led to his being silenced by murder.  In the same period a smaller gang with John Washburn as its leading spirit and with Natchez as informal headquarters, was busy at burglary, highway and flatboat robbery, pocket picking and slave stealing.[57] In 1846 a prisoner under arrest at Cheraw, South Carolina, professed to reveal a new conspiracy for slave stealing with ramifications from Virginia to Texas; but the details appear not to have been published.[58]

[Footnote 54:  H.M.  Henry, The Police Control of the Slave in South Carolina [1914], pp. 110-112.]

[Footnote 55:  The Athenian (Athens, Ga.), Aug. 19, 1828.]

[Footnote 56:  H.R.  Howard, compiler, The History of Virgil A. Stewart and his Adventure in capturing and exposing the great “Western Land Pirate” and his Gang (New York, 1836), pp. 63-68, 104, et passim.  The truth of these accounts of slave stealings is vouched for in a letter to the editor of the New Orleans Bulletin, reprinted in the Federal Union (Milledgeville, Ga.), Nov. 5, 1835.]

[Footnote 57:  The manifold felonies of the gang were described by Washburn in a dying confession after his conviction for a murder at Cincinnati.  Natchez Courier, reprinted in the Louisiana Courier (New Orleans), Feb. 28, 1837.  Other reports of the theft of slaves appear in the Charleston Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, Nov. 2, 1786; Southern Banner (Athens, Ga.), July 19, 1834, advertisement; Federal Union (Milledgeville, Ga.), July 18, 1835; and the following New Orleans journals:  Louisiana Gazette, Apr. 1 and Sept. 10, 1819; Mercantile Advertiser, Sept 29, 1831; Bee, Dec. 14, 1841; Mch. 10, 1845, and Aug. 1 and Nov. 11, 1848; Louisiana Courier, Mch. 29 and Sept. 18, 1840; Picayune, Aug. 21, 1845.]

[Footnote 58:  New Orleans Commercial Times, Aug. 26, 1846.]

Certain hostile critics of slavery asserted that in one district or another masters made reckonings favorable to such driving of slaves at their work as would bring premature death.  Thus Fanny Kemble wrote in 1838, when on the Georgia coast:  “In Louisiana ... the humane calculation was not only made but openly and unhesitatingly avowed that the planters found it upon the whole their most profitable plan to work off (kill with labour) their whole number of slaves about once in seven years, and renew the whole stock."[59] The English traveler Featherstonhaugh likewise wrote of Louisiana in 1844, when he had come as close to it as East Tennessee, that “the duration of life for a sugar mill hand does not exceed seven years."[60] William Goodell supported a similar assertion of his own in 1853 by a series of citations.  The first of these was to Theodore Weld as authority, that “Professor Wright” had been told at New York by Dr. Deming of Ashland, Ohio, a story that Mr. Dickinson of Pittsburg had been told by Southern planters and slave dealers