of the wives and daughters of white mechanics as a class.  “In a very short time he had more customers than both Brown and Gadsby—­but the landlord was not to be found although diligent search was made all through the house.  Next morning the house was visited by an increased number of guests, but Snow was still absent.”  The mob then began to search the houses of his associates for him.  In that of James Hutton, another free mulatto, some abolition papers were found.  The mob hustled Hutton to a magistrate, returned and wrecked Snow’s establishment, and then held an organized meeting at the Center Market where an executive committee was appointed with a view to further activity.  Meanwhile the city council held session, the mayor issued a proclamation, and the militia was ordered out.  Mobs gathered that night, nevertheless, but dispersed after burning a negro hut and breaking the windows of a negro church.[82] Such outrages appear to have been rare in the distinctively Southern communities where the racial subordination was more complete and the antipathy correspondingly fainter.

[Footnote 82:  Washington Globe, about August 14, reprinted in the North Carolina Standard, Aug. 27, 1835.]

Since the whites everywhere held the whip hand and nowhere greatly refrained from the use of their power, the lot of the colored freeman was one hardly to be borne without the aid of habit and philosophy.  They submitted to the regime because it was mostly taken as a matter of course, because resistance would surely bring harsher repression, and because there were solaces to be found.  The well-to-do quadroons and mulattoes had reason in their prosperity to cherish their own pride of place and carry themselves with a quiet conservative dignity.  The less prosperous blacks, together with such of their mulatto confreres as were similarly inert, had the satisfaction at least of not being slaves; and those in the South commonly shared the humorous lightheartedness which is characteristic of both African and Southern negroes.  The possession of sincere friends among the whites here and there also helped them to feel that their lives lay in fairly pleasant places; and in their lodges they had a refuge peculiarly their own.

The benevolent secret societies of the negroes, with their special stress upon burial ceremonies, may have had a dim African origin, but they were doubtless influenced strongly by the Masonic and other orders among the whites.  Nothing but mere glimpses may be had of the history of these institutions, for lowliness as well as secrecy screened their careers.  There may well have been very many lodges among illiterate and moneyless slaves without leaving any tangible record whatever.  Those in which the colored freemen mainly figured were a little more affluent, formal and conspicuous.  Such organizations were a recourse at the same time for mutual aid and for the enhancement of social prestige.  The founding of one of them