[Footnote 50: Carolina Gazette (Charleston), Feb. 4, 1798, supplement.]
[Footnote 51: Louisiana Courier, Mch. 3, 1828.]
[Footnote 52: J.W. DuBose, Life of W.L. Yancey (Birmingham, Ala., 1892), p. 39.]
[Footnote 53: Alexandra Barbe, Histoire des Comités de Vigilance aux
Attakapas] (Louisiana, 1861), pp. 182-185.
The governor of South Carolina reported the convictions of five white men for the crime of slave stealing in the one year;[54] and in the penitentiary lists of the several states the designation of slave stealers was fairly frequent, in spite of the fact that the death penalty was generally prescribed for the crime. One method of their operation was described in a Georgia newspaper item of 1828 which related that two wagoners upon meeting a slave upon the road persuaded him to lend a hand in shifting their load. When the negro entered the wagon they overpowered him and drove on. When they camped for the night they bound him to the wheel; but while they slept he cut his thongs and returned to his master.[55] The greatest activities in this line, however, were doubtless those of the Murrell gang of desperadoes operating throughout the southwest in the early thirties with a shrewd scheme for victimizing both whites and blacks. They would conspire with a slave, promising him his freedom or some other reward if he would run off with them and suffer himself to be sold to some unwary purchaser and then escape to join them again.[56] Sometimes they repeated this process over and over again with the same slave until a threat of exposure from him led to his being silenced by murder. In the same period a smaller gang with John Washburn as its leading spirit and with Natchez as informal headquarters, was busy at burglary, highway and flatboat robbery, pocket picking and slave stealing.[57] In 1846 a prisoner under arrest at Cheraw, South Carolina, professed to reveal a new conspiracy for slave stealing with ramifications from Virginia to Texas; but the details appear not to have been published.[58]
[Footnote 54: H.M. Henry, The Police Control of the Slave in South
Carolina [1914], pp. 110-112.]
[Footnote 55: The Athenian (Athens, Ga.), Aug. 19, 1828.]
[Footnote 56: H.R. Howard, compiler, The History of Virgil A. Stewart and his Adventure in capturing and exposing the great "Western Land Pirate" and his Gang (New York, 1836), pp. 63-68, 104, et passim. The truth of these accounts of slave stealings is vouched for in a letter to the editor of the New Orleans Bulletin, reprinted in the Federal Union (Milledgeville, Ga.), Nov. 5, 1835.]
[Footnote 57: The manifold felonies of the gang were described by Washburn in a dying confession after his conviction for a murder at Cincinnati. Natchez Courier, reprinted in the Louisiana Courier (New Orleans), Feb. 28, 1837. Other reports of the theft of slaves appear in the Charleston Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, Nov. 2, 1786; Southern Banner (Athens, Ga.), July 19, 1834, advertisement; Federal Union (Milledgeville, Ga.), July 18, 1835; and the following New Orleans journals: Louisiana Gazette, Apr. 1 and Sept. 10, 1819; Mercantile Advertiser, Sept 29, 1831; Bee, Dec. 14, 1841; Mch. 10, 1845, and Aug. 1 and Nov. 11, 1848; Louisiana Courier, Mch. 29 and Sept. 18, 1840; Picayune, Aug. 21, 1845.]
[Footnote 58: New Orleans Commercial Times, Aug. 26, 1846.]