The lynching of Francis McIntosh was the killing of a free Black man, a boatman, by a white mob after he was arrested in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 28, 1836.

Francis L. McIntosh, aged twenty-six,[2] of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was a free man of color who worked as a porter and a cook on the steamboat Flora, which arrived in St. Louis on April 28.

[1] The mob took him to the outskirts of town (near the present-day intersection of Seventh and Chestnut streets in Downtown St. Louis), chained him to a locust tree, and piled wood around and up to his knees.

[3] Estimates for the number of persons present at the lynching range in the hundreds, and include an alderman who threatened to shoot anyone who attempted to stop the killing.

[7] As a result of mob pressure and outright attacks on his press, Lovejoy was forced to move from St. Louis to Alton, Illinois, in the free state.

The Spaniards may have murdered monks by the score, the Mexicans may have shot prisoners by the dozen, but roasting alive before a slow fire is a practice nowhere except among free, enlightened, high-minded Americans.

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 a single hour from the time he had been a freeman, attending to his own business, and at peace with the world.No other state legislator in Illinois or Missouri condemned the mob action.

[3] Shortly after the lynching, a St. Louis newspaper, the Missouri Republican, noted that abolitionists were attempting to gather McIntosh's remains in an effort to bring them to the Eastern United States, as a symbol of the evils of slavery.

[3] In the years following the lynching, visitors to the city (often from McIntosh's home town of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) went to the tree and removed parts of it as memorial keepsakes.