In the month of May, 1835, two negroes were burned to death near Mobile, Alabama, for “most barbarously murdering” two children. The murderers had their trial, the result of which is given in the following paragraph taken from a Mobile paper: “As the Court pronounced the only sentence known to the law—the smothered flame broke forth. The laws of the country had never conceived that crimes could be perpetrated with such peculiar circumstances of barbarity, and had therefore provided no adequate punishment. Their lives were justly forfeited to the laws of the country, but the peculiar circumstances demanded that the ordinary punishment should be departed from—they were seized, taken to the place where they had perpetrated the act, and burned to death.”[[164]]

A case of burning alive, which on account of the subsequent events gained great notoriety, occurred at St. Louis, Missouri, April 28, 1836. One writer designated it as “the execution of ‘Lynch Law’ upon a yellow fellow, by means of a slow fire.” A colored man was arrested on board a boat by a deputy sheriff and a constable. Another colored man, a free mulatto, assisted him to escape, and the officers immediately arrested the mulatto. He, however, turned upon the officers, drew a knife and stabbed Deputy Sheriff Hammond, killing him instantly, and also seriously wounded Mr. Mull, the constable. He was finally captured, however, and locked up in the jail. Later the people assembled and, after threatening to tear down the jail if he was not delivered to them, secured the prisoner, conducted him to the outskirts of the city, placed a chain round his neck and a rope round his body, and thus fastened him to a tree a few feet from the ground. A fire was then placed round the tree and he was roasted alive.[[165]]

When this case came up for consideration before the Grand Jury of St. Louis County, Judge Lawless—according to subsequent comments rightly named—made the following charge:

“I have reflected much on this matter, and after weighing all the considerations that present themselves as bearing upon it, I feel it my duty to state my opinion to be, that whether the Grand Jury shall act at all, depends upon the solution of this preliminary question, namely, whether the destruction of McIntosh was the act of the ‘few’ or the act of the ‘many.’

“If on a calm view of the circumstances attending this dreadful transaction, you shall be of opinion that it was perpetrated by a definite, and, compared to the population of St. Louis, a small number of individuals, separate from the mass, and evidently taking upon themselves, as contradistinguished from the multitude, the responsibility of the act, my opinion is that you ought to indict them all, without a single exception.

“If on the other hand, the destruction of the murderer of Hammond was the act as I have said, of the many—of the multitude, in the ordinary sense of those words—not the act of numerable and ascertainable malefactors, but of congregated thousands, seized upon and impelled by that mysterious, metaphysical, and almost electric phrenzy, which, in all nations and ages, has hurried on the infuriated multitude to deeds of death and destruction—then, I say, act not at all in the matter—the case then transcends your jurisdiction—it is beyond the reach of human law.”[[166]]

It was for denouncing the burning of this colored man and violently attacking Judge Lawless in his Observer that the Rev. E. P. Lovejoy had his printing-office destroyed by a mob in St. Louis, and was forced to remove his paper to Alton, Illinois. He did not cease to express his convictions, however, and neither did his persecutions cease. Three times his press was destroyed by mobs. On November 7, 1837, while endeavoring to protect his property, he met his death at the hands of an Alton mob.

In an address on “The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions,” delivered before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, on January 27, 1837, Abraham Lincoln characterized the spirit of the times in the following way:

“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 creature of climate, neither are they confined to the slaveholding or the non-slaveholding States. Alike they spring up among the pleasure-hunting masters of Southern slaves, and the order-loving citizens of the land of steady habits. Whatever then their cause may be, it is common to the whole country.

“It would be tedious as well as useless to recount the horrors of all of them. Those happening in the State of Mississippi and at St. Louis are perhaps the most dangerous in example and revolting to humanity. In the Mississippi case they first commenced by hanging the regular gamblers—a set of men certainly not following for a livelihood a very useful or very honest occupation, but one which, so far from being forbidden by the laws, was actually licensed by an act of the legislature passed but a single year before. Next, negroes suspected of conspiring to rise an insurrection were caught up and hanged in all parts of the State; then, white men supposed to be leagued with the negroes; and finally, strangers from neighboring States, going thither on business, were in many instances subjected to the same fate. Thus went on this process of hanging, from gamblers to negroes, from negroes to white citizens, and from these to strangers, till dead men were literally dangling from the boughs of trees by every roadside, and in numbers almost sufficient to rival the native Spanish moss of the country as a drapery of the forest.