resolutions
adopted in Washington County are notable especially for the tone of their
preamble. Mentioning the method recently followed in Mississippi only to
disapprove it, this preamble ran: "We would fain hope that the soil of
Georgia may never be reddened or her people disgraced by the arbitrary
shedding of human blood; for if the people allow themselves but one
participation in such lawless proceedings, no human sagacity can foretell
where the overwhelming deluge will be staid or what portions of our state
may feel its desolating ruin. This course of protection unhinges every tie
of social and civil society, dissolves those guards which the laws throw
around property and life, and leaves every individual, no matter how
innocent, at the sport of popular passion, the probable object of popular
indignation, and liable to an ignominious death. Therefore we would
recommend to our fellow-citizens that if any facts should be elicited
implicating either white men or negroes in any insurrectionary or abolition
movements, that they be apprehended and delivered over to the legal
tribunals of the country for full and fair judicial trial."[88] At
Clarksville, Tennessee, uneasiness among the citizens on the score of the
negroes employed in the iron works thereabout was such that they procured a
shipment of arms from the state capital in preparation for special guard at
the Christmas season.[89]

[Footnote 88: _Federal Union_ (Milledgeville, Ga.), Dec. 11, 1835. At
Darien on the Georgia coast Edwin C. Roberts, an Englishman by birth, was
committed for trial in the following August for having told slaves they
ought to be free and that half of the American people were in favor of
their freedom. The local editor remarked when reporting the occurrence:
"Mr. Roberts should thank his stars that he did not commence his crusade in
some quarters where Judge Lynch presides. Here the majesty of the law
is too highly respected to tolerate the jurisdiction of this despotic
dignitary." Darien _Telegraph_, Aug. 30, quoted in the _Federal Union_,
Sept. 6, 1836.]

[Footnote 89: MS. petition with endorsement noting the despatch of arms, in
the state archives at Nashville.]

In various parts of Louisiana in this period there was a succession of
plots discovered. The first of these, betrayed on Christmas Eve, 1835,
involved two white men, one of them a plantation overseer, along with forty
slaves or more. The whites were promptly hanged, and doub