January 11 Friday – Glasscock’s Ben Negro was hanged before a huge crowd—the first legal execution in the history of Marion County. In Villagers of 1840-3 Sam wrote in 1897:

“The Hanged Nigger. He raped and murdered a girl of 13 in the woods. He confessed to forcing three young women in Virginia, and was brought away in a feather bed to save his life —which was a valuable property” [Wecter 215].

Note: Dempsey writes, “there is no evidence in the court records or newspaper accounts that Ben killed anyone in Virginia or that he was too valuable to be hanged there…This story seems to be an invention of Clemens’s, which, like other of his inventions, occasionally shows up in history books” [131].