| For each day employed in hunting or trailing | $2.50 |
| For catching each slave | 10.00 |
| For going over ten miles, and catching slaves | 20.00 |
“If sent for, the above prices will be exacted in cash. The subscriber resides one mile and a half south of Dadeville, Ala.
“B. Black.”
Slavery so completely seared the conscience of the whites of the South, that they had no feeling of compassion for the blacks, as the following illustration will show. At St. Louis, in the year 1835, Francis McIntosh, a free colored man, while defending himself from an attack of white ruffians, one of the latter was killed. At once the colored man was taken, chained to a tree, and burnt to death. One of the newspapers at the time gave the following account of the inhuman affair:—
“All was silent as death while the executioners were piling wood around their victim. He said not a word, until feeling that the flames had seized upon him. He then uttered an awful howl, attempting to sing and pray, then hung his head, and suffered in silence, except in the following instance. After the flames had surrounded their prey, his eyes burnt out of his head, and his mouth seemingly parched to a cinder, some one in the crowd, more compassionate than the rest, proposed to put an end to his misery by shooting him, when it was replied, ‘That would be of no use, since he was already out of pain.’ ‘No, no,’ said the wretch, ‘I am not, I am suffering as much as ever; shoot me, shoot me.’ ‘No, no,’ said one of the fiends who was standing about the sacrifice they were roasting, ‘he shall not be shot. I would sooner slacken the fire, if it would increase his misery;’ and the man who said this was, as we understand, an officer of justice!”
Lest this demonstration of “public opinion” should be regarded as a sudden impulse merely, not an index of the settled tone of feeling in that community, it is important to add, that the Hon. Luke E. Lawless, Judge of the Circuit Court of Missouri, at a session of that court in the city of St. Louis, some months after the burning of this man, decided officially that since the burning of McIntosh was the act, either directly or by countenance of a majority of the citizens, it is “a case which transcends the jurisdiction” of the Grand Jury! Thus the State of Missouri proclaimed to the world that the wretches who perpetrated that unspeakably diabolical murder, and the thousands that stood by consenting to it, were her representatives, and the Bench sanctified it with the solemnity of a judicial decision.
CHAPTER XXXVI. DISCONTENT AND INSURRECTION.
An undeveloped discontent always pervaded the black population of the South, bond and free. Human bondage is ever fruitful of insurrection, wherever it exists, and under whatever circumstances it may be found. The laws forbidding either free people of color or slaves to assemble in any considerable numbers for religious, or any other purpose, without two or more whites being present, and the rigorous enforcement of such laws, show how fearful the slave-masters were of their injured victims.