This burning of a free black man, and sailor, without trial, in one day, Francis McIntosh, in St. Louis in April 1936, by a pro-slavery lynch mob was brought back to mind in reading THE KEY TO UNCLE TOM'S CABIN by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1853). Judge Lawless, his true name and true nature, did not allow a grand jury to prosecute anyone. Mob acts were above the law, he said. Abraham Lincoln, when running for state office in Illinois, condemned the lynching by slow roasting. Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy of Alton, Illinois, had his 4th printing press thrown into the Mississippi River for daring to write in his abolitionist newspaper about this travesty and others. He was later killed in November 1837 by another pro-slavery, St. Louis, Missouri lynching mob. No one was ever prosecuted, for the shooting of this white man, nor for the slow-roasting of the free black man!
