e there and elsewhere, however, was in the form of
added legal restrictions upon the colored population, slave and free. But
when the fright and fervor of the year had passed, conditions normal to the
community returned. On the one hand the warnings of wiseacres impressed
upon the would-be problem solvers the maxim of the golden quality of
silence, particularly while the attacks of the Northern abolitionists upon
the general Southern regime were so active. On the other hand the new
severities of the law were promptly relegated, as the old ones had been,
to the limbo of things laid away, like pistols, for emergency use, out of
sight and out of mind in the daily routine of peaceful industry.

[Footnote 84: _The Letter of Appomattox to the People of Virginia:
Exhibiting a connected view of the recent proceedings in the House of
Delegates on the subject of the abolition of slavery and a succinct account
of the doctrines broached by the friends of abolition in debate, and the
mischievous tendency of those proceedings and doctrines_ (Richmond, 1832).
These letters were first published in the Richmond _Enquirer_, February 4,
1832 et seqq.]

[Footnote 85: The debate is summarized in Henry Wilson, _History of the
Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America_ (Boston, 1872), I, 190-207.]

In the remaining ante-bellum decades, though the actual outbreaks were
negligible except for John Brown's raid, the discoveries, true or false,
and the rumors, mostly unwarranted, were somewhat more frequent than
before. Revelations in Madison County, Mississippi, in 1835 shortly before
July 4, told of a conspiracy of whites and blacks scheduled for that day
as a ramification of the general plot of the Murrell gang recently
exposed.[86] A mass meeting thereupon appointed an investigating committee
of thirteen citizens with power to apply capital punishment; and several
whites together with ten or fifteen blacks were promptly put to death.[87]

[Footnote 86: See above, pp. 381, 382.]

[Footnote 87: _The Liberator_ (Boston, Mass.), Aug. 8, 1835, quoting the
Clinton, Miss., _Gazette_ of July 11.]

Widespread rumors at the beginning of the following December that a general
uprising was in preparation for the coming holiday season caused the
summons of citizens in various Georgia counties to mass meetings which with
one accord recommended special precautions by masters, patrols and militia,
and appointed committees of vigilance. In this series the