[Footnote 10:  Boston Chronicle, Sept. 26, 1768, confirmed by a contemporary broadside:  “The Life and Dying Speech of Arthur, a Negro Man who was executed at Worcester, October 20, 1786, for a rape committed on the body of one Deborah Metcalfe” (Boston, 1768).]

[Footnote 11:  Augusta Chronicle, Mch. 29, 1811.]

[Footnote 12:  American Historical Association Report for 1904, pp. 579, 580.]

[Footnote 13:  Charleston Observer, Nov. 24, 1827.]

[Footnote 14:  Ibid., Nov. 10, 1827.]

[Footnote 15:  New Orleans Delta, June 23, 1849.]

[Footnote 16:  New Orleans Bee, Sept. 27, 1842, reprinted in Plantation and Frontier, II, 121, 122.]

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]

[Footnote 17:  Gallatin, Miss., Signal, Feb. 27, 1843, reprinted in the Louisiana Courier (New Orleans), Mch. 1, 1843.]

An editorial in the Sentinel of Columbus, Georgia, described and discussed a local occurrence of August 12, 1851,[18] in a different tone: 

[Footnote 18:  Columbus Sentinel, reprinted in the Augusta Chronicle, Aug. 17, 1851.  This item, which is notable in more than one regard, was kindly furnished by Prof.  R.P.  Brooks of the University of Georgia.]

“Our community has just been made to witness the most high-handed 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.