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]