at the hands of a mob while trying to protect
his property November 7, 1837. Judge Lawless defended the lynching and
even William Ellery Channing took a compromising view. Abraham Lincoln,
however, then a very young man, in an address on "The Perpetuation of
Our Political Institutions" at Springfield, January 27, 1837, said:
"Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the everyday news of the
times. They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana;
they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former nor the
burning suns of the latter; they are not the creatures of climate,
neither are they confined to the slaveholding or the nonslaveholding
states.... Turn to that horror-striking scene at St. Louis. A single
victim only was sacrificed there. This story is very short, and is
perhaps the most highly tragic of anything that has ever been witnessed
in real life. A mulatto man by the name of McIntosh was seized in the
street, dragged to the suburbs of the city, chained to a tree, and
actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from the time he
had been a free man attending to his own business and at peace with
the world.... Such are the effects of mob law, and such are the scenes
becoming more and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of
law and order, and the stories of which have even now grown too familiar
to attract anything more than an idle remark."

[Footnote 1: Cutler: _Lynch Law_, 109, citing Niles's _Register_, June
4, 1836.]

All the while flagrant crimes were committed against Negro women and
girls, and free men in the border states were constantly being
dragged into slavery by kidnapers. Two typical cases will serve for
illustration. George Jones, a respectable man of New York, was in 1836
arrested on Broadway on the pretext that he had committed assault and
battery. He refused to go with his captors, for he knew that he had
done nothing to warrant such a charge; but he finally yielded on the
assurance of his employer that everything possible would be done for
him. He was placed in the Bridewell and a few minutes afterwards taken
before a magistrate, to whose satisfaction he was proved to be a slave.
Thus, in less than two hours after his arrest he was hurried away by the
kidnapers, whose word had been accepted as sufficient evidence, and he
had not been permitted to secure a single friendly witness. Solomon
Northrup, who afterwards wrote an account of his experie