Lynch law

“ The only ultimate remedy for lynching is a strong public sentiment against it. It is necessary, in the United States particularly, to depend very largely upon public sentiment for the enforcement of law, and until there is a sentiment, in every community where a lynching occurs, which will demand the punishment of those who take part in such lynching, it can scarcely be expected that sheriffs will risk their lives to protect prisoners, or that prosecuting attorneys, judges, and juries will co-operate to secure the conviction of lynchers and to make them feel the full penalty of the law. ”

“ In this second type of society, recourse to lynch-law procedure may be had either in times of popular excitement and social disruption, or when there is a contrast in the population such as is to be seen in the South between the whites and the negroes, or against disreputable characters in the community for whose punishment under the law no tangible evidence can be adduced, or against persons guilty of committing some heinous offense which on account of its atrocity and fiendishness is particularly shocking to the community. ”

“ Compare the justification of the frontier type of lynch-law given by Owen Wister in his recent novel, “The Virginian.” After describing the lynching of some Wyoming cattle-thieves, and emphasizing the fact that “many an act that man does is right or wrong according to the time and place which form, so to speak, its context,” the author puts into the mouth of “Judge Henry” these words: “They (the ordinary citizens) are where the law comes from, you see. For they chose the delegates who made the Constitution that provided for the courts. There’s your machinery. ”

“ Lynch-law in the United States has never been administered by an organization so perfect and extensive as that of the Vehmic courts. [6] The feudal conditions have been lacking which made that organization possible. It is only in its raison d’être that the frontier type of lynch-law may be compared to the Vehmic courts. The early settlers in this country felt themselves compelled to resort to summary proceedings as a means of protection; the civil government was not sufficiently organized and established to insure the punishment of violators of the public peace and security. ”

“ Indeed, it is not too much to say that popular justification is the sine qua non of lynching. It is this fact that distinguishes lynching, on the one hand, from assassination and murder, and, on the other hand, from insurrection and open warfare. A lynching may be defined as an illegal and summary execution at the hands of a mob, or a number of persons, who have in some degree the public opinion of the community behind them. When the term first came into use it meant the infliction of corporal punishment, particularly whipping. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Lynch Law
135 All thoughtful men must feel the gravest alarm over the growth of lynching in this country, and especially over the peculiarly hideous form so often taken by mob violence when colored men are the victims, on which occasions the mob seems to lay most weight, not on the crime but on the color of the criminal. In a certain proportion of these cases the man lynched has been guilty of a crime horrible beyond description a crime so horrible that as far as he himself is concerned he has forfeited the right to any kind of sympathy whatsoever. ”

“ Englishmen express their surprise that in a moral community such a monstrosity as Lynch law should exist; but although the present system, which has been derived from the original Lynch law, cannot be too severely condemned, it must, in justice to the Americans, be considered that the original custom of Lynch law was forced upon them by circumstances.... ”

“ 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. ”

“ A trained band of villains, whose operations extended from North to South, whose well concerted schemes had bidden defiance to the ordinary laws of the land, and whose success encouraged them to persevere in depredations upon an unoffending community, was dispersed and laid prostrate under the infliction of Lynch’s law. Of how many terrible, and deeply to be lamented consequences—of how great an amount of permanent evil—has the partial and temporary good been productive! ”

“ Your denunciation of the South on this point is directed exclusively, or nearly so, against the application of lynch law for the punishment of one crime; the existence, I suppose I might say the prevalence, of this crime at the South is undeniable. But I read your article in vain for any special denunciation of the crime itself. As you say, your people are lynched, tortured and burned, for assault on white women. ”

“ Not only did lynch-law continue to be exercised occasionally in the border settlements, but it was revived in well-established communities for the purpose of putting down abolitionism. The early thirties witnessed many acts of violence. The following appeared in the Massachusetts Journal in the year 1831: “Progress of Violence.—It ought to be observed that there never was a time of peace in which violence was so common in this country as at this period.... Citizens who feel offended take the law into their own hands without ceremony.” ”

“ The Vehmic courts, however, give no explanation for the presence of lynch-law as an institution in American society. No connection can be traced further than a few similarities in the methods adopted to put down lawlessness at a time when the civil government proved weak and inefficient.
7Some writers have stated that lynch-law was anciently known in England by the name of Lydford law and Halifax law, and that the same thing was known in Scotland as Cowper justice and Jeddart or Jedburg justice. ”

“ It is certain that lynching mobs have not only refused to give the Negro a chance to defend himself, but have killed their victim with a full knowledge that the relationship of the alleged assailant with the woman who accused him, was voluntary and clandestine. As a matter of fact, one of the prime causes of the Lynch Law agitation has been a necessity for defending the Negro from this awful charge against him. ”

“ Among the early settlers there was a way of trying causes, which may perhaps be new to you. No commentator has taken any notice of Linch’s Law, which was once the lex loci of the frontiers. Its operation was as follows: When a horse thief, a counterfeiter, or any other desperate vagabond, infested a neighborhood, evading justice by cunning, or by a strong arm, or by the number of his confederates, the citizens formed themselves into a ‘regulating company,’ a kind of holy brotherhood, whose duty was to purge the community of its unruly members. ”

“ If he is, although we admire submission to the course pointed out by the law of the land, in this case so much of the brute has been manifested, we should be glad to see our citizens rise en masse, and avail themselves of Lynch law, and hang the rascal without court or jury. ”

“ The infliction of any minor punishment without legal trial still constitutes lynch-law, but the simple term “lynching” usually implies capital punishment. It is in this sense that the term will be used throughout the remainder of this investigation.
137 CHAPTER V
The Reconstruction Period A civil war is worse in many respects than a foreign war. When the members of a society are forced to settle any differences that they may have and come together in order to resist the aggressions of a foreign foe, the internal organization of the society is strengthened. ”

“ Doubtless most men will agree that he was, to all intents and purposes, legally executed, and yet many instances of the operation of lynch-law on the frontier were scarcely less justifiable, though the trial and infliction of punishment may have been far more summary. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Negroes know that white men have been known to rape colored girls, but that never has there been a suggestion of lynching or burning for that, and they feel despondent, for they know the courts are useless in such cases, and this jug-handle enforcement of lynch law is breeding its own bad fruits on the Negro race as well as making more brutal the whites. ”

“ It is doubtless the perfunctoriness in the administration of justice which at times arouses the indignation of the public and causes them to have recourse to what is called Lynch Law, in which respect American society, in the more newly settled parts of the country, may be said to be at the stage of the rough populace of Edinburgh when they interrupted the ordinary course of justice, and laid violent hands on Captain Porteous. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The nearest approach that can be found in Europe to the American practice of lynching exists in the rural districts of little Russia where the peasants sometimes adopt summary measures against horse-thieves. The Russian law provides only a light punishment for horse-stealing, and, since the peasant’s horse is almost his only property and is his chief instrument of labor, summary methods seem necessary in order to check the veritable plague of horse-stealing which breaks out every year as soon as the dark nights of autumn begin. ”

“ It was made a misdemeanor for said officer to fail to call together a posse in such an emergency, and citizens who responded were authorized to carry weapons in the performance of their duties. Any person engaged in “mobbing or lynching any citizen ... without due process of law” should be arrested and punished by imprisonment in the penitentiary for not less than one nor longer than twenty years; and if death resulted from such mob violence the person causing said death should be subject to indictment and trial for the offense of murder. ”

“ At one time there may be a lack of ordinary tribunals of justice, at another time there may be doubt as to the efficiency of the legal machinery. Lynchings may take place because the offense is outside the law but is deemed serious enough to merit severe punishment. They may occur because of the barbarity and fiendish nature of the crime committed. ”

“ The men and women in the South who disapprove of lynching and remain silent on the perpetration of such outrages, are particeps criminis, accomplices, accessories before and after the fact, equally guilty with the actual lawbreakers who would not persist if they did not know that neither the law nor militia would be employed against them.
SELF-HELP
In the creation of this healthier public sentiment, the Afro-American can do for himself what no one else can do for him. The world looks on with wonder that we have conceded so much and remain law-abiding under such great outrage and provocation. ”

“ Of the numerous proposals that have been made for reform in the system of legal procedure in the United States, as a remedy for lynching, none is more noteworthy or fundamental than that put forward by Justice Brewer of the United States Supreme Court. He argues that men are afraid of the law’s delays and the uncertainty of its results ”