louisa picquet, the octoroon: or inside views of - Negro Artist

Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon 52
24.03.2006
"It is questionable whether burning negroes by whites has any better effect than
to brutalize the feeling of a community. Several have already been burned in
Montgomery County, without, it seems, decreasing crime among them."
Here it is stated by an Alabama editor that "several" negroes have already been
burned in Montgomery County. Several in a single county------
Our next witness is a Mr. Poe, a native of Richmond, Va., and afterward a
resident of Hamilton County, Ohio, where he was a highly respected ruling
elder in the Presbyterian Church. In a letter written about twenty years since,
upon the subject of slavery, he says: "In Goochland County, Virginia, an
overseer tied a slave to a tree, flogged him again and again with great severity,
then piled brush around him, set it on fire, and burned him to death. The
overseer was tried and imprisoned. The whole transaction may be found on the
records of the court."------
The late John Parrish, of Philadelphia, an eminent minister of the Society of
Friends, traveled through the Slave States on a religious mission, early in this
century, and on his return published a pamphlet entitled "Remarks on the
Slavery of the Black People." Among other instances of cruel punishment, he
states that a slave "was burned to death at a stake in Charleston, surrounded by a
multitude of spectators, some of whom were people of the first rank; ...... the
poor object was heard to cry, as long as he could breathe, 'not guilty--not guilty!'
"------
In the year 1836, a man of color was arrested in St. Louis for some offense, but
was rescued by one Mackintosh, a free man of color, a steward on board a
steamboat. On his way to the jail, in order to effect his escape, he stabbed and
killed one of his captors. The wife and children of the murdered man excited
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the rage of the people by their lamentations, the jail was surrounded, the
murderer demanded, and given up. He was led into the woods, on the then
outskirts of the city, but near the spot where the court-house was afterward built,
brush wood and green wood was piled about him, and fire set to the heap, in
presence of a concourse of two or three thousand of the citizens of St. Louis.
The poor wretch was from twenty minutes to half an hour in dying, during
which he was praying or singing hymns in a calm voice. When his legs were
consumed, the trunk disappeared in the blazing pile. "There," said a by-stander,
"it is over with him; he does not feel any more now." "Yes, I do," answered a