The n—r, like the Inj—n will be eliminated. It is the law of races, of history.
—WALT WHITMAN to Horace Traubel, September 8, 1888
ON APRIL 28, 1836, FRANCIS MCINTOSH, A FREE BLACK STEWARD aboard the steamboat Flora, disembarked on the levee in St. Louis, not far from the spot where Lewis and Clark had landed on their return to St. Louis three decades earlier. Best as anyone could later tell, as McIntosh crossed the levee and walked into town he was overtaken by a pair of sailors who were running from the police. Whether he impeded the police, ignored their shouted commands, or simply did not understand what was happening around him, Deputy Sheriff George Hammond and Deputy Constable William Mull abandoned their pursuit of the two sailors and instead took McIntosh into custody. Within an hour, McIntosh would be dead, the victim of what was arguably the first lynching in the history of the United States. As Abraham Lincoln later put it, “His story is very short, and is perhaps the most highly tragic of anything of the length that has ever been witnessed in real life. A mulatto man, by the name of McIntosh, was seized in the street, dragged to the suburbs of the city, chained to a tree, and actually burned to death; and all within the single hour from the time he had been a free man, attending to his own business, and at peace with the world.” McIntosh, who had begun the day as a free Black sailor, was, by nightfall, a grisly landmark in a campaign of ethnic cleansing that sought to remake St. Louis, Missouri, and the West as a “white man’s country,” linking together the imperial practices of Indian removal and war to the jurisprudential annihilation of the 1857 Dred Scott decision.1
Because there was no uniformed police force in the city in 1836, there was no way for McIntosh to easily distinguish Hammond and Mull from anyone else when they accosted him. As the policemen tackled him and attempted to drag him to jail, McIntosh drew a knife from his coat and cut Hammond’s throat. He then turned to Mull and drove his knife upward into the constable’s stomach. McIntosh began running down Fourth Street, toward Market. As he passed across the front of the courthouse square, Mull, in pursuit, called out for help before collapsing in the street. McIntosh made it as far as Walnut Street before he was surrounded by as many as fifty men, taken to jail, and locked in a cell.2
Outside the jail, a crowd began to gather. There were later reports that Hammond’s widow and orphaned children were there, and that their keening grief enraged the crowd. A group of men soon forced their way into the jail, seized the key to McIntosh’s cell from the overwhelmed sheriff, and pulled the Black man outside. The mob dragged him a couple of blocks up Chestnut Street, where they tied him to a tree. Members of the neighborhood fire company stacked wood around his feet. McIntosh was silent while they worked. Only as the flames rose around him did he begin to pray and then to scream. Some of those who watched in the crowd later remembered hearing him beg to be shot as he was consumed by the flames.3