The Maysville, Ken. Gazette, in announcing Donavan's murder, says, "he formerly belonged to Maysville, and was a much respected citizen."
A letter from Donavan to his wife, written just before his execution, and published in the Maysville paper, says, "I am doomed to die to-morrow at 12 o'clock, on a charge of having been concerned in a negro insurrection, in this State, among many other whites. We are not tried by a regular jury, but by a committee of planters appointed for the purpose, who have not time to wait on a person for evidence.... Now I must close by saying, before my Maker and Judge, that I go into his presence as innocent of this charge as when I was born.... I must bid you a final farewell, hoping that the God of the widow and the fatherless will give you grace to bear this most awful sentence."
And now, did these butcheries by the Mississippi planters excite the indignation of the slaveholding communities? Receive the answer from an editor of the Ancient Dominion, replying to the comments of a Northern newspaper. "The Journal may depend upon it that the Cottons and the Saunders, men confessing themselves guilty of inciting and plotting insurrection, will be hanged up wherever caught, and that without the formality of a legal trial. Northern or Southern, such will be their inevitable doom. For our part, we applaud the transaction, and none in our opinion can condemn it, who have not a secret sympathy with the Garrison sect. If Northern sympathy and effort are to be cooled and extinguished by such cases, it proves but this, that the South ought to feel little confidence in the professions it receives from that quarter."—Richmond Whig.
About the time of the massacre in Clinton County, another awful tragedy was performed at Vicksburg in the same State. Five men, said to be gamblers, were hanged by the mob on the 5th July, in open day.
The Louisiana Advertiser, of 13th July, says, "These unfortunate men claimed to the last, the privilege of American citizens, the trial by Jury, and professed themselves willing to submit to anything their country would legally inflict upon them: but we are sorry to say, their petition was in vain. The black musicians were ordered to strike up, and the voices of the supplicants were drowned by the fife and drum. Mr. Riddle, the Cashier of the Planters' Bank, ordered them to play Yankee Doodle. The unhappy sufferers frequently implored a drink of water, but they were refused."
The sympathy of the Louisiana editor, so different from his brother of Richmond, was probably owing to the fact, that the murdered men were accused of being gamblers, and not abolitionists.
When we said these five men were hung by the mob, we did not mean what Chancellor Harper calls "the democratic rabble." It seems the Cashier of a Bank, a man to whom the slaveholders entrust the custody of their money, officiated on the occasion as Master of Ceremonies.
A few days after the murders at Vicksburg, a negro named Vincent was sentenced by a Lynch club at Clinton, Miss., to receive 300 lashes, for an alleged participation in an intended insurrection. We copy from the Clinton Gazette.
"On Wednesday evening Vincent was carried out to receive his stripes, but the assembled multitude were in favor of hanging him. A vote was accordingly fairly taken, and the hanging party had it by an overwhelming majority, as the politicians say. He was remanded to prison. On the day of execution a still larger crowd was assembled, and fearing that the public sentiment might have changed in regard to his fate, after everything favorable to the culprit was alleged which could be said, the vote was taken, and his death was demanded by the people. In pursuance of this sentiment, so unequivocally expressed, he was led to a black jack and suspended to one of its branches—we approve entirely of the proceedings; the people have acted properly."
Thus, sixteen human beings were deliberately and publicly murdered, by assembled crowds, in different parts of the State of Mississippi, within little more than one week, in open defiance of the laws and Constitution of the State.