[Footnote 1:  See Hart:  Slavery and Abolition, 11 and 117, citing Cutler:  Lynch Law, 98-100 and 126-128.]

Extraordinary attention was attracted by the burning in St. Louis in 1835 of a man named McIntosh, who had killed an officer who was trying to arrest him.[1] This event came in the midst of a period of great agitation, and it was for denouncing this lynching that Elijah P. Lovejoy had his printing-office destroyed in St. Louis and was forced to remove to Alton, Ill., where his press was three times destroyed and where he finally met death at the hands of a mob while trying to protect his property November 7, 1837.  Judge Lawless defended the lynching and even William Ellery Channing took a compromising view.  Abraham Lincoln, however, then a very young man, in an address on “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions” at Springfield, January 27, 1837, said:  “Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the everyday news of the times.  They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana; they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former nor the burning suns of the latter; they are not the creatures of climate, neither are they confined to the slaveholding or the nonslaveholding states....  Turn to that horror-striking scene at St. Louis.  A single victim only was sacrificed there.  This story is very short, and is perhaps the most highly tragic of anything that has ever been witnessed in real life.  A mulatto man by the name of McIntosh was seized in the street, dragged to the suburbs of the city, chained to a tree, and actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from the time he had been a free man attending to his own business and at peace with the world....  Such are the effects of mob law, and such are the scenes becoming more and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of law and order, and the stories of which have even now grown too familiar to attract anything more than an idle remark.”

[Footnote 1:  Cutler:  Lynch Law, 109, citing Niles’s Register, June 4, 1836.]

All the while flagrant crimes were committed against Negro women and girls, and free men in the border states were constantly being dragged into slavery by kidnapers.  Two typical cases will serve for illustration.  George Jones, a respectable man of New York, was in 1836 arrested on Broadway on the pretext that he had committed assault and battery.  He refused to go with his captors, for he knew that he had done nothing to warrant such a charge; but he finally yielded on the assurance of his employer that everything possible would be done for him.  He was placed in the Bridewell and a few minutes afterwards taken before a magistrate, to whose satisfaction he was proved to be a slave.  Thus, in less than two hours after his arrest he was hurried away by the kidnapers, whose word had been accepted as sufficient evidence, and he had not been permitted to secure a single friendly witness.  Solomon Northrup,