9th July, 1922 -- Jack, a slave belonging to Paul Pritchard, commonly called GULLAH JACK, and sometimes COUTER JACK, was brought up, and sentence pronounced by L.H.KENNEDY, Presiding Magistrate.
JACK PRITCHARD -- The Court, after deliberately considering all the circumstances of you case, are perfectly satisfied of your guilt. In the prosecution of your wicked designs, you were not satisfied with resorting to natural and ordinary means, but endeavored to enlist on your behalf, all the powers of darkness, and employed for that purpose, the most disgusting mummery and superstition. You represented yourself as invulnerable; that you could neither be taken nor destroyed and that all who fought under your banners would be invincible. While such wretched expedients are calculated to inspire the confidence, or to alarm the fears of the ignorant and credulous, they excite no other emotion in the mind of the intelligent and enlightened, but contempt and disgust. Your boasted Charms have not preserved yourself, and of course could not protect others. "Your Altars and your Gods have sunk together in the dust." The airy spectres, conjured by you, have been chased away by the special light of Truth, and you stand exposed, the miserable and deluded victim of offended Justice. Your days are literally numbered. You will shortly be consigned to the cold and silent grave, and all the Posers of Darkness cannot recue you from your approaching Fate! Let me then conjure you to devote the remnant of your miserable existence, in fleeing from the "wrath to come". This can only be done by a full disclosure of the truth. The Court are willing to afford you all the aid in their power, and to permit any Minister of the Gospel, whom you may select to have free access to you. To him you may unburthen your guilty conscience. Neglect not the opportunity, for there is "no device nor art beyond the tomb," to which you must shortly be consigned.
Slave Insurrections: Selected Documents, reprinted in 1970 by the Negro Universities Press, A Division of Greenwood Press, Inc., Connecticut
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