May 26, 1862: Black men don’t kill for money

According to the Richmond Daily Dispatch, one aspect of the black man’s less than full humanity is an immunity from some motives for murder. The Dispatch found it incredible that a black man would have killed men for money, and thus held that his Northern judges were deluded. Yankees just don’t understand the nature of black people the way southerners do, says the Dispatch.

The negro and the Yankee.

We noticed on Friday the case of the negro, who was hung by the Yankees at West Point upon the charge of having murdered two soldiers in a Massachusetts regiment “for their money” Is there a man in the South who believes that the negro did this thing? We have yet to know the instance of a murder being perpetrated by a negro for money. The negro will kill in a passion or in a fit of jealousy; possibly he might kill in endeavoring to escape upon the commission of burglary to get groceries or whiskey of wearing apparel yet we know of no such case. But that he will deliberately kill a man to rob him of money we do not believe, and we never heard of an instance to show that he will. As sure as there are murderers and robbers amongst the Yankees, this negro whom they have hung was guiltless of the crime of killing two Massachusetts soldiers “for their money.” We do not believe he killed them at all. The negro is not given to any such desperate act as that of killing two men at once, and at a time, too, when he is in a strange situation, amongst men who have changed his social relation, and while his mind must have been naturally occupied with this new position of his prospects. The story is incredible. If the truth is ever known, it will appear that the men, if killed by the negro at all, were killed for other cause than that alleged; but it will be ascertained that he did not kill them at all, and that some other person killed and robbed them.

Whatever the Yankee may say of the negro, and whatever follies he may commit under the delusion practiced upon him by the cunning serpent from the North now tracing his disgusting trail through the garden of the South, he has not yet interfered with the Yankee in his vocation of murdering that he may steal. He may steal a little — mostly something to eat, or now and then something to wear, as he is vain, and likes to sport a shining coat or bit of jewelry; but he will not murder to get them. So the Yankee need not be cruel to the negro on the suspicion that he meditates any such infringement of his prerogatives. As the Divine Thug of the age — the especial favorite of Heaven, commissioned in his own conceit to kill other people, and appropriate their money, and their goods, and their horses and asses, and cattle and flocks, to his own use — he will have no rival. He can have none. The negro may be vain, and have a good appetite, and seek to gratify his little vanities and his large appetites by small thefts; but he is not malignant, he is not avaricious, he is not selfish, like his Yankee hypocritical sympathizer. He will not murder, and steal, and secrete, and accumulate stores by appropriating to himself the property and substance of other people. He is a simple child, who gratifies the feeling of the hour and takes no care for the future. –He is a more innocent being than his pretended friend — he can never become his rival in the prominent features of his Southern raid, and is without doubt most grossly libelled in the alleged act of murdering two Massachusetts men “for money.”