Address to the Non-Slaveholders of the South: on the Social and Political Evils of SlaveryTappan, Lewis
History
Address to the Non-Slaveholders of the South: on the Social and Political Evils of Slavery
Tappan, Lewis
Slavery -- United States
Here we have a record of no less than TEN men, five black and five
white, probably all innocent of the crime alleged against them,
deliberately and publicly put to death by the slaveholders, without the
shadow of legal authority.
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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