a large number of white people,[19] burned him alive.”  This mention of negroes in attendance is in sharp contrast with their palpable absence on similar occasions in later decades.  They were present, of course, as at legal executions, by the command of their masters to receive a lesson of deterrence.  The wisdom of this policy, however, had already been gravely questioned.  A Louisiana editor, for example, had written in comment upon a local hanging:  “The practice of sending slaves to witness the execution of their fellows as a terror to them has many advocates, but we are inclined to doubt its efficacy.  We took particular pains to notice on this occasion the effects which this horrid spectacle would produce on their minds, and our observation taught us that while a very few turned with loathing from the scene, a large majority manifested that levity and curiosity superinduced by witnessing a monkey show."[20]

[Footnote 19:  Southern Banner (Athens, Ga.), June 21, 1855.]

[Footnote 20:  Caddo Gazette, quoted in the New Orleans Bee, April 5, 1845.]

For another case of lynching, which occurred in White County, Tennessee, in 1858, there is available merely the court record of a suit brought by the owners of the slave to recover pecuniary damages from those who had lynched him.  It is incidentally recited, with strong reprehension by the court, that the negro was in legal custody under a charge of rape and murder when certain citizens, part of whom had signed a written agreement to “stand by each other,” broke into the jail and hanged the prisoner.[21]

[Footnote 21:  Head’s Tennessee Reports, I, 336.  For lynchings prompted by other crimes than rape see below, p. 474, footnote 60.]

In general the slaveholding South learned of crimes by individual negroes with considerable equanimity.  It was the news or suspicion of concerted action by them which alone caused widespread alarm and uneasiness.  That actual deeds of rebellion by small groups were fairly common is suggested by the numerous slaves convicted of murdering their masters and overseers in Virginia, as well as by chance items from other quarters.  Thus in 1797 a planter in Screven County, Georgia, who had recently bought a batch of newly imported Africans was set upon and killed by them, and his wife’s escape was made possible only by the loyalty of two other slaves.[22] Likewise in Bullitt County, Kentucky, in 1844, when a Mr. Stewart threatened one of his slaves, that one and two others turned upon him and beat him to death;[23] and in Arkansas in 1845 an overseer who was attacked under similar circumstances saved his life only with the aid of several neighbors and through the use of powder and ball.[24] Such episodes were likely to grow as the reports of them flew over the countryside.  For instance in 1856 when an unruly slave on a plantation shortly below New Orleans upon being threatened with punishment seized an axe and was thereupon shot by his overseer, the rumor of an insurrection quickly ran to and through the city.[25]