.

"Notwithstanding his conviction, it was believed by some that
the negro was innocent. Those who believed him innocent, in a
spirit of mercy, undertook a short time since to procure his pardon;
and a petition to that effect was circulated among our citizens
and, we believe, very numerously signed. This we think was
a great error. . . . It is dangerous for the people to undertake to
meddle with the majesty of the jury trial; and strange as it may
sound to some people, we regard the unfortunate denouement of
this case as but the extreme exemplification of the very principle
which actuated those who originated this petition. Each proceeded
from a spirit of discontent with the decisions of the authorized
tribunals; the difference being that in the one case peaceful
means were used for the accomplishment of mistaken mercy,

and in the other violence was resorted to for the attainment of
mistaken justice.

"The petition was sent to Governor Towns, and on Monday
evening last the messenger returned with a full and free pardon
to the criminal. In the meantime the people had begun to flock in.
from the country to witness the execution; and when it was announced
that a pardon had been received, the excitement which
immediately pervaded the streets was indescribable. Monday night
passed without any important demonstration. Tuesday morning
the crowd in the streets increased, and the excitement with it. A
large and excited multitude gathered early in the morning at the
market house, and after numerous violent harangues a leader was
chosen, and resolutions passed to the effect that the mob should
demand the prisoner at four o'clock in the afternoon, and if he
should not be given up he was to be taken by force and executed.
After this decision the mob dispersed, and early in the afternoon,
upon the ringing of the market bell, it reassembled and proceeded
to the jail. The sheriff of the county of course refused to surrender
the negro, when he was overpowered, the prison doors
broken open, and the unfortunate culprit dragged forth and hung.

"These are the facts, briefly and we believe accurately, stated.
We do not feel now inclined to comment upon them. We leave
them to the public, praying in behalf of our injured community
all the charity which can be extended to an act so outraging, so
unpardonable."[18]

A similar occurrence in Sumter County, Alabama, in 1855 was
reported with no expression of regret. A negro who had raped
and murdered a young girl there was brought before the superior
court in regular session. "When the case was called for trial a
motion for change of venue to the county of Greene was granted.
This so exasperated the citizens of Sumter (many of whom were
in favor of summary punishment in the outset) that a large
number of them collected on the 23d. ult., took him out of prison,
chained him to a stake on the very spot where the murder was
committed, and in the presence of two or three thousand negroes

and a large number of white people,[19] burned him alive."
This mention of negroes in attendance is in sharp contrast with
their palpable absence on similar occasions in later decades.
They were present, of course, as at legal executions, by the command
of their masters to receive a lesson of deterrence. The
wisdom of this policy, however, had already been gravely questioned.
A Louisiana editor, for example, had written in comment
upon a local hanging: "The practice of sending slaves to
witness the execution of their fellows as a terror to them has
many advocates, but we are inclined to doubt its efficacy. We
took particular pains to notice on this occasion the effects which
this horrid spectacle would produce on their minds, and our observation
taught us that while a very few turned with loathing
from the scene, a large majority manifested that levity and curiosity
superinduced by witnessing a monkey show."[20]

For another case of lynching, which occurred in White County,
Tennessee, in 1858, there is available merely the court record of
a suit brought by the owners of the slave to recover pecuniary
damages from those who had lynched him. It is incidentally recited,
with strong reprehension by the court, that the negro was
in legal custody under a charge of rape and murder when certain
citizens, part of whom had signed a written agreement to
"stand by each other," broke into the jail and hanged the prisoner.[21]

In general the slaveholding South learned of crimes by individual
negroes with considerable equanimity. It was the news
or suspicion of concerted action by them which alone caused
widespread alarm and uneasiness. That actual deeds of rebellion
by small groups were fairly common Is suggested by the
numerous slaves convicted of murdering their masters and overseers
in Virginia, as well as by chance items from other quarters.
Thus in 1797 a planter in Screven County, Georgia, who
had recently bought a batch of newly imported Africans was set
upon and killed by them, and his wife's escape was made possible

only by the loyalty of two other slaves.[22] Likewise in Bullitt
County, Kentucky, in 1844, when a Mr. Stewart threatened one
of his slaves, that one and two others turned upon him and beat
him to death;[23] and in Arkansas in 1845 an overseer who was
attacked under similar circumstances saved his life only with the
aid of several neighbors and through the use of powder and
ball.[24] Such episodes were likely to grow as the reports of them
flew over the countryside. For instance in 1856 when an unruly
slave on a plantation shortly below New Orleans upon being
threatened with punishment seized an axe and was thereupon shot
by his overseer, the rumor of an insurrection quickly ran to and
through the city.[25]

If all such rumors as this, many of which had equally slight
basis, were assembled, the catalogue would reach formidable dimensions.
A large number doubtless escaped record, for the
newspapers esteemed them "a delicate subject to touch";[26] and
many of those which were recorded, we may be sure, have not
come to the investigator's notice. A survey of the revolts and
conspiracies and the rumors of such must nevertheless be attempted;
for their influence upon public thought and policy, at
least from time to time, was powerful.

Early revolts were of course mainly in the West Indies, for
these were long the chief plantation colonies. No more than
twenty years after the first blacks were brought to Hispaniola a
score of Joloff negroes on the plantation of Diego Columbus
rose in 1622 and were joined by a like number from other estates,
to carry death and desolation in their path until they were
all cut down or captured.[27] In the English islands precedents of
conspiracy were set before the blacks became appreciably numerous.
A plot among the white indentured servants in Barbados
in 1634 was betrayed and the ringleader executed;[28] and another

on a larger scale in 1649 had a similar end.[29] Incoming
negroes appear not to have taken a similar course until 1675
when a plot among them was betrayed by one of their number.
The governor promptly appointed captains to raise companies,
as a contemporary wrote,[30] "for repressing the rebels, which accordingly
was done, and abundance taken and apprehended and
since put to death, and the rest kept in a more stricter manner."
This quietude continued only until 1692 when three negroes were
seized on charge of conspiracy. One of these, on promise of
pardon, admitted the existence of the plot and his own participation
therein. The two others were condemned "to be hung in
chains on a gibbet till they were starved to death, and their bodies
to be burned." These endured the torture "for four days
without making any confession, but then gave in and promised
to confess on promise of life. One was accordingly taken down
on the day following. The other did not survive." The tale
as then gathered told that the slaves already pledged were
enough to form six regiments, and that arrangements were on
foot for the seizure of the forts and arsenal through bribery
among their custodians. The governor when reporting these disclosures
expressed the hope that the severe punishment of the
leaders, together with a new act offering freedom as reward to
future informers, would make the colony secure.[31] There seems
to have been no actual revolt of serious dimensions in Barbados
except in 1816 when the blacks rose in great mass and burned
more than sixty plantations, as well as killing all the whites they
could catch, before troops arrived from neighboring islands and
suppressed them.[32]

In Jamaica a small outbreak in 1677[33] was followed by another,
in Clarendon Parish, in 1690. When these latter insurgents
were routed by the whites, part of them, largely Coromantees
it appears, fled to the nearby mountain fastnesses where,

under the chieftainship of Cudjoe, they became securely established
as a community of marooned freemen. Welcoming runaway
slaves and living partly from depredations, they made
themselves so troublesome to the countryside that in 1733 the
colonial government built forts at the mouths of the Clarendon
defiles and sent expeditions against the Maroon villages. Cudjoe
thereupon shifted his tribe to a new and better buttressed
vale in Trelawney Parish, whither after five years more spent in
forays and reprisals the Jamaican authorities sent overtures for
peace. The resulting treaty, signed in 1738, gave recognition
to the Maroons, assigned them lands and rights of hunting, travel
and trade, pledged them to render up runaway slaves and criminals
in future, and provided for the residence of an agent of the
island government among the Maroons as their superintendent.
Under these terms peace prevailed for more than half a century,
while the Maroon population increased from 600 to 1400 souls.
At length Major James, to whom these blacks were warmly attached,
was replaced as superintendent by Captain Craskell whom
they disliked and shortly expelled. Tumults and forays now ensued,
in 1795, the effect of which upon the sentiment of the
whites was made stronger by the calamitous occurrences in San
Domingo. Negotiations for a fresh accommodation fell through,
whereupon a conquest was undertaken by a joint force of British
troops, Jamaican militia and free colored auxiliaries. The
prowess of the Maroons and the ruggedness of their district held
all these at bay, however, until a body of Spanish hunters with
trained dogs was brought in from Cuba. The Maroons, conquered
more by fright than by force, now surrendered, whereupon
they were transported first to Nova Scotia and thence at
the end of the century to the British protectorate in Sierra
Leone.[34] Other Jamaican troubles of some note were a revolt in
St. Mary's Parish in 1765,[35] and a more general one in 1832 in
which property of an estimated value of $1,800,000 was destroyed
before the rebellion was put down at a cost of some
$700,000 more.[36] There were troubles likewise in various other
colonies, as with insurgents in Antigua in 1701[37] and[38] 1736
and Martinique and Guadeloupe in 1752;[39] with maroons in
Grenada in 1765,[40] Dominica in 1785[41] and Demarara in[42] 1794;
and with conspirators in Cuba in 1825[43] and St. Croix[44] and
Porto Rico in 1848.[45]

Everything else of such nature, however, was eclipsed by the
prodigious upheaval in San Domingo consequent upon the
French Revolution. Under the flag of France the western end
of that island had been converted in the course of the eighteenth
century from a nest of buccaneers into the most thriving of plantation
colonies. By 1788 it contained some 28,000 white settlers,
22,000 free negroes and mulattoes, and 405,000 slaves. It had
nearly eight hundred sugar estates, many of them on a huge
scale. The soil was so fertile and the climate so favorable that
on many fields the sugar-cane would grow perennially from the
same roots almost without end. Exports of coffee and cotton
were considerable, of sugar and molasses enormous; and the
volume was still rapidly swelling by reason of the great annual
importations of African slaves. The colony was by far the most
valued of the French overseas possessions.

Some of the whites were descendants of the original freebooters,
and retained the temperament of their forbears; others were
immigrant fortune seekers. The white women were less than
half as numerous as the men, and black or yellow concubines
were common substitutes for wives. The colony was the French
equivalent of Jamaica, but more prosperous and more self-willed
and self-indulgent. Its whites were impatient of outside control,
and resolute that the slaves be ruled with iron hand and that
the colored freemen be kept passive.

A plentiful discontent with bureaucracy and commercial restraint

under the old régime caused the planters to welcome the
early news of reform projects in France and to demand representation
in the coming States General. But the rapid progress
of radical republicanism in that assembly threw most of these
into a royalist reaction, though the poorer whites tended still to
endorse the Revolution. But now the agitations of the Amis
des Noirs at Paris dismayed all the white islanders, while on the
other hand the National Assembly's "Declaration of the Rights
of Man," together with its decrees granting political equality in
somewhat ambiguous form to free persons of color, prompted
risings in 1791 among the colored freemen in the northern part
of the colony and among the slaves in the center and south.
When reports of these reached Paris, the new Legislative Assembly
revoked the former measures by a decree of September 24,
1791, transferring all control over negro status to the colonial assemblies.
Upon receiving news of this the mulattoes and blacks,
with the courage of despair, spread ruin in every district. The
whites, driven into the few fortified places, begged succor from
France; but the Jacobins, who were now in control at Paris, had
a programme of their own. By a decree of April 4, 1792, the
Legislative Assembly granted full political equality to colored
freemen and provided for the dispatch of Republican commissioners
to establish the new régime. The administration of the
colony by these functionaries was a travesty. Most of the surviving
whites emigrated to Cuba and the American continent,
carrying such of their slaves as they could command. The free
colored people, who at first welcomed the commissioners, unexpectedly
turned against them because of a decree of August 29,
1793, abolishing slavery.

At this juncture Great Britain, then at war with the French
Republic, intervened by sending an army to capture the colony.
Most of the colored freemen and the remaining whites rallied to
the flag of these invaders; but the slaves, now commanded by the
famous Toussaint L'Ouverture, resisted them effectually, while
yellow fever decimated their ranks and paralyzed their energies.
By 1795 the two colored elements, the mulattoes who had improvised
a government on a slaveholding basis in the south, and

the negroes who dominated the north, each had the other alone
as an active enemy; and by the close of the century the mulattoes
were either destroyed or driven into exile; and Toussaint,
while still acknowledging a nominal allegiance to France, was
virtual monarch of San Domingo. The peace of Amiens at
length permitted Bonaparte to send an army against the "Black
Napoleon." Toussaint soon capitulated, and in violation of the
amnesty granted him was sent to his death in a French dungeon.
But pestilence again aided the blacks, and the war was still raging
when the breach of the peace in Europe brought a British
squadron to blockade and capture the remnant of the French
army. The new black leader, Dessalines, now proclaimed the
colony's independence, renaming it Hayti, and in 1804 he
crowned himself emperor. In the following year any further
conflict with the local whites was obviated by the systematic massacre
of their small residue. In the other French islands the developments,
while on a much smaller scale, were analogous.[46]

In the Northern colonies the only signal disturbances were
those of 1712 and 1741 at New York, both of which were more
notable for the frenzy of the public than for the formidableness
of the menace. Anxiety had been recurrent among the whites,
particularly since the founding of a mission school by Elias Neau
in 1704 as an agent of the Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel. The plot was brewed by some Coromantee and Paw
Paw negroes who had procured the services of a conjuror to
make them invulnerable; and it may have been joined by several
Spanish or Portuguese Indians or mestizoes who had been captured
at sea and unwarrantly, as they contended, reduced to slavery.
The rebels to the number of twenty-three provided themselves
with guns, hatchets, knives and swords, and chose the dark
of the moon in the small hours of an April night to set a house
afire and slaughter the citizens as they flocked thither. But their
gunfire caused the governor to send soldiers from the Battery
with such speed that only nine whites had been killed and several

others wounded when the plotters were routed. Six of these
killed themselves to escape capture; but when the woods were
beaten and the town searched next day and an emergency court
sat upon the cases, more captives were capitally sentenced than
the whole conspiracy had comprised. The prosecuting officer,
indeed, hounded one of the prisoners through three trials, to win
a final conviction after two acquittals. The maxim that no one
may twice be put in jeopardy for the same offense evidently did
not apply to slaves in that colony. Of those convicted one was
broken on the wheel, another hanged alive in chains; nineteen
more were executed on the gallows or at the stake, one of these
being sentenced "to be burned with a slow fire, that he may continue
in torment for eight or ten hours and continue burning
in said fire until he be dead and consumed to ashes"; and
several others were saved only by the royal governor's reprieve
and the queen's eventual pardon. Such animosity was exhibited
by the citizens toward the "catechetical school" that for some
time its teacher hardly dared show himself on the streets. The
furor gradually subsided, however, and Mr. Neau continued his
work for a dozen years longer, and others carried it on after his
death.[47]

The commotion of 1741 was a panic among the whites of high
and low degree, prompted in sequel to a robbery and a series of
fires by the disclosures of Mary Burton, a young white servant
concerning her master John Hughson, and the confessions of
Margaret Kerry, a young white woman of many aliases but most
commonly called Peggy, who was an inmate of Hughson's disreputable
house and a prostitute to negro slaves. When Mary
testified under duress that Hughson was not only a habitual recipient
of stolen goods from the negroes but was the head of a
conspiracy among them which had already effected the burning
of many houses and was planning a general revolt, the supreme

court of the colony began a labor of some six months' duration
in bringing the alleged plot to light and punishing the alleged
plotters.[48] Hughson and his wife and the infamous Peggy were
promptly hanged, and likewise John Ury who was convicted of
being a Catholic priest as well as a conspirator; and twenty-nine
negroes were sent with similar speed either to the gallows or the
stake, while eighty others were deported. Some of the slaves
made confessions after conviction in the hope of saving their
lives; and these, dubious as they were, furnished the chief corroborations
of detail which the increasingly fluent testimony of
Mary Burton received. Some of the confessions, however, were
of no avail to those who made them. Quack and Cuffee, for example,
terror-stricken at the stake, made somewhat stereotyped
revelations; but the desire of the officials to stay the execution
with a view to definite reprieve was thwarted by their fear of
tumult by the throng of resentful spectators. After a staggering
number of sentences had been executed the star witness
raised doubts against herself by her endless implications, "for as
matters were then likely to turn out there was no guessing where
or when there would be an end of impeachments."[49] At length
she named as cognizant of the plot several persons "of known
credit, fortune and reputations, and of religious principles superior
to a suspicion of being concerned in such detestable practices;
at which the judges were very much astonished."[50] This
farcical extreme at length persuaded even the obsessed magistrates
to stop the tragic proceedings.

In New Jersey in 1734 a slave at Raritan when jailed for
drunkenness and insolence professed to reveal a plot for insurrection,

whereupon he and a fellow slave were capitally convicted.
One of them escaped before execution, but the other
was hanged.[51] In Pennsylvania as late as 1803 a negro plot at
York was detected after nearly a dozen houses had been burnt
and half as many attempts had been made to cause a general
conflagration. Many negroes were arrested; others outside made
preparations to release them by force; and for several days a
reign of terror prevailed. Upon the restoration of quiet, twenty
of the prisoners were punished for arson.[52]

In the Southern colonies there were no outbreaks in the seventeenth
century and but two discoveries of plots, it seems, both
in Virginia. The first of these, 1663, in which indented white
servants and negro slaves in Gloucester County were said to be
jointly involved, was betrayed by one of the servants. The colonial
assembly showed its gratification not only by freeing the informer
and giving him five thousand pounds of tobacco but by
resolving in commemoration of "so transcendant a favour as the
preserving all we have from so utter ruin," "that the 13th. of
September be annually kept holy, being the day those villains
intended to put the plot in execution."[53] The other plot, of
slaves alone, in the "Northern Neck" of the colony in 1687, appears
to have been of no more than local concern.[54] The punishments
meted out on either occasion are unknown.

The eighteenth century, with its multiplication of slaves, saw
somewhat more frequent plots in its early decades. The discovery
of one in Isle of Wight County, Virginia, in 1709 brought
thirty-nine lashes to each of three slaves and fifty lashes to a
free negro found to be cognizant, and presumably more drastic
punishments to two other slaves who were held as ringleaders
to await the governor's order. Still another slave who at least
for the time being escaped the clutches of the law was proclaimed
an outlaw.[55] The discovery of another plot in Gloucester and
Middlesex Counties of the same colony in 1723 prompted the assembly

to provide for the deportation to the West Indies of
seven slave participants.[56]

In South Carolina, although depredations by runaways gave
acute uneasiness in 1711 and thereabouts, no conspiracy was discovered
until 1720 when some of the participants were burnt,
some hanged and some banished.[57] Matters were then quiet
again until 1739 when on a September Sunday a score of Angola
blacks with one Jonny as their leader broke open a store, supplied
themselves with arms, and laid their course at once for
Florida where they had been told by Spanish emissaries welcome
and liberty awaited them. Marching to the beat of drums,
slaughtering with ease the whites they came upon, and drawing
black recruits to several times their initial number, on the Pon
Pon road that day the rebels covered ten prosperous miles. But
when at evening they halted to celebrate their exploits with dancing
and plundered rum they were set upon by the whites whom
couriers had collected. Several were killed in the onslaught, and
a few more were captured on the spot. Most of the rest fled
back to their cabins, but a squad of ten made their way thirty
miles farther on the route to Florida and sold their lives in battle
when overtaken. Of those captured on the field or in their
quarters some were shot but none were tortured. The toll of lives
lost numbered twenty-one whites and forty-four.[58] blacks.

Following this and the New York panic of two years later,
there was remarkable quiet in race relations in general for a full
half century. It was not indeed until the spread of the amazing
news from San Domingo and the influx thence of white refugees
and their slaves that a new series of disturbances began on the
continent. At Norfolk in 1792 some negroes were arrested on
suspicion of conspiracy but were promptly discharged for lack

of evidence;[59] and close by at Portsmouth in the next year there
were such savage clashes between the newly come French blacks
and those of the Virginia stock that citizens were alarmed for
their own safety.[60] In Louisiana an uprising on the plantation
of Julien Poydras in Pointe Coupée Parish in 1796 brought the
execution of a dozen or two negroes and sentences to prison of
several whites convicted as their accomplices;[61] and as late as
1811 an outbreak in St. Charles and St. James Parishes was
traced in part to San Domingo slaves.[62]

Gabriel's rising in the vicinity of Richmond, however, eclipsed
all other such events on the continent in this period. Although
this affair was of prodigious current interest its details were
largely obscured by the secrecy maintained by the court and the
legislature in their dealings with it. Reports in the newspapers
of the time were copious enough but were vague except as to the
capture of the leading participants; and the reminiscent journalism
of after years was romantic to the point of absurdity. It is
fairly clear, however, that Gabriel and other slaves on Thomas
H. Prosser's plantation, which lay several miles distant from
Richmond, began to brew the conspiracy as early as June, 1800,
and enlisted some hundreds of confederates, perhaps more than
a thousand, before September I, the date fixed for its maturity.
Many of these were doubtless residents of Richmond, and some
it was said lived as far away as Norfolk. The few muskets procured
were supplemented by cutlasses made from scythe blades
and by plantation implements of other sorts; but the plan of onslaught
contemplated a speedy increase of this armament. From
a rendezvous six miles from Richmond eleven hundred men in
three columns under designated officers were to march upon the
city simultaneously, one to seize the penitentiary which then
served also as the state arsenal, another to take the powder

magazine in another quarter of the town, and the third to begin a
general slaughter with such weapons as were already at hand.

Things progressed with very little hitch until the very eve of
the day set. But then two things occurred, either of which happening
alone would probably have foiled the project. On the
one hand a slave on Moseley Sheppard's plantation informed his
master of the plot; on the other hand there fell such a deluge of
rain that the swelling of the streams kept most of the conspirators
from reaching the rendezvous. Meanwhile couriers had
roused the city, and the rebels assembled could only disperse.
Scores of them were taken, including eventually Gabriel himself
who eluded pursuit for several weeks and sailed to Norfolk as a
stowaway. The magistrates, of course, had busy sessions, but
the number of death sentences was less than might have been
expected. Those executed comprised Gabriel and five other
Prosser slaves along with nineteen more belonging to other masters;
and ten others, in scattered ownership, were deported. To
provide for a more general riddance of suspected negroes the
legislature made secret overtures to the federal government looking
to the creation of a territorial reservation to receive such
colonists; but for the time being this came to naught. The legislature
furthermore created a permanent guard for the capitol,
and it liberated at the state's expense Tom and Pharaoh, slaves
of the Sheppard family, as reward for their services in helping
to foil the plot.[63]

Set on edge by Gabriel's exploit, citizens far and wide were
abnormally alert for some time thereafter; and perhaps the
slaves here and there were unusually restive. Whether the one
or the other of these conditions was most responsible, revelations
and rumors were for several years conspicuously numerous.
In 1802 there were capital convictions of fourteen insurgent
or conspiring slaves in six scattered counties of Virginia;[64]
and panicky reports of uprisings were sent out from Hartford

and Bertie Counties, North Carolina.[65] In July, 1804, the
mayor of Savannah received from Augusta "information highly
important to the safety, peace and security" of his town, and
issued appropriate orders to the local militia.[66] Among rumors
flying about South Carolina in this period, one on a December
day in 1805 telling of risings above and below Columbia led to
the planting of cannon before the state house there and to the
instruction of the night patrols to seize every negro found at
large. An over-zealous patrolman thereupon shot a slave who
was peacefully following his own master, and was indicted next
day for murder. The peaceful passing of the night brought a
subsidence of the panic with the coming of day.[67]

In Virginia, again, there were disturbing rumors at one place
or another every year or two from 1809 to 1814,[68] but no occurrence
of tangible character until the Boxley plot of 1816 in
Spottsylvania and Louisa Counties. George Boxley, the white
proprietor of a country store, was a visionary somewhat of John
Brown's type. Participating in the religious gatherings of the
negroes and telling them that a little white bird had brought him
a holy message to deliver his fellowmen from bondage, he enlisted
many blacks in his project for insurrection. But before
the plot was ripe it was betrayed by a slave woman, and several
negroes were arrested. Boxley thereupon marched with a dozen
followers on a Quixotic errand of release, but on the road the
blacks fell away, and he, after some time in hiding, surrendered
himself. Six of the negroes after conviction were hanged and
a like number transported; but Boxley himself broke jail and
escaped.[69]

In the lower South a plot at Camden, South Carolina, in

l8l6[70] and another at Augusta, Georgia,[71] three years afterward
had like plans of setting houses afire at night and then attacking
other quarters of the respective towns when the white men had
left their homes defenceless. Both plots were betrayed, and
several participants in each were executed. These conspiracies
were eclipsed in turn by the elaborate Vesey plot at Charleston
in 1822, which, for the variety of the negro types involved, the
methods of persuasion used by the leading spirits and the sobriety
of the whites on the occasion is one of the most notable of
such episodes on record.

Denmark Vesey, brought from Africa in his youth, had
bought his freedom with part of a $1500 prize drawn by him in
a lottery, and was in this period an independent artisan. Harboring
a deep resentment against the whites, however, he began
to plan his plot some four years before its maturity. He familiarized
himself with the Bible account of the deliverance of
the children of Israel, and collected pamphlet and newspaper material
on anti-slavery sentiment in England and the North and
on occurrences in San Domingo, with all of which on fit occasions
he regaled the blacks with whom he came into touch. Arguments
based on such data brought concurrence of negroes of the
more intelligent sort, prominent among whom were certain
functionaries of the African Church who were already nursing
grievances on the score of the suppression of their ecclesiastical
project by the Charleston authorities.[72] The chief minister of
that church, Morris Brown, however, was carefully left out of
the conspiracy. In appealing to the more ignorant and superstitious
element, on the other hand, the services of Gullah Jack,
so called because of his Angola origin, were enlisted, for as a
recognized conjuror he could bewitch the recalcitrant and bestow
charmed crabs' claws upon those joining the plot to make

them invulnerable. In the spring of 1822 things were put in
train for the outbreak. The Angolas, the Eboes and the Carolina-born
were separately organized under appropriate commanders;
arrangements were made looking to the support of the
plantation slaves within marching distance of the city; and letters
were even sent by the negro cook on a vessel bound for San
Domingo with view apparently both to getting assistance from
that island and to securing a haven there in case the revolt should
prove only successful enough to permit the seizure of the ships
in Charleston harbor. Meanwhile the coachmen and draymen
in the plot were told off to mobilize the horses in their charge,
pikes were manufactured, the hardware stores and other shops
containing arms were listed for special attention, and plans were
laid for the capture of the city's two arsenals as the first stroke
in the revolt. This was scheduled for midnight on Sunday,
June 16.

On May 30 George, the body-servant of Mr. Wilson, told his
master that Mr. Paul's William had invited him to join a society
which was to make a stroke for freedom. William upon being
seized and questioned by the city council made something of a
confession incriminating two other slaves, Mingo Harth and
Peter Poyas; but these were so staunch in their denials that they
were discharged, with confidential slaves appointed to watch
them. William was held for a week of solitary confinement, at
the end of which he revealed the extensive character of the plot
and the date set for its maturity. The city guard was thereupon
strengthened; but the lapse of several days in quiet was about to
make the authorities incredulous, when another citizen brought
them word from another slave of information precisely like that
which had first set them on the qui vive. This caused the local
militia to be called out to stiffen the patrol. Then as soon as
the appointed Sunday night had passed, which brought no outbreak,
the city council created a special court as by law provided,
comprising two magistrates together with five citizens carefully
selected for their substantial character and distinguished position.
These were William Drayton, Nathaniel Heyward, James
R. Pringle, James Legaré and Robert J. Turnbull. More sagacious

and responsible men could certainly not have been found.
A committee of vigilance was also appointed to assist the court.

This court having first made its own rules that no negro was
to be tried except in the presence of his master or attorney, that
everyone on trial should be heard in his own defense, and that
no one should be capitally sentenced on the bare testimony of a
single witness, proceeded to the trial of Peter Poyas, Denmark
Vesey and others against whom charges had then been lodged.
By eavesdropping those who were now convicted and confronting
them with their own words, confessions were procured implicating
many others who in turn were put on trial, including
Gullah Jack whose necromancy could not save him. In all 130
negroes were arrested, including nine colored freemen. Of the
whole number, twenty-five were discharged by the committee of
vigilance and 27 others by the court. Nine more were acquitted
with recommendations with which their masters readily complied,
that they be transported. Of those convicted, 34 were deported
by public authority and 35 were hanged. In addition
four white men indicted for complicity, comprising a German
peddler, a Scotchman, a Spaniard and a Charlestonian,[73] were
tried by a regular court having jurisdiction over whites and sentenced
to prison terms ranging from three to twelve months.

A number of Charleston citizens promptly memorialized the
state assembly recommending that all free negroes be expelled,
that the penalties applicable to whites conspiring with negroes
be made more severe, and that the control over the blacks be
generally stiffened.[74] The legislature complied except as to the
proposal for expulsion. Charlestonians also organized an association
for the prevention of negro disturbances; but by 1825

the public seems to have begun to lose its ardor in the premises.[75]

The next salient occurrence in the series was the outbreak
which brought fame to Nat Turner and the devoted Virginia
county of Southampton. Nat, a slave who by the custom of the
country had acquired the surname of his first master, was the
foreman of a small plantation, a Baptist exhorter capable of
reading the Bible, and a pronounced mystic. For some years,
as he told afterward when in custody, he had heard voices from
the heavens commanding him to carry on the work of Christ to
make the last to be first and the first last; and he took the sun's
eclipse in February, 1831, as a sign that the time was come. He
then enlisted a few of his fellows in his project, but proceeded
to spend his leisure for several months in prayer and brooding
instead of in mundane preparation. When at length on Sunday
night, August 21, he began his revolt he had but a petty squad of
companions, with merely a hatchet and a broad-axe as weapons,
and no definite plan of campaign. First murdering his master's
household and seizing some additional equipment, he took
the road and repeated the process at whatever farmhouses he
came upon. Several more negroes joined the squad as it proceeded,
though in at least one instance a slave resisted them in
defense of his master's family at the cost of his own life. The
absence of many whites from the neighborhood by reason of
their attendance at a camp-meeting across the nearby North
Carolina line reduced the number of victims, and on the other
hand made the rally of the citizens less expeditious and formidable
when the alarm had been spread. By sunrise the rebels
numbered fifteen, part of whom were mounted, and their outfit
comprised a few firearms. Throughout the morning they continued
their somewhat aimless roving, slaughtering such white
households as they reached, enlisting recruits by persuasion or
coercion, and heightening their courage by draughts upon the
apple-brandy in which the county, by virtue of its many orchards
and stills, abounded. By noon there were some sixty in
the straggling ranks, but when shortly afterward they met a

squad of eighteen rallying whites, armed like themselves mainly
with fowling pieces with birdshot ammunition, they fled at the
first fire, and all but a score dispersed. The courage of these
whites, however, was so outweighed by their caution that Nat
and his fellows were able to continue their marauding course in
a new direction, gradually swelling their numbers to forty again.
That night, however, a false alarm stampeded their bivouac and
again dispersed all the faint-hearted. Nat with his remaining
squad then attacked a homestead just before daybreak on Tuesday,
but upon repulse by the five white men and boys with several
slave auxiliaries who were guarding it they retreated only to
meet a militia force which completed the dispersal. All were
promptly killed or taken except Nat who secreted himself near
his late master's home until his capture was accomplished six
weeks afterward. The whites slain by the rebels numbered ten
men, fourteen women and thirty-one children.

The militia in scouring the countryside were prompted by the
panic and its vindictive reaction to shoot down a certain number
of innocent blacks along with the guilty and to make display of
some of their severed heads. The magistrates were less impulsive.
They promptly organized a court comprising all the justices
of the peace in the county and assigned attorneys for the
defense of the prisoners while the public prosecutor performed
his appointed task. Forty-seven negroes all told were brought before
the court. As to the five free blacks included in this number
the magistrates, who had only preliminary jurisdiction in
their cases, discharged one and remanded four for trial by a
higher court. Of the slaves four, and perhaps a fifth regarding
whom the record is blank, were discharged without trial, and
thirteen more were acquitted. Of those convicted seven were
sentenced to deportation, and seventeen with the ringleader among
them, to death by hanging. In addition there were several slaves
convicted of complicity in neighboring counties.[76]

This extraordinary event, occurring as it did after a century's
lapse since last an appreciable number of whites on the continent
had lost their lives in such an outbreak, set nerves on edge
throughout the South, and promptly brought an unusually bountiful
crop of local rumors. In North Carolina early in September
it was reported at Raleigh that the blacks of Wilmington
had burnt the town and slaughtered the whites, and that several
thousand of them were marching upon Raleigh itself.[77]
This and similarly alarming rumors from Edenton were followed
at once by authentic news telling merely that conspiracies had
been discovered in Duplin and Sampson Counties and also in
the neighborhood of Edenton, with several convictions resulting
in each locality.[78]

At Milledgeville, the village capital of Georgia where in the
preceding year the newspapers and the town authorities had
been fluttered by the discovery of incendiary pamphlets in a citizen's
possession,[79] a rumor spread on October 4, 1831, that a
large number of slaves had risen a dozen miles away and were
marching upon the town to seize the weapons in the state arsenal
there. Three slaves within the town, and a free mulatto
preacher as well, were seized on suspicion of conspiracy but
were promptly discharged for lack of evidence, and the city
council soon had occasion, because there had been "considerable
danger in the late excitement . . . by persons carrying arms
that were intoxicated" to order the marshal and patrols to take
weapons away from irresponsible persons and enforce the ordinance
against the firing of guns in the streets.[80] Upon the first
coming of the alarm the governor had appointed Captain J. A.
Cuthbert, editor of the Federal Union, to the military command
of the town; and Cuthbert, uniformed and armed to the teeth,
dashed about the town all day on his charger, distributing weapons

and stationing guards. Upon the passing of the baseless
panic Seaton Grantland, customarily cool and sardonic, ridiculed
Cuthbert in the Southern Recorder of which he was editor.
Cuthbert retorted in his own columns that Grantland's
conduct in the emergency had proved him a skulking coward.[81]

No blood was shed, even among the editors.

There were doubtless episodes of such a sort in many other
localities.[82] It was evidently to this period that the reminiscences
afterward collected by Olmsted applied. "'Where I
used to live,'" a backwoodsman formerly of Alabama told the
traveller, "'I remember when I was a boy—must ha' been about
twenty years ago—folks was dreadful frightened about the niggers.
I remember they built pens in the woods where they
could hide, and Christmas time they went and got into the pens,
fraid the niggers was risin'.' 'I remember the same time where
we were in South Carolina,' said his wife, 'we had ail our things
put up in bags, so we could tote 'em if we heerd they was comin'
our way.'"[83]

Another sort of sequel to the Southampton revolt was of
course a plenitude of public discussion and of repressive legislation.
In Virginia a flood of memorials poured upon the legislature.
Petitions signed by 1,188 citizens in twelve counties
asked for provision for the expulsion of colored freemen; others
with 398 signatures from six counties proposed an amendment
to the United States Constitution empowering Congress to aid
Virginia to rid herself of all the blacks; others from two colonization
societies and 366 citizens in four counties proposed the
removal first of the free negroes and then of slaves to be emancipated
by private or public procedure; 27 men of Buckingham
and Loudon Counties and others in Albemarle, together with
the Society of Friends in Hanover and 347 women, prayed for
the abolition of slavery, some on the post nati plan and others

without specification of details.[84] The House of Delegates responded
by devoting most of its session of that winter to an extraordinarily
outspoken and wide-ranging debate on the many
phases of the negro problem, reflecting and elaborating all the
sentiments expressed in the petitions together with others more
or less original with the members themselves. The Richmond
press reported the debate in great detail, and many of the
speeches were given a pamphlet circulation in addition.[85] The
only tangible outcome there and elsewhere, however, was in the
form of added legal restrictions upon the colored population,
slave and free. But when the fright and fervor of the year had
passed, conditions normal to the community returned. On the
one hand the warnings of wiseacres impressed upon the would-be
problem solvers the maxim of the golden quality of silence, particularly
while the attacks of the Northern abolitionists upon
the general Southern régime were so active. On the other hand
the new severities of the law were promptly relegated, as the old
ones had been, to the limbo of things laid away, like pistols, for
emergency use, out of sight and out of mind in the daily routine
of peaceful industry.

In the remaining ante-bellum decades, though the actual outbreaks
were negligible except for John Brown's raid, the discoveries,
true or false, and the rumors, mostly unwarranted, were
somewhat more frequent than before. Revelations in Madison
County, Mississippi, in 1835 shortly before July 4, told of a
conspiracy of whites and blacks scheduled for that day as a
ramification of the general plot of the Murrell gang recently exposed.[86]
A mass meeting thereupon appointed an investigating
committee of thirteen citizens with power to apply capital punishment;

and several whites together with ten or fifteen blacks
were promptly put to death.[87]

Widespread rumors at the beginning of the following December
that a general uprising was in preparation for the coming
holiday season caused the summons of citizens in various Georgia
counties to mass meetings which with one accord recommended
special precautions by masters, patrols and militia, and
appointed committees of vigilance. In this series the resolutions
adopted in Washington County are notable especially for
the tone of their preamble. Mentioning the method recently
followed in Mississippi only to disapprove it, this preamble ran:
"We would fain hope that the soil of Georgia may never be reddened
or her people disgraced by the arbitrary shedding of human
blood; for if the people allow themselves but one participation
in such lawless proceedings, no human sagacity can foretell
where the overwhelming deluge will be staid or what portions of
our state may feel its desolating ruin. This course of protection
unhinges every tie of social and civil society, dissolves those
guards which the laws throw around property and life, and
leaves every individual, no matter how innocent, at the sport of
popular passion, the probable object of popular indignation, and
liable to an ignominious death. Therefore we would recommend
to our fellow-citizens that if any facts should be elicited
implicating either white men or negroes in any insurrectionary
or abolition movements, that they be apprehended and delivered
over to the legal tribunals of the country for full and fair judicial
trial."[88] At Clarksville, Tennessee, uneasiness among the
citizens on the score of the negroes employed in the iron works
thereabout was such that they procured a shipment of arms from

the state capital in preparation for special guard at the Christmas
season.[89]

In various parts of Louisiana in this period there was a succession
of plots discovered. The first of these, betrayed on
Christmas Eve, 1835, involved two white men, one of them a
plantation overseer, along with forty slaves or more. The
whites were promptly hanged, and doubtless some of the blacks
likewise.[90] The next, exposed in the fall of 1837, was in the
neighborhood of Alexandria. Nine slaves and three free negroes
were hanged in punishment,[91] and the negro Lewis who
had betrayed the conspiracy was liberated at state expense and was
voted $500 to provide for his security in some distant community.[92]
The third was in Lafayette and St. Landry Parishes,
betrayed in August, 1840, by a slave woman named Lecide who
was freed by her master in reward. Nine negroes were hanged.
Four white men who were implicated, but who could not be convicted
under the laws which debarred slave testimony against
whites, were severely flogged under a lynch-law sentence and
ordered to leave the state.[93] Rumors of other plots were spread
in West Feliciana Parish in the summer of 1841,[94] in several
parishes opposite and above Natchez in the fall of 1842,[95] and at
Donaldsonville at the beginning of 1843;[96] but each of these in
turn was found to be virtually baseless. Meanwhile at Augusta,
Georgia, several negroes were arrested in February, 1841, and
at least one of them was sentenced to death. A petition was
circulated for his respite as an inducement for confession; but
other citizens, disquieted by the testimony already given, prepared
a counter petition asking the governor to let the law take
its course. The plot as described contemplated the seizure of

the arsenal and the firing of the city in facilitation of massacre.[97]

The rest of the 'forties and the first half of the 'fifties were a
period of comparative quiet; but in 1855 there were rumors in
Dorchester and Talbot Counties, Maryland,[98] and the autumn
of 1856 brought widespread disturbances which the Southern
whites did not fail to associate with the rise of the Republican
Party. In the latter part of that year there were rumors afloat
from Williamsburg, Virginia, and Montgomery County in the
same state, from various quarters of Tennessee, Arkansas and
Texas, from New Orleans, and from Atlanta and Cassville,
Georgia.[99] A typical episode in the period was described by a
schoolmaster from Michigan then sojourning in Mississippi.
One night about Christmas of 1858 when the plantation homestead
at which he was staying was filled with house guests, a
courier came in the dead of night bringing news that the blacks
in the eastern part of the county had risen in a furious band and
were laying their murderous course in this direction. The head
of the house after scanning the bulletin, calmly told his family
and guests that they might get their guns and prepare for defense,
but if they would excuse him he would retire again until
the crisis came. The coolness of the host sent the guests back
to bed except for one who stood sentry. "The negroes never
came."[100]

The shiver which John Brown's raid sent over the South was
diminished by the failure of the blacks to Join him, and it was
largely overcome by the wave of fierce resentment against the
abolitionists who, it was said, had at last shown their true colors.
The final disturbance on the score of conspiracy among
the negroes themselves was in the summer of 1860 at Dallas,
Texas, where in the preceding year an abolitionist preacher had

been whipped and driven away. Ten or more fires which occurred
in one day and laid much of the town in ruins prompted
the seizure of many blacks and the raising of a committee of
safety. This committee reported to a public meeting on July
24 that three ringleaders in the plot were to be hanged that afternoon.
Thereupon Judge Buford of the district court addressed
the gathering. "He stated in the outset that in any ordinary
case he would be as far from counselling mob law as any other
man, but in the present instance the people had a clear right to
take the law in their own hands. He counselled moderation, and
insisted that the committee should execute the fewest number
compatible with the public safety."[101]

On the whole it is hardly possible to gauge precisely the degree
of popular apprehension in the premises. John Randolph
was doubtless more picturesque than accurate when he said, "the
night bell never tolls for fire in Richmond that the mother does
not hug the infant more closely to her bosom."[102] The general
trend of public expressions laid emphasis upon the need of safeguards
but showed confidence that no great disasters were to be
feared. The revolts which occurred and the plots which were
discovered were sufficiently serious to produce a very palpable
disquiet from time to time, and the rumors were frequent enough
to maintain a fairly constant undertone of uneasiness. The net
effect of this was to restrain that progress of liberalism which
the consideration of economic interest, the doctrines of human
rights and the spirit of kindliness all tended to promote.