Whenever the vicious portion of the population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure and with impunity, depend on it: the government cannot last. Lincoln, “Address by Abraham Lincoln Before the Young Men’s Lyceum.” 1838

In his early years Lincoln was more famous for this law and order speech than for civil rights, but he alluded to two victims of St. Louis hate crimes when he was s legislator in the Illinois House of Representatives– an editor and an “obnoxious person.”

The story of Francis McIntosh (the “obnoxious person”), a free Black steward aboard a steamboat docking in St. Louis, resonates with our modern Black on Blue tragedies.  McIntosh was barely off the boat when two sailors came running toward him followed by two other men in plain clothes, although they were Deputy Sheriff George Hammond and Deputy Constable William Mull.  McIntosh held them up in their pursuit, so they decided to take him in, instead of the sailors they had pursued.  In the struggle the Steward pulled out a knife and slit Hammond’s throat. Then he drove his knife into Constable Mull’s stomach. McIntosh fled down Fourth Street, but he was apprehended by about fifty men by the time he reached Walnut Street. They heard the cries of the pursuing Constable Mull, surrounded McIntosh, and took him to the local jail.

A crowd gathered outside the jail, along with Deputy Hammond’s widow and children. Their cries of grief incensed the crowd until a group of men forced their way into the jail and dragged McIntosh away. A few blocks away on Chestnut Street they tied McIntosh to a tree and built a fire around him. “Only as the flames arose around him did he begin to pray and then to scream. Some of those who watched in the crowd later remembered hearing him to beg to be shot as he was consumed by the flames.” (Gerteis, Civil War St. Louis, 8-9, 13, 31.)

McIntosh’s lynching was a national story, reported locally by the white abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy in his St. Louis Observer. The lynching occurred in April, 1836, and after a series of articles deploring the act, Lovejoy fled to Alton, Illinois in May under pressure from angry readers.

In November, 1837  a St.Louis mob crossed the Mississippi to set fire to the warehouse where Lovejoy kept his printing press.  He was shot when he arrived at the site of the arson and tried to save his press. The mob seized the press, destroyed it, and hurled it in the river below.  Lovejoy died of his gunshot wounds, and no one was ever convicted for his murder. John Quincy Adams called it “a shock as of an earthquake throughout the continent.”

The remains of Frances McIntosh were left under the burned tree at the corner of Seventh and Chestnut for years afterward, clearly a symbol of White supremacy and Black subordination. Even the voice of protest, Elijah Lovejoy, had been snuffed out. Instructing the members of the grand jury investigating the lynching of McIntosh the appropriately-named Judge Lawless said that the lynch mob had responded to a “higher law,” the need to avenge the murder of Hammond and “similar atrocities committed in this and other states by INDIVIDUALS OF NEGRO BLOOD AGAINT THEIR WHITE BRETHREN.”   Walter Johnson, author of The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States, commented, “The mob was moved by a spirit greater than that of law or constitutional order: the spirit of white rage.” (78).

The three white men arrested in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, a black man who was chased while jogging in Georgia, were indicted on murder charges.

It is not hard to see comparisons between McIntosh’s confrontation with plains clothes policemen with the story of Ahmaud Arbery, the Black jogger accosted by two men in civilian clothes in Atlanta, who mistook him for a local burglar.  In the modern version, the Black man is unarmed and falls victim to a shotgun blast.  But the curse of jogging while Black resembles the curse of a man who thought he was defending shipmates against pursuers, when he stepped in front of the plain clothes policemen.  It was the fatal color of the skin that resulted in death.

Like many modern historians Walter Johnson sees parallels between the removal of Indian tribes from Missouri and its enduring identity as a slave state. He points to the Jefferson Barracks, home to U.S. Army battalions deployed to push Indian settlements westward during the expansion of white settlements in the first half of the century. He cites the pressure of white settlers to dispossess the Osage as they pushed west for room to live.  At the time of Missouri’s admission to the Union as a slave state (1820), the new state constitution stipulated that free Blacks and mulattoes were forbidden to enter the state from Illinois and surrounding free states, despite a substantial population of Black freemen in St. Louis already.

The non-slave-holding population of St. Louis was 86%, a large disadvantaged white population. “For the non-slaveholding and working class white men who predominated in the state, Indians were a barrier to cheap land and enslaved people and free Blacks were a barrier to high wages” (84). This turned the poor white against the poor black and poor Indian. It was not always the wealthy elite that turned their political power against the darker people.

Johnson takes many more pains to show the political polarization among the races and tribes, but I will only bring you to the end result: Dred Scott vs. Sandford, March 6, 1857. Justice Roger Taney declared that Blacks were “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” (Dred Scott vs. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857).

At this nadir of race relations, Johnson suggests that St. Louis had another road it might have taken following the Civil War, but, of course, his book would be much different if the city had taken that road.