More frequent occasions for the creation of vigilance committees were the rumors of plots among the blacks and the reports of mischievous doings by whites.  In the same Santee district of the Carolina lowlands, for instance, a public meeting at Black Oak Church on January 3, 1860, appointed three committees of five members each to look out for and dispose of any suspicious characters who might be “prowling about the parish.”  Of the sequel nothing is recorded by the local diarist of the time except the following, under date of October 25:  “Went out with a party of men to take a fellow by the name of Andrews, who lived at Cantey’s Hill and traded with the negroes.  He had been warned of our approach and run off.  We went on and broke up the trading establishment."[37]

[Footnote 37:  Diary of Thomas P. Ravenel, which is virtually a continuation of the Diary just cited.  MS. in private possession.]

Such transactions were those of the most responsible and substantial citizens, laboring to maintain social order in the face of the law’s desuetude.  A mere step further in that direction, however, lay outright lynch law.  Lynchings, indeed, while far from habitual, were frequent enough to link the South with the frontier West of the time.  The victims were not only rapists[38] but negro malefactors of sundry sorts, and occasionally white offenders as well.  In some cases fairly full accounts of such episodes are available, but more commonly the record extant is laconic.  Thus the Virginia archives have under date of 1791 an affidavit reciting that “Ralph Singo and James Richards had in January last, in Accomac County, been hung by a band of disguised men, numbering from six to fifteen";[39] and a Georgia newspaper in 1860 the following:  “It is reported that Mr. William Smith was killed by a negro on Saturday evening at Bowling Green, in Oglethorpe County.  He was stabbed sixteen times.  The negro made his escape but was arrested on Sunday, and on Monday morning a number of citizens who had investigated the case burnt him at the stake."[40] In at least one well-known instance the mob’s violence was directed against an abuser of slaves.  This was at New Orleans in 1834 when a rumor spread that Madame Lalaurie, a wealthy resident, was torturing her negroes.  A great crowd collected after nightfall, stormed her door, found seven slaves chained and bearing marks of inhuman treatment, and gutted the house.  The woman herself had fled at the first alarm, and made her way eventually to Paris.[41] Had she been brought before a modern court it may be doubted whether she would have been committed to a penitentiary or to a lunatic asylum.  At the hands of the mob, however, her shrift would presumably have been short and sure.

[Footnote 38:  For examples of these see above, pp. 460-463.]

[Footnote 39:  Calendar of Virginia State Papers, V, 328.]

[Footnote 40:  Southern Banner (Athens, Ga.), June 14, 1860.  Other instances, gleaned mostly from Niles’ Register and the Liberator, are given in J.E.  Cutler, Lynch Law (New York, 1905), pp. 90-136.]