It should be said, however, that the instances of the application of lynch-law which are given in Niles’ Register and the Liberator from 1830 to 1860 show an increase in the severity of the punishment administered. As the slavery controversy went on and the breach widened between the North and the South, it was but natural that such should be the case. Many people in the South felt that no punishment was quite severe enough for an abolitionist. Crimes committed by negroes were also treated with greater severity. The following extract from a private letter, dated Houston, Texas, August 23, 1860, to a friend in Hartford, Connecticut, expresses a sentiment felt at that time in many sections of the South: “Tell your abolition friends to go on and soon they will have the pleasure of seeing the negro reduced to such a state of hopeless bondage that they may well pity them. I solemnly declare that to-day the negro is not as free as he was two or five years ago; and why? Simply because his master has been goaded on to desperation by incendiary acts and speeches. Now he fears the negro, and binds him down as you would a savage animal. One year ago, all was peace and quietness here. The negro was allowed to go out, to have dances and frolics; to-day one dare not show his head after nine o’clock in the evening. Seven companies of patrols are organized and guard the city each night, sixteen horse-patrol scour the country around. Forty-eight vigilance men say live, banish or die, as the proof may go to show. And so it is all over the country. Men are hung every day by the decision of planters, lawyers, judges and ministers. It is no hot impetuous act, but cool, stern justice. It is the saving of wife and daughter, mother and sister from the hand of desecration. It is the stopping of scenes that would make the Druses and Turks blush for shame.”[184] At the time this letter was written, and during the three years preceding, there was a great deal of excitement in Texas. Vigilance societies were in active operation against desperadoes and abolitionists. In 1857 a vigilance committee in the “upper country,” as it was then called, was “raking the country fore and aft and swinging every horse-thief and murderer,” that could be found. A traveler saw twelve bodies suspended from one tree and on another tree five.[185] In the summer of 1860 there was an insurrection and conspiracy in Dallas, Ellis, Tarrant and Denton counties, in northern Texas. The three ringleaders, Sam, Cato, and Patrick, were hung by a vigilance committee on July 24. Twenty-two insurrectionists in all were said to have been hanged.[186] This condition of affairs must be taken into consideration in connection with the statements made in the above letter and the fears and prejudice therein expressed.