The South was much excited in 1832 and later by the reports of the Southhampton negro insurrection in Virginia, or plot for insurrections, which was followed by many hasty trials and executions. There was such a panic also, in earlier days, in New York City. In both cases there were those who denied the seriousness of the alarm, adn claimed that confessions and executions alike were part of a strange and uncontrollable panic. On the other hand the records afford evidence of some fire behind the smoke. The Mississippi panic was in 1835, following the visits of Virgil A. Stewart, who travelled extensively through Mississippi and several adjoining States, selling a pamphlet which purported to be a revelation of a scheme for a general insurrection originated by John Murel, of Tennessee, negro stealer and horse thief, and participated in by the noted outlaw Alonzo Phelps and the whole body of "thompsonian" or "steam doctors." There had been in the ame year as the Virignia panic, a bloody insurrection of slaves in Jamaica, and the era was revolutionary everywhere, both in Europe and America. Stewart found complete credence for his revelations, was given public honors in some places and hailed as a public savior. The result is thus described by Henry S. Foote, in his Reminiscenses, (pp. 251-62.) "Never was there an instance of more extravagant and even maddening excitement amid a refined, intelligent and virtue-loving people than that which I had the pain to witness in the counties of Central Mississippi in teh summer of 1835. Vigilance committees were organized in some ten or a dozen counties where the negro population was most numerous, and where, of consequence, the slaveholding class was more sensitive to the cries of alarm which at this time literally range through the whole community . . . . The impression prevailed that the insurrectionary movement was to commence in the interior counties of Holmes, Yazoo and Madison;" that the slaves were to rise simultaneously, murder the whites, burn the towns, sieze all firearms and spread war over all the cotton country. At Clinton, night after night, the women and children were assembled at a central place, while the male population patrolled the surrounding country. The committees of safety sat daily, and some persons suspected of abetting the alleged insurrection were brought before it, while others, "whose guilt seemed to be fully established, were hung without ceremony along the roadsides or in front of their own dwellings by those who had apprehended them. "A number of the poor Thompsonian empirics were taken up and either hung or severely whipped" according to the seeming force of the evidence. In Madison County a young trader from Kentucky was taken and hung, and the publication of his letters to his wife, later, proved that there was not, the slightest cause for the outrage." Foote made a desperate but vain attempt to save the life of a mulatto boy who had been the sole suport of his master's widow and child. Patrick L. Sharkey, a kinsman of the chief justice, and himself a magistrate, was attacked by a mob because he discharged an intended victim, and was badly wounded, but fled from Madison county, and obtained the protection of the Hinds County committee. Such is Foote's version of the episode.

In the Mississippi Archives is a pamphlet printed at Jackson in 1835, being a narrative prepared by Thomas Shackleford in behalf of the committee of citizens of Madison County, at Livingston. It appears that a rumor was afloat in that county in June, that an insurrection was meditated, which was found to emanate from a lady who had overheard her colored girls talking rebelliously. Her son told one of them she had been overheard and must confess, and thereupon she told a story a black man told her, that there was to be a rising soon to kill all the whites. Consequently there was a meeting of the citizens, presiding over by Col. H. D. Runnels, and hints were collected which led to the severe whipping of a number of negroes by their masters, and additional confessions. From this the excitement grew until five negroes were examined and hung at Beattie's Bluff, after accounts of teh proposed insurrection on July 4 were elicited from them.

On July 3 there was a great meeting at Livingston and a committee was appointed, which proceeded to try all persons accused. The list of white men executed on confession, or negro testimony, or circumstantial evidence, were Joshua Cotton, a steam doctor from Tennessee, who made a confession that he was one of the grand council of Murel's gang, and that the statements of Stewart's book were correct; William Saunders, also of Tennessee, a friend of Cotton's; Albe Dean, a Mississippian of two years' residence from Connecticut, who was hung on the word of Cotton and Saunders; A. L. Donovan, of Maysville KY who was apparently a contraband trader with the negroes, and was accused of being an abolitionist; Ruel Blake, implicated by Cotton; Lee Smith of Hinds County, from Tennessee, implicated by Cotton; William Benson, who had worked for Blake; William Earle, of Warren County, being taken committed suicide; John Earle, who made a confession was turned over to the committee at Vicksburg. A visitor from Natchez wrote home July 14 that five white men and twelve negroes had been hung in Madison County. Such was the panic that his letter was opened by the postmaster and he was put under surveillance as a spy or accomplice of the gang. There is no doubt that the State at this time was overrun with highway robbers, negro-stealers, and Black legs, of which organization Murel was a member; that some abnormal people were impelled to foment insurrection by the doctrines of abolition, as others have from time to time been impelled to assassination by political and religious doctrines. The combination of circumstances and the general agitation of the period all over the world, serve to explain this Mississippi phenomenon, that Foote's account hardly does justice. But the license of the regulators brought evils in its train.

The Jackson Freetrader said in August 1836:

"Another bloody affray, is a sound which often greets our ears. The affair at Vicksburg, the affair at Manchester, the affair at Rodney, other places, and lastly a most horrid affair at Fayette, have followed each other in quick succession, as to make every friend to law and order shudder, lest an entire destruction of rational liberty should be the consequence of these repeated violations of law."

The same paper declared that a man paraded the streets of Jackson two days early in December 1835, armed with a fowling piece, sundry pistols and a bowie knife, threatening to assassinate Governor Runnels, without molestation.

The Natchez Courier and Journal, March 3, 1837, complained:>

"The papers in the city of New York seem to delight in nothing better than when any little fracas happens in any of the Southern States, to announce in glorious capitals, "More Riots in Mississippi," "More Lynching in the South."

See also John A. Murrel