“The present white population of Mississippi is but little more than half as great as that of Vermont, and yet more horrible crimes are perpetrated by them EVERY MONTH, than have ever been perpetrated in Vermont since it has been a state, now about half a century.  Whoever doubts it, let him get data and make his estimate, and he will find that this is no random guess.”

LOUISIANA.

Louisiana became one of the United States in 1811.  Its present white population is about one hundred and fifteen thousand.

The extracts which follow furnish another illustration of the horrors produced by passions blown up to fury in the furnace of arbitrary power.  We have just been looking over a broken file of Louisiana papers, including the last six months of 1837, and the whole of 1838, and find ourselves obliged to abandon our design of publishing even an abstract of the scores and hundreds of affrays, murders, assassinations, duels, lynchings, assaults, &c. which took place in that state during that period.  Those which have taken place in New Orleans alone, during the last eighteen months, would, in detail, fill a volume.  Instead of inserting the details of the principal atrocities in Louisiana, as in the states already noticed, we will furnish the reader with the testimony of various editors of newspapers, and others, residents of the state, which will perhaps as truly set forth the actual state of society there, as could be done by a publication of the outrages themselves.

From the “New Orleans Bee,” of May 23, 1838.

“Contempt of human life.—­In view of the crimes which are daily committed, we are led to inquire whether it is owing to the inefficiency of our laws, or to the manner in which those laws are administered, that this frightful deluge of human blood fowl through our streets and our places of public resort.

“Whither will such contempt for the life of man lead us?  The unhealthiness of the climate mows down annually a part of our population; the murderous steel despatches its proportion; and if crime increases as it has, the latter will soon become the most powerful agent in destroying life.

“We cannot but doubt the perfection of our criminal code, when we see that almost every criminal eludes the law, either by boldly avowing the crime, or by the tardiness with which legal prosecutions are carried on, or, lastly, by the convenient application of bail in criminal cases.”

The “New Orleans Picayune” of July 30, 1837, says: 

“It is with the most painful feelings that we daily hear of some fatal duel.  Yesterday we were told of the unhappy end of one of our most influential and highly respectable merchants, who fell yesterday morning at sunrise in a duel.  As usual, the circumstances which led to the meeting were trivial.”

The New Orleans correspondent of the New York Express, in his letter dated New Orleans, July 30, 1837, says: