ork which the negroes had acquired from the
bandit.[53]

[Footnote 48: For the effect of epidemics _see_ above, pp. 300, 301.]

[Footnote 49: _South Carolina Gazette_, Feb. 12 to 19, 1741.]

[Footnote 50: _Carolina Gazette_ (Charleston), Feb. 4, 1798, supplement.]

[Footnote 51: _Louisiana Courier_, Mch. 3, 1828.]

[Footnote 52: J.W. DuBose, _Life of W.L. Yancey_ (Birmingham, Ala., 1892),
p. 39.]

[Footnote 53: Alexandra Barbe, _Histoire des Comites de Vigilance aux
Attakapas_] (Louisiana, 1861), pp. 182-185.

The governor of South Carolina reported the convictions of five white
men for the crime of slave stealing in the one year;[54] and in the
penitentiary lists of the several states the designation of slave stealers
was fairly frequent, in spite of the fact that the death penalty was
generally prescribed for the crime. One method of their operation was
described in a Georgia newspaper item of 1828 which related that two
wagoners upon meeting a slave upon the road persuaded him to lend a hand in
shifting their load. When the negro entered the wagon they overpowered him
and drove on. When they camped for the night they bound him to the wheel;
but while they slept he cut his thongs and returned to his master.[55] The
greatest activities in this line, however, were doubtless those of the
Murrell gang of desperadoes operating throughout the southwest in the early
thirties with a shrewd scheme for victimizing both whites and blacks. They
would conspire with a slave, promising him his freedom or some other reward
if he would run off with them and suffer himself to be sold to some unwary
purchaser and then escape to join them again.[56] Sometimes they repeated
this process over and over again with the same slave until a threat of
exposure from him led to his being silenced by murder. In the same period a
smaller gang with John Washburn as its leading spirit and with Natchez as
informal headquarters, was busy at burglary, highway and flatboat robbery,
pocket picking and slave stealing.[57] In 1846 a prisoner under arrest at
Cheraw, South Carolina, professed to reveal a new conspiracy for slave
stealing with ramifications from Virginia to Texas; but the details appear
not to have been published.[58]

[Footnote 54: H.M. Henry, _The Police Control of the Slave in South
Carolina_ [1914], pp. 110-112.]

[Footnote 55: _The Athenian_ (Athens, Ga.), Aug. 19, 1828.]

[Footnote 56: H.R. Howard, compiler, _The History of Virgi