Those happening in the State of Mississippi and at St. Louis are
perhaps the most dangerous in example and revolting to humanity. In the
Mississippi case they first commenced by hanging the regular gamblers--a
set of men certainly not following for a livelihood a very useful or very
honest occupation, but one which, so far from being forbidden by the
laws, was actually licensed by an act of the Legislature passed but a
single year before. Next, negroes suspected of conspiring to raise an
insurrection were caught up and hanged in all parts of the State; then,
white men supposed to be leagued with the negroes; and finally, strangers
from neighboring States, going thither on business, were in many
instances subjected to the same fate. Thus went on this process of
hanging, from gamblers to negroes, from negroes to white citizens, and
from these to strangers, till dead men were seen literally dangling from
the boughs of trees upon every roadside, and in numbers almost sufficient
to rival the native Spanish moss of the country as a drapery of the
forest.
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