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Chapter Four SAVAGE DEEDS OF BLOOD AND CARNAGE Having taken measures to protect their homes from the incendiary’s torch and their families from the assassin’s hand, the vigilance committees proceeded apace with the grim business of discovering and punishing the conspirators. Obtaining evidence against the enemies of slavery, however, was by no means an easy task. With few exceptions, those whites charged with having caused the mischief had stayed in the background, allegedly inducing the blacks to do the dirty work and take all the risks. Not that there was a shortage of suspicious white persons. Most communities in this frontier land could count a generous sprinkling of white settlers who had only recently arrived from other states, and some of those from northern climes were thought to be entirely too friendly with African Americans. In some instances, so it was said, these familiarities had taken the form of trading liquor to slaves, gambling with them, and instilling in them an unhealthy dissatisfaction with their enslaved condition. Such a flaunting of the law—for recent revisions of the slave code forbade such activities—was regarded by some as prima facie evidence that the whites involved were at least untrustworthy, if not downright abolitionist in their views.1 While those exemplifying more orthodox southern racial attitudes always held such men in contempt, during the panic suspect northerners were in mortal danger. Vigilantes everywhere depended on frightened blacks to reveal the particulars of the “plots,” and they usually induced confessions by threats and by forceful applications of the lash. According to one report, blacks in Tennessee 78 . Gammel, The Laws of Texas, 4:459, 467. Colony “were taken up and severely whipped, and made to divulge much in relation to insurrectionary movements.” In consequence of their confessions, the vigilantes arrested two white men.2 A resident of Billums Creek reported that the committee in Tyler County had whipped four blacks “very severely and one of them has died sinse from the whiping.”3 The Rusk Enquirer said that the vigilantes of that town had “severely whipped” some blacks, and, not surprisingly , this action appears to have led other blacks to confess their guilt “with little or no punishment.”4 A report from Athens announcing the discovery of “over one hundred bottles” of strychnine among the local blacks said: “After severe punishment [the blacks] revealed the particulars of the plot.”5 A similar report came from Judge Nat Burford of Dallas, who wrote: “Under the lash the negroes have admitted that they had in their possession deadly poisons to be administered to their masters’ families in food; and when demanded of them, they have gone to the kitchen and produced the poison.”6 The white populace generally demanded a quick and terrible punishment for those whose names were extorted from the blacks. There should be no hesitation , many believed, in putting the culprits to death. They agreed with the Corsicana editor who hoped that the incendiaries “may be swung up to the limb of a post oak.”7 There could be no punishment terrible enough to match the monstrous horrors that the abolitionists allegedly had planned for white Texans; nevertheless, some believed that an awful retribution should fall upon the guilty, not only because of the enormity of their crimes, but also because other would-be conspirators might be deterred by the fearful consequences. The Houston Telegraph said: “Let their crimes be washed out by their blood. And if they are insane, their insanity is of a nature that burning alive will cure, as well as prevent the spread of.”8 Hanging was “too reputable a death” for such “devil worshippers,” wrote an Austin woman: “Fire, the element they invoke for the consummation of their wicked aims and purposes, should be the avenging agent for the punishment of their atrocious crimes.”9 2. Galveston Civilian and Gazette Weekly, August 4, 860. 3. W. L. Mann, Billums Creek, Tyler County, to Thomas B. Huling, Lampasas, August 24, 860, Huling Papers, Barker Texas History Center Archives, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 4. Rusk Enquirer, n.d., clipped in Marshall Texas Republican, August 8, 860. 5. Tyler Reporter, August , 860, clipped in Marshall Texas Republican, August 8, 860. 6. Waco Democrat, n.d., clipped in Houston Telegraph, July 3, 860. 7. Corsicana Navarro Express, August 25, 860. 8. Houston Telegraph, n.d., clipped in San Antonio Daily Ledger and Texan, July 23, 860. 9. Anonymous letter, printed in Houston True Southron, July 28, 860...

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