OUR slavery? What about YOUR witch trials?

“The day after [John] Brown’s execution in Virginia, [the Raleigh Register] warned Virginia governor Henry Wise to burn the gallows, lest some enterprising man remove it and ship it north, since ‘The Yankees have no objection to mingling money-making with their grief.’  The idea of memorial services and ‘mock funerals’ rumored in the North irritated the same editor enough to make him suggest that if Northerners were looking for public entertainment, ‘It is a pity they haven’t a witch or two to drown or burn’…

“Angered by [Massachusetts Rep.] Horace Mann’s comments condemning  slavery, [Rep. Abraham Venable of North Carolina] lashed out: ‘Let him blush when he speaks of the sins and crimes of any people on earth… no southern calendar of crime can afford such cases as the Salem murders.’ ”

— From “The Specter of Salem: Remembering the Witch Trials in Nineteenth-Century America” (2008) by  Gretchen A. Adams