Ruel Blake was next tried, condemned and HUNG. "He protested his innocence to the last, and said his life was sworn away."
Here we have a record of no less than TEN men, five black and five white, probably all innocent of the crime alleged against them, deliberately and publicly put to death by the slaveholders, without the shadow of legal authority.
The Maysville, Ken. Gazette, in announcing Donavan's murder, says, "he formerly belonged to Maysville, and was a much respected citizen."
A letter from Donavan to his wife, written just before his execution, and published in the Maysville paper, says, "I am doomed to die to-morrow at 12 o'clock, on a charge of having been concerned in a negro insurrection, in this State, among many other whites. We are not tried by a regular jury, but by a committee of PLANTERS appointed for the purpose, who have not time to wait on a person for evidence.... Now I must close by saying, before my Maker and Judge, that I go into his presence as innocent of this charge as when I was born.... I must bid you a final farewell, hoping that the God of the widow and the fatherless will give you grace to bear this most awful sentence."
And now, did these butcheries by the Mississippi PLANTERS excite the indignation of the slaveholding communities? Receive the answer from an editor of the Ancient Dominion, replying to the comments of a Northern newspaper. "The Journal may depend upon it that the Cottons and the Saunders, men confessing themselves guilty of inciting and plotting insurrection, will be HANGED UP wherever caught, and that _without the formality of a legal trial_. Northern or Southern, such will be their inevitable doom. For our part, WE APPLAUD the transaction, and none in our opinion can condemn it, who have not a secret sympathy with the Garrison sect. If Northern sympathy and effort are to be cooled and extinguished by such cases, it proves but this, that the South ought to feel little confidence in the professions it receives from that quarter."--_Richmond Whig._
About the time of the massacre in Clinton County, another awful tragedy was performed at Vicksburg in the same State. FIVE men, said to be _gamblers_, were HANGED by the mob on the 5th July, in open day.