There is reason to believe that these executions are not of rare occurrence, and that many of them, either through indifference or policy, are not noticed in the Southern papers.
Lewis Tappan
The Public Record
Lewis Tappan was an American abolitionist who in 1841 helped to secure freedom for the enslaved Africans aboard the Amistad. He was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, into a Calvinist household.
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Men who can enjoy the sight of negroes writhing in flames, and are permitted by the civil authorities to indulge in such exhibitions, will not be very scrupulous in taking the lives of each other.
You well know how incessantly the work of human slaughter is going on among you: and no reader of your public journals can be ignorant of the frequent occurrence of your deadly street fights.
We charge the slaveholding community, as such, with sanctioning murder, and protecting the perpetrators, and setting the laws at defiance.
God forbid we should deny that many of the community to which we refer, utterly abhor the atrocities we are about to detail.
We speak of the murderous feelings of the slaveholding community, just as we speak of the politics, the manners, and the morals of any other community, freely acknowledging that there are numerous and honorable exceptions.
You have already seen that the pro-slavery press has recommended the murder of such northern abolitionists as may be caught in the South; we now ask your attention to the efforts made by the slaveholders to get prominent abolitionists into…
The legislature, however, forthwith passed a law, offering a bribe of $5000 to any person who would arrest and bring to trial and conviction, in Georgia, the editor and publisher of the Boston paper.
The object of the bribe could have been no other than the abduction and murder of the conductor of the paper--his trial and conviction under Georgia laws being a mere pretence: the Georgia courts have as much jurisdiction over the Press in…
Let us now witness the practical operation of that murderous spirit which dictated the foregoing villainous bribes.
We have already seen the conduct of the slave-holding community to negro offenders; we are now to notice its tender mercies to men of its own color.
If we are permitted to apply this rule in testing the moral condition of the South, the result will not be favorable.