Widespread rumors at the beginning of the following December that a general uprising was in preparation for the coming holiday season caused the summons of citizens in various Georgia counties to mass meetings which with one accord recommended special precautions by masters, patrols and militia, and appointed committees of vigilance.  In this series the resolutions adopted in Washington County are notable especially for the tone of their preamble.  Mentioning the method recently followed in Mississippi only to disapprove it, this preamble ran:  “We would fain hope that the soil of Georgia may never be reddened or her people disgraced by the arbitrary shedding of human blood; for if the people allow themselves but one participation in such lawless proceedings, no human sagacity can foretell where the overwhelming deluge will be staid or what portions of our state may feel its desolating ruin.  This course of protection unhinges every tie of social and civil society, dissolves those guards which the laws throw around property and life, and leaves every individual, no matter how innocent, at the sport of popular passion, the probable object of popular indignation, and liable to an ignominious death.  Therefore we would recommend to our fellow-citizens that if any facts should be elicited implicating either white men or negroes in any insurrectionary or abolition movements, that they be apprehended and delivered over to the legal tribunals of the country for full and fair judicial trial."[88] At Clarksville, Tennessee, uneasiness among the citizens on the score of the negroes employed in the iron works thereabout was such that they procured a shipment of arms from the state capital in preparation for special guard at the Christmas season.[89]

[Footnote 88:  Federal Union (Milledgeville, Ga.), Dec. 11, 1835.  At Darien on the Georgia coast Edwin C. Roberts, an Englishman by birth, was committed for trial in the following August for having told slaves they ought to be free and that half of the American people were in favor of their freedom.  The local editor remarked when reporting the occurrence:  “Mr. Roberts should thank his stars that he did not commence his crusade in some quarters where Judge Lynch presides.  Here the majesty of the law is too highly respected to tolerate the jurisdiction of this despotic dignitary.”  Darien Telegraph, Aug. 30, quoted in the Federal Union, Sept. 6, 1836.]

[Footnote 89:  MS. petition with endorsement noting the despatch of arms, in the state archives at Nashville.]

In various parts of Louisiana in this period there was a succession of plots discovered.  The first of these, betrayed on Christmas Eve, 1835, involved two white men, one of them a plantation overseer, along with forty slaves or more.  The whites were promptly hanged, and doubtless some of the blacks likewise.[90] The next, exposed in the fall of 1837, was in the neighborhood of Alexandria.  Nine slaves and three