Southern Outrages

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 8, 1875

Southern Outrages.

The committee appointed by the late Convention in Chattanooga, to investigate the reports of outrages in the South, speak as follows in reference to the state of affairs in Arkansas:— “The committee have done more work in Arkansas than in any other State, and yet they are obliged to confess that not one-eighth of the crimes can be recorded, for several reasons. But the returns from this State, as declared by one who has been permitted to examine them, make up a page of horrors absolutely appalling; a page of death ‘in the cabin, by the road-side, on the crowded street, by the sluggish stream, in the thicket, in the open field, by night-time, and by day-time.’ Fifty-six of the seventy-three counties in Arkansas report that there have been 956 outrages since 1866, from merciless whippings to cold-blooded murder, as follows: Murders, 660; attempts to assassinate, 223; threats to murder and whippings have been in proportion, and the number of men engaged in the outrages, nearly all white, is little less than a thousand.”