James Elbert Cutler

“ In the meantime the spirit of lawlessness is unchecked.
“Any band of men may feel secure in taking the life of a fellow-being on almost any pretext. This deplorable condition ought to be remedied. To compel the proper respect for the majesty of the law I recommend the enactment of special legislation in reference to lynching, that the great responsibility of officials directly charged with enforcing the law be brought home to them, and that more effectual measures be taken for the apprehension of persons who take the law in their own hands. ”

“ To outwit, avoid, defy, or forget the laws is not a serious offense so long as an appeal can be made to the individual sense of justice in support of such courses of action.
In Europe, where the statutes have grown up from tradition and ancient custom, the law is regarded as a more sacred institution; in a very real sense it is the product of a superior authority. Law in its institutional sense is as much a predetermined factor in daily affairs as is one of the laws of nature. ”

“ The seriousness of the situation with reference to the practice of lynching in the United States is not yet fully realized. There is no little ground for apprehension in the fact that it is becoming common for cries of “Lynch him,” “Hang him,” “Get a rope and string him up,” &c., to be heard, even on the streets of New York City, whenever a crowd gathers in response to a feeling of popular excitement and indignation over the perpetration of some atrocious crime. ”

“ They imagine that, as the Jurisdiction of the Courts in Charlestown extends all over the Province, Government is not a protection, but an oppression; that they are not tried there by their Peers; and that the accumulated expenses of a law-suit, or prosecution, puts justice out of their power; by which means the honest man is not secure in his property, and villainy becomes rampant with impunity. ”

“ So long as the blacks were valuable as slaves and accepted their inferior position without protest, no one wanted to get rid of them or put them to death. The fact that slaves were property, and in that capacity were amenable to the laws, made recourse to unlawful procedure against them both unwise and unnecessary. It was only in cases of insurrection among the slaves, or when some especially brutal and barbarous crime was committed by a negro, that summary measures were adopted prior to the Civil War. ”

“ The lynching of negroes in recent years can be justified on no other ground than that the law as formulated and administered has proved inadequate to deal with the situation—that there has been governmental inefficiency. Not that guilty negroes frequently escape conviction in the Southern courts, or that they fail to receive punishment to the full extent of the law, but rather that the law and its administration seem utterly unsuited to the function of dealing with negro criminals. ”

“ All revengeful dealing with crime has increased crime rather than lessened it. The only deterrent from crime that men have found is the prompt and certain and solemn punishment by law, sustained and supported by a confident, unyielding body of public opinion. [267]
The attempt to justify the lynching of negroes on the plea that lynching for rape committed upon white women is necessary to repress that crime is without support in any respect. ”

“ Further, not only did the emancipation of the slaves leave no restriction upon the manifestation of race prejudice in the form of summary procedure against negro criminals, but the sudden elevation of the negroes to political equality with the whites directly encouraged its display. “Two hundred years or more of slavery educated both the white and the black to a fixed order of society, in which the negro was the servant and the white man the master. ”

“ When judges and courts are leagued with desperadoes, or when peculiar difficulties stand in the way of a prompt administration of justice, the public, in self-defense, feel impelled to interfere. At the settlement of California, and before society had time to establish regular tribunals, or to give due efficacy to the law, life and property would not have been safe for a moment, unless a Vigilance Committee had charged itself with the duty of lynching. Even when, in such newly opened territories, judges are appointed, only a small advance is made towards a vigorous legal administration. ”

“ Politics do not enter into the enforcement of law. Civilization is distributed in a more nearly equal measure and the law is enforced with equal vigor over the whole country. [341] The judicial and administrative officers are persons socially and politically distinct from the masses, and their individuality is so completely subordinated to their representative capacity that the law thus comes to have a majesty and dignity which can be given it in no other way.
In the United States, on the contrary, the body of the law lacks the support of long tradition and ancient practice. ”

“ The cause for all the turbulence and violence lay deeper than abolitionism, slavery, or the character of political leaders. These were merely the manifestations of the disruption of underlying social forces which were warring against each other while seeking to come to a stable equilibrium under new and changed conditions. ”

“ The institution of slavery has no doubt created a caste feeling on the part of the master race, and yet this is but the strengthening and deepening of a natural race antipathy, the causes for which are evident. Slavery merely intensified a feeling that was due to other causes. It is an error to say that slavery has been the cause of all the prejudice against the negro. [235] It is true that the black race long wore the chain of slavery and was regarded as an inferior race, and this was true in the United States as well as elsewhere ”

“ It would be a disgrace to us if amongst us men should burn a rattlesnake or a mad dog. The badness of the victim is not an element in the case at all. Torture and burning are forbidden, not because the victim is not bad enough, but because we are too good. It is on account of what we owe to ourselves that these methods are shameful to us, if we descend to them. It is evident, however, that public opinion is not educated up to this level. The reader of the present book will learn very interesting facts about the causes alleged for lynching, and about the public view of that crime. ”

“ The purpose of the investigation has not been primarily to write the history of lynching, but to determine from the history the causes for the prevalence of the practice, to determine what the social conditions are under which lynch-law operates, and to test the validity of the arguments which have been advanced in justification of lynching.
At the present time many positive opinions are held with reference to lynching, and these are quite at variance one with another. Any one who attempts to investigate a subject under such conditions cannot hope to escape criticism ”

“ If the United States had a monarchical form of government the most practicable means for the suppression of lynchings would consist merely in the publication of an edict by the monarch for the better enforcement of the law. Most lynching mobs could be easily dispersed were the officers of the law resolute and determined men intent upon protecting their prisoners and letting the law take its course; if they were responsible only to their superior officers and not more or less directly responsible to the people, and if they were not in sympathy with the mob to a greater or less degree. ”

“ If a man, whom the public voice has proclaimed a thief or a swindler, escapes from justice for want of a legal proof of his guilt, though the law and a jury of his fellow citizens have acquitted him, ten to one but he is met with before he can quit the neighborhood, and, tied up to a sapling, receives a scourging that marks him for the rest of his life.
“In Kentucky, whose institutions have acquired greater maturity, such events have taken place some years ago; but now they would scarcely be tolerated, and they will soon be matter of history only, in Indiana and Illinois. ”

“ In recent years the customary explanations of lynchings attribute them to mob rule, emotional insanity of the crowd, race prejudice, contempt for the “niggers,” intense community feeling, vivid hatred of crime, lex talionis and the like. It is often asserted that lynchings occur because the courts are slow, uncertain, and unduly sympathetic with the rights of the accused, because corrupt jurymen, shrewd lawyers, the technicalities of the law or the undue sympathies of the pardoning powers frequently prolong and save a guilty person’s life. ”

“ Lynching is a phenomenon in American society too deeply rooted to be destroyed by merely taking away the right of appeal in criminal cases, but that a measure will render less plausible a prominent excuse for its existence and continuance makes such a measure worthy of serious consideration. ”

“ Of American judges it needs to be recollected that their position is often not such as to command respect. A judge of the supreme courts in England is a being aloof in every respect from the people, and he scrupulously abstains from interference personally in matters which might by possibility come before him in his judicial capacity. An American judge, on the other hand, is not dissevered from the ordinary action of society ”

“ Society seems everywhere unhinged, and the demon of ‘blood and slaughter’ has been let loose upon us! We have the slave question in many different forms, including the proceedings of kidnappers and manstealers—and others belonging to the free negroes: the proscription and prosecution of gamblers; with mobs growing out of local matters—and a great collection of acts of violence of a private, or personal nature, ending in death ”

“ Among the Southern people the conviction is general that terror is the only restraining influence that can be brought to bear upon vicious negroes. The negroes fear nothing so much as force, and should they once get the notion that there is a reasonable hope of escape from punishment, the whites in many parts of the South would be at their mercy. [347] There is no evidence, however, to show that the punishment of negroes by mob violence tends to decrease lawlessness among the negroes, or even tends to restrain the vicious element from committing offenses against the whites. ”

“ In 1899 an act dealing with the subject of lynching and violence by mobs was passed by the legislature of Indiana. In this act a mob and a lynching are defined as follows: “Any collection of individuals assembled for any unlawful purpose intending to injure any person by violence and without authority of law shall, for the purpose of this act, be regarded as a ‘mob,’ and any act of violence exercised by such mob upon the body of any person shall constitute the crime of ‘lynching,’ when such act or acts of violence result in death.” ”

“ The practice whereby mobs capture individuals suspected of crime, or take them from the officers of the law, and execute them without any process at law, or break open jails and hang convicted criminals, with impunity, is to be found in no other country of a high degree of civilization. Riots and mob executions take place in other countries, but there is no such frequent administration of what may be termed popular justice which can properly be compared with lynch-law procedure in the United States. ”

“ It is necessary that facts should be known and that public opinion should be corrected as to the ethics of that mode of dealing with crime. Lynch-law is a very different thing where laws and civil institutions are in full force and activity from what it is where they are wanting. It is not admissible that a self-governing democracy should plead the remissness of its own selected agents as an excuse for mob-violence. ”

“ The commonest justification for lynching negroes in recent years, the plausibility of which rests very largely on race prejudice, is the crime of rape as directed against white women. According to Tillinghast this crime has come into existence since the Civil War, and its perpetrators are overcome in many cases by primitive passions which master the criminal’s whole being, a great fear being present also which impels to murder. ”

“ So long as the negro race was in bondage to the white race, then, not only were the inciting causes of negro lynching largely held in check, but such provisions were made for the trial and punishment of miscreant slaves that resort to lynching was wholly without justification. ”

“ The changed social conditions incident to an increasing density of the population in a frontier region, and the establishment of a regular and adequate judiciary, remove every cause for the existence of the frontier type of lynch-law. The rapid colonization of the western section of the United States has thus made that phase of the lynching question no longer a serious matter. But how to put an end to the practice of lynching in older communities possessing well established civil regulations is a problem for which the people of the United States have not yet found a satisfactory solution. ”

“ It is a disgrace to our civilization that men can be put to death by painful methods, which our laws have discarded as never suitable, and without the proofs of guilt which our laws call for in any case whatsoever. ”