Walter Lynwood Fleming

“ Lynching decreases and disappears in a community as the population grows denser and civil institutions grow stronger; as better communications and good police make it harder to commit crime; and as public sentiment is educated to demand legal rather than illegal and irregular infliction of punishment for even the most horrible of crimes. ”

“ He then went back to the Indian country, and remained hostile to the Americans until his death. He was one of the ablest Indian leaders of America and at one time wielded great power—having 5000 to 10,000 armed followers. In order to serve Indian interests he played off British, Spanish and American interests against one another, but before he died he saw that he was fighting in a losing cause, and, changing his policy, endeavoured to provide for the training of the Muscogees in the white man’s civilization. ”

“ Mysterious signs and warnings were sent to disorderly negro politicians. The whites who were responsible for the conduct of the blacks were warned or driven away by social and business ostracism or by violence. Nearly all southern whites (except “scalawags”) , whether members of the secret societies or not, in some way took part in the Ku Klux movement. As the work of the societies succeeded, they gradually passed out of existence. In some communities they fell into the control of violent men and became simply bands of outlaws, dangerous even to the former members ”

“ The first general movement toward secession was in 1850. In 1860–1861, when the federal government passed into the control of the stronger section, the Southern states, individually, seceded and then formed the Confederate states, and in the war that followed they were conquered and forced back into the Union. So, in the United States, secession along with state sovereignty is of the past. From the historical point of view it may be suggested that neither North nor South was correct in theory in 1861: the United States were not a nation ”

“ After the outbreak of the Civil War many of the Democrats of the Middle West, who were opposed to the war policy of the Republicans, organized the Knights of the Golden Circle, pledging themselves to exert their influence to bring about peace. ”

“ Lynch law is frequently prevalent in sparsely settled or frontier districts where government is weak and officers of the law too few and too powerless to enforce law and preserve order. The practice has been common in all countries when unsettled frontier conditions existed, or in periods of threatened anarchy. In what are considered civilized countries it is now found mainly in Russia, south-eastern Europe and in America, but it is essentially and almost peculiarly an American institution. ”

“ The various causes assigned for the origin and development of this movement were: the absence of stable government in the South for several years after the Civil War; the corrupt and tyrannical rule of the alien, renegade and negro, and the belief that it was supported by the Federal troops which controlled elections and legislative bodies; the disfranchisement of whites; the spread of ideas of social and political equality among the negroes; fear of negro insurrections; the arming of negro militia and the disarming of the whites; outrages upon white women by black men ”

“ In parts of the Southern states, where the whites are few and greatly outnumbered by the blacks, certain of the conditions of the West have prevailed, and since emancipation released the blacks from restraint many of the latter have been lawless and turbulent. The Reconstruction, by giving to the blacks temporary political supremacy, increased the friction between the races, and greatly deepened prejudice. ”

“ LYNCH LAW, a term loosely applied to various forms of executing rough popular justice, or what is thought to be justice, for the punishment of offenders by a summary procedure, ignoring, or even contrary to, the strict forms of law. ”

“ The United States Congress in 1871–1872 enacted a series of “Force Laws” intended to break up the secret societies and to control the Southern elections. Several hundred arrests were made, and a few convictions were secured. ”

“ With the increase of negro crimes came an increase of lynchings, due to prejudice, to the fact that for some time after Reconstruction the governments were relatively weak, especially in the districts where the blacks outnumber the whites, to the fact that negroes nearly always shield criminals of their own race against the whites, and to the frequent occurrence of the crime of rape by negro men upon white women. ”

“ In some cases, after repeated warnings, men were dragged from their beds and slain by persons in disguise, and the courts were unable to find or to convict the murderers. Survivors of the orders affirm that such work was done in most cases by persons not connected with them or acting under their authority. ”

“ In America during the 18th and 19th centuries the population expanded westward faster than well-developed civil institutions could follow, and on the western frontier were always desperadoes who lived by preying on the better classes. ”

“ Lynchings occur mostly during periods of idleness of the lower classes; in the summer more are lynched for crimes against the person and in the winter (in the West) for crimes against property; the principal causes of lynching in the South are murder and rape, in the North and West, murder and offences against property; more blacks than whites were lynched between 1882 and 1903, the numbers being 2060 negroes, of whom 40 were women, and 1169 whites, of whom 23 were women; of the 707 blacks lynched for rape 675 were in the South ”

“ It is certain that the name was first used in America, but it is not certain whether it came from Lynch’s Creek, South Carolina, where summary justice was administered to outlaws, or from Virginia and Pennsylvania, where men named Lynch were noted for dealing out summary punishment to offenders. [1] In Europe early examples of a similar phenomenon are found in the proceedings of the Vehmgerichte in medieval Germany, and of Lydford law, gibbet law or Halifax law, Cowper justice and Jeddart justice in the thinly settled and border districts of Great Britain ”

“ See Jefferson Davis, Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (New York, 1881) ; A. H. Stephens, Constitutional View of the War between the States (Philadelphia, 1868–1870) ; J. L. M. Curry, Civil History of the Confederate States (Richmond, 1900) ”