one of the ferry boats was crossing the river with sixteen slaves on board belonging to General Wade Hampton, with their baggage, a few rods distant from the shore these negroes, being frightened by the motion of the boat, all threw themselves on the same side, which caused the boat to fill; and notwithstanding the prompt assistance afforded, four or five of these unfortunates perished."[51] In 1839 William Lowndes Yancey, who was then a planter in South Carolina, lost his whole gang through the poisoning of a spring on his place, and was thereby bankrupted.[52] About 1858 certain bandits in western Louisiana abducted two slaves from the home of the Widow Bernard on Bayou Vermilion.  After the lapse of several months they were discovered in the possession of one Apcher, who was tried for the theft but acquitted.  The slaves when restored to their mistress were put in the kitchen, bound together by their hands.  But while the family was at dinner the two ran from the house and drowned themselves in the bayou.  The narrator of the episode attributed the impulse for suicide to the taste for vagabondage and the hatred for work which the negroes had acquired from the bandit.[53]

[Footnote 48:  For the effect of epidemics see above, pp. 300, 301.]

[Footnote 49:  South Carolina Gazette, Feb. 12 to 19, 1741.]

[Footnote 50:  Carolina Gazette (Charleston), Feb. 4, 1798, supplement.]

[Footnote 51:  Louisiana Courier, Mch. 3, 1828.]

[Footnote 52:  J.W.  DuBose, Life of W.L.  Yancey (Birmingham, Ala., 1892), p. 39.]

[Footnote 53:  Alexandra Barbe, Histoire des Comites de Vigilance aux Attakapas] (Louisiana, 1861), pp. 182-185.

The governor of South Carolina reported the convictions of five white men for the crime of slave stealing in the one year;[54] and in the penitentiary lists of the several states the designation of slave stealers was fairly frequent, in spite of the fact that the death penalty was generally prescribed for the crime.  One method of their operation was described in a Georgia newspaper item of 1828 which related that two wagoners upon meeting a slave upon the road persuaded him to lend a hand in shifting their load.  When the negro entered the wagon they overpowered him and drove on.  When they camped for the night they bound him to the wheel; but while they slept he cut his thongs and returned to his master.[55] The greatest activities in this line, however, were doubtless those of the Murrell gang of desperadoes operating throughout the southwest in the early thirties with a shrewd scheme for victimizing both whites and blacks.  They would conspire with a slave, promising him his freedom or some other reward if he would run off with them and suffer himself to be sold to some unwary purchaser and then escape to join them again.[56] Sometimes they repeated this process over and over again with the same slave until a threat of exposure from him