Mob violence

“ It was done by some of the citizens, and those who know will not tell.
S.S. GLOVER, Sheriff
Thus acts the mob with the victim of its fury, conscious that it will never be called to an account. Not only is this true, but the moral support of those who are chosen by the people to execute the law, is frequently given to the support of lawlessness and mob violence. The press and even the pulpit, in the main either by silence or open apology, have condoned and encouraged this state of anarchy. ”

“ The mob hanging on their skirts were of a very different class, however; ill-clad, dirty, unkempt tatter-de-malions, the dregs of the alleys and by-ways of the city, ripe for any mischief or devilment. Evil men and worse women, they shuffled and scrambled and hustled along, with occasional cheers for the strikers, hoarse cries and oaths to one another, and execrations for the government: a towsled, disorderly rabble, unquestionably dangerous, and high-charged with thoughts and hopes of violence. ”

“ THE SOUTH IS A GOOD PLACE FOR THE NEGRO TO LIVE, provided, however, the better class of citizens will rise up and demand that lynchings and mobs shall cease, and that the officers of the law shall do their duty without prejudice. The only way to suppress mob violence is to make punishment for the leaders in it, sure and certain. The reason we have mobs is because the leaders of them know they will not be punished. ”

“ All the bright hopes of life had gone down amid the gloom of midnight darkness. Several months lingered slowly away while these men were awaiting their trial. Day after day they heard the tolling of the tocsin, the reverberations of the alarm gun, and the beating of the insurrection drum, as the demon of lawless violence rioted through the streets of the blood-stained metropolis. The execrations of the mob, loud and fiend-like, accompanied the cart of the condemned, as it rumbled upon the pavements above their heads, bearing the victims of popular fury to the guillotine ”

“ Growing more violent every instant the mob continued to hoot and yell through the streets; stopping before some of the handsomest dwellings they passed, attacking them with violence, and breaking in the doors and windows ”

“ To a military man there is something ludicrous in the idea of gentle dealings with a mob. It may be political heresy to say so, but no chief of police should discriminate between a band of murderous ruffians—if you choose avowed brigands—and those—hardly less ruffianly—who use and utilize the striking of honest workingmen for better conditions for purposes of pillage and violence. If a mob knew that the orders were—"Shoot to kill!" ”

“ Our Ars workmen, as I said, are more noisy than evil-intentioned. But there are strangers who have incited them to action, and it is with them that we shall have to deal.”
“A mob is a brute force, both blind and deaf. You cannot undeceive a hundred men. If they all clamour aloud at once, how can any possible understanding be reached?”
“That is what leaders of strikes rely upon! Tumult and violence. To-morrow I shall receive a delegation of workmen, with whom, I hope, it will be possible to come to reasonable terms.” ”

“ From feeling that sense of security from lawless violence, which every man, whether guilty or innocent, is entitled to feel, he has been in imminent danger of being torn in pieces by an infuriated mob. ”

“ If a negro man, woman, or child fell into their hands, none were more brutal than the unsexed hags of the mob.
If on this, and other occasions, they had remained in their homes they would not have suffered, nor would the men have been so ferocious in their violence. They were the first to yield to panic, however, and now their shrieks were the loudest and their efforts to escape out of the deadly range of the guns the most frantic. In a few moments the avenue was cleared, and the military marched away, leaving the dead and wounded rioters where they had fallen, as the police had done before. ”

“ But it is easier to "call spirits from the vasty deep" than to make them respond. Public feeling may be so strong in opposition to the service of the process that mob violence will be tolerated and even openly supported. ”

“ These outbreaks grew to such a pitch, that the magistrates now, whenever possible, hasten to the threatened establishment, to repress violence by their presence and authority. The rush, however, is so sudden, that before they can arrive on the spot, the mob has improved its opportunity for destruction, and disappeared. ”

“ Law and order were laid waste, and the officers of justice looked on, some perhaps with dismay, and others with indifference, while the rights of citizens were prostrated, and their peaceful and quiet homes invaded by the hand of violence. At such a time the voice of remonstrance or entreaty, would have been useless, and had the avowed friends of the colored man interfered in any public manner, the effect would probably have been to increase the fury of the storm, and to have directed the violence of the mob upon themselves. ”

“ The presence of eight millions of people in any section of this country, constituting an aggrieved class, smarting under terrible wrongs, denied the exercise of the commonest rights of humanity, and regarded by the ruling class of that section as outside of the government, outside of the law, outside of society, having nothing in common with the people with whom they live, the sport of mob violence and murder, is not only a disgrace and a scandal to that particular section, but a menace to the peace and security of the whole country. ”

“ The arrest of several of the ringleaders of the mob, and the arrival of large numbers of regular troops, have produced a temporary lull in the city; but the spirit of lawless violence has been permitted to grow and strengthen itself in these people for some time past now ”

“ The ignorant mob in some instances seriously maltreated those suspected of this crime. The innocent were thus often punished, for the violence of the mob is as likely to fall upon the innocent as upon the guilty. ”

“ In the heat of blind fury one might conceive how a mad mob might beat and kill a man taken red-handed in a brutal murder. But it is almost past belief to read that civilized white people, men who boast of their chivalry and blue blood, actually had fun in beating, chasing and shooting men who had no possible connection with any crime. ”

“ There is a deal of truth in mob law, and those who are shocked at the mere mention of it are respectable outsiders. But suppose you belong to the mob yourself (and mobs are made of men, women, and children) , how then? Is there no wholesome gratification in the thought that you, addressed in the riot act, dispersed, moved on, &c., &c., have yet after all a quick rough sense of justice. Yes, you don’t want disorder, but only protest against some passing abuse or petty police encroachment. The licence of our English mobs is most useful in resisting this last. ”

“ The newspaper reports [Pg 206] are fond of describing lynching mobs as “made up of the foremost citizens of the town.” In few cases that I know of, either South or North, except in back country neighbourhoods, has a mob been made up of what may be called the best citizens; but the best citizens have often stood afar off “decrying the mob”—as a Springfield man told me—and letting it go on. A mob is the method by which good citizens turn over the law and the government to the criminal or irresponsible classes. ”

“ When the police, in force, in answer to a riot-call, reached the spot a quarter of an hour later and dispersed the mob, it looked as if the sea had swept over the scene. The car was overturned and stripped to a mere broken shell; and on the ground a hundred paces away, with only a shred of bloody clothing still about it, lay the battered and mutilated trunk of what had been a man trying to make bread for his children, while a wild cry of hate and joy at the deed raged about the street. ”

“ Not a breeze comes to us from the late rebellious states that is not tainted and freighted with Negro blood. In its thirst for blood and its rage for vengeance, the mob has blindly, boldly and defiantly supplanted sheriffs, constables and police. It has assumed all the functions of civil authority. It laughs at legal processes, courts and juries, and its red-handed murderers range abroad unchecked and unchallenged by law or by public opinion. If the mob is in pursuit of Negroes who happen to be accused of crime, innocent or guilty, prison walls and iron bars afford no protection. ”

“ An infuriated mob has succeeded in accomplishing its sanguinary purpose by the destruction of printing presses and other property, by violating the sanctuary of dwelling houses, breaking open the public prison and dragging forth from the protection of civil authority the victims of their ferocious pursuit, guilty of no crime but the expression of their opinions and completing the tissue of their enormities by curses, wounds and murders, accompanied by the most barbarous and shocking indignities. ”

“ In the intense, excited crowd gathered around the court-house on this Tuesday, the 16th of August, other influences were also at work, influences operating in a greater or less degree in every lynching mob. We are accustomed to look upon a mob as an entity, the expression of a single concrete feeling; it is not; it is itself torn with dissensions and compunctions, swayed by conflicting emotions. Similarly, we look upon a militia company as a sort of machine, which, set in operation, automatically performs a certain definite service. ”

“ None of us will forget the horrors of those bloody days and bloody nights lit up by the glare of fires, those sobbing women, those little children's bodies torn to pieces and left lying in the street. But for all that not one of us thinks that the police and the mob are the real origin of the evil. ”

“ Once permit the shackles of law and order to be cast off, and men, white or black, Christian or pagan, revert to primordial savagery. There is no such thing as an orderly mob.
Crime had been committed by Negroes, but this mob made no attempt to find the criminals: it expressed its blind, unreasoning, uncontrolled race hatred by attacking every man, woman, or boy it saw who had a black face. A lame boot-black, an inoffensive, industrious Negro boy, at that moment actually at work shining a man’s shoes, was dragged out and cuffed, kicked and beaten to death in the street. ”

“ The mob had collected and organized to the number of several hundred, and were marching through the lower part of the city, dealing destruction in their course; the houses of respectable and worthy colored citizens were broken in upon, the furniture scattered to the winds, all they possessed destroyed or plundered, and they themselves subjected to the most brutal and savage treatment. ”

“ At last, when there was here nothing more to accomplish, the mob, swollen to a frightful size, including myriads of wretched, drunken women, and the half-grown, vagabond boys of the pavements, rushed through the intervening streets, stopping cars and insulting peaceable citizens on their way, to an armory where were manufactured and stored carbines and guns for the government. In anticipation of the attack, this, earlier in the day, had been fortified by a police squad capable of coping with an ordinary crowd of ruffians, but as chaff before fire in the presence of these murderous thousands. ”

“ The success of the mob in thus attacking and annihilating a company of the government’s own soldiers and ruthlessly putting to death peaceable citizens in defiance of the law, without judge or jury, gave the greatest encouragement to the hopes of the whites. ”

“ Then occasional squads of scowling men give way before their steady tramp and are driven down alley-ways and around street-corners by reviving police. Then the head of column turns to the left and comes full upon a scene of tumult,—a great building in flames, a great mob surging about it defying police interference and bent apparently on gutting the structure from roof to cellar and pillaging the neighboring stores. Now, men of the ——th, here's work cut out for you! Drive that mob! ”

“ The mean and envious beast that lived in our midst,—as it lives in every other country,—unseen, but felt, and always ready to crush the acquirements of existing civilization,—the mob came out from the underground world; criminal hands let the mob on the streets. ”

“ The mob, always the first to execute justice, in their own inimitable way took vengeance upon Crauford by burning the house no longer his, and the houses of his partners, who were the worst and most innocent sufferers for his crime. ”

“ Add to this that the police do not attack in order to disperse a crowd, but to kill. In a public square where a crowd has gathered to hear a labor speech, the police assemble on four sides and, upon a given signal, rush to the center, pushing even innocent passers-by into the midst of the crowd that, on the instant, has become a mob. ”

“ The result of which is that a ferocious mob surrounds you, and with invectives, insults, and provocative gestures assail and outrage you, till it please your tormentor to drive on; which you do at length amidst hooting and uproar that even convicted felons would feel ashamed of. ”

“ It is said that we must not hold either the government or the people responsible for what was merely the act of a mob. Certainly not, if either government or people at once disclaim all sympathy with the atrocious crime, and make haste to punish the perpetrators. ”

“ The arms of the mob were never taken away, and the majority of the militia, to my certain knowledge, were engaged the next day with the mob, (Colonel Pitcher and Boggs not excepted) , going from house to house in gangs from sixty to seventy in number, threatening the lives of women and children, if they did not leave forthwith. In this diabolical scene men were chased from their houses and homes without any preparation for themselves or families. ”