Outlaw

“ The matter-of-fact manner in which the outlaw, who was, even as he spoke, being hunted by hundreds of men, talked of eluding his pursuers and fulfilling his promise, gave the scouts an idea of his absolute fearlessness which they could not but admire, while at the same time his contempt for the Service galled them. ”

“ But the outlaw carries one thought constantly in his mind—and that is what makes him so sore against life, more than anything else—he knows where the marshals get their recruits of deputies. He knows that the majority of these upholders of the law were once lawbreakers, horse thieves, rustlers, highwaymen, and outlaws like himself, and that they gained their positions and immunity by turning state’s evidence, by turning traitor and delivering up their comrades to imprisonment and death. ”

“ I rule by right of intellect and will, and my first failure will be my death warrant; for, judged even by the standards of a thief like you, Colonel Knight, I am an outlaw—one who is outside the protection of the laws of men! ”

“ While such as these bordermen lived, an outlaw should never sleep, for he was a marked and doomed man. The deadly, cold-pointed flame which scintillated in the prisoner's eyes was only a gleam of what the border felt towards outlaws. ”

“ Much as we would have preferred, by the regular course of law, to have marked a more ignominious end, his hardiness, his readiness and his desperation prevented this, but leaves to us the very satisfactory reflection that there was found in the lawful paths of life the courage, the presence of mind and the constancy which surpassed that of the outlaw himself. ”

“ Nor is it true, that the fugitive slave is made an "outlaw," and on that ground justifiable for bloody and murderous resistance of Law. He is under the protection of Law; and if any man injures him or kills him, the Law will avenge him, just as soon as it would you or me. He is not made an outlaw: common sense knows better. ”

“ I have lived much among horrible sights and sounds, and you must not wonder if this scene does not affect me. Nay, I have myself known the very feelings which animate you now, and here I stand, an outlaw, to convict myself of folly. You have accidentally killed a man. ”

“ The Anglo-Saxons regarded him as an evil man: wearg, a scoundrel; Gothic vargs, a fiend. But very often the word meant no more than an outlaw. Pluquet in his Contes Populaires tells us that the ancient Norman laws said of the criminals condemned to outlawry for certain offences, Wargus esto: be an outlaw! ”

“ Margaret asked anxiously.
Virginia nodded. “It is a very lonely spot,” she said, “and so it is quite possible.”
“What is an outlaw?” the eastern girl inquired as they rode side by side toward the sand-hills.
“An outlaw is a man who has done something displeasing to his fellow citizens. He is driven from his home state and it would not be safe for him to return. Sometimes an outlaw is innocent of the charges against him and is just a victim of unfortunate circumstances, but one never knows, of course.” ”

“ I am an outlaw, and you are perhaps worse, for you dare not show your face among your fellow men.”
“By the Heaven above, but you are bold to thus address me!” cried Gray Chief furiously.
“My worst foes never called me a coward,” said the young man. “But I came here not to parley about courage or character, but to discuss a more important matter. You are accursed for some crime, or you would never hide in these hills like a hunted wolf. I am an outlaw, a price is upon my head, and, figuratively speaking, a noose is around my neck.”
“Go on, sir,” said the old man. ”

“ I was myself an outlaw, until I was fifty-two years of age, without the power of obtaining redress where I was wronged, or of punishing fraud or theft from which I suffered, or of protecting the life and property of others, where my evidence was required. My ambition was to be a barrister, but legal friends assured me that the law turned upon the hinge of oath-taking, and that the path of the Bar would to me be a path of lying. It happens that I have never taken an oath. ”

“ The Outlaw protests again that he won his lands from the enemy, and as he won them so will he keep them, against all kings in Christendom; but having indulged in this vaunt asks mercy again, and offers to give up the keys of his castle if the king will constitute him and his successors sheriffs of the forest. The king, on his part, is equally ready for a compromise. The Outlaw, on surrendering the keys of his castle, shall be made sheriff of Ettrick Forest, and shall never be forfeited as long as he continues loyal, and his men shall have pardon if they amend their lives. ”

“ Modern Bad Men—Murder and Robbery as a Profession—The School of Guerrilla Warfare—Butcher Quantrell; the James Brothers; the Younger Brothers.
Outlawry of the early border, in days before any pretense at establishment of a system of law and government, and before the holding of property had assumed any very stable form, may have retained a certain glamour of romance. The loose gold of the mountains, the loose cattle of the plains, before society had fallen into any strict way of living, and while plenty seemed to exist for any and all, made a temptation easily accepted and easily excused. ”

“ The outlaw, the rebel, the rugged individual, the pioneer, the sturdy Jeffersonian yeoman, the private citizen resisting interference in his pursuit of happiness—these are figures that all Americans recognize, and that many will strongly applaud and defend. ”

“ Outlawry is the engine applied by the law, as an instrument of compulsion to those who fly from civil justice. Outlawry is the engine employed as an instrument of punishment, against the most atrocious of malefactors. This self-same load of mischief, the financier with perfect heedlessness, but with unerring certainty, heaps on the head of unsuspected innocence. ”

“ The jobs have been too well done, too surely covered, to be the work of greasers or ordinary outlaws.”
“What's your view of the outlook? How's all this going to wind up? Will the outlaw ever be driven out?” asked Duane.
“Never. There will always be outlaws along the Rio Grande. All the armies in the world couldn't comb the wild brakes of that fifteen hundred miles of river. But the sway of the outlaw, such as is enjoyed by these great leaders, will sooner or later be past. The criminal element flock to the Southwest. But not so thick and fast as the pioneers. ”

“ Some day when you think you tread on a wisp of straw, it will be a snake with the deadly tooth. You have made an outlaw—take care! When the outlaw tires of the game, he winds it up quick. And some one pays for the candles and the cards.”
Iberville walked up to him. “Radisson,” he said in a voice well controlled, “you have always been an outlaw. In our native country you were a traitor; in this, you are the traitor still. ”

“ Some thousands of years of such experience have led to the generalisations, that stealing and murder, for example, are inconsistent with the ends of society. There is no more doubt that they are so than that unsupported stones tend to fall. The man who steals or murders, breaks his implied contract with society, and forfeits all protection. He becomes an outlaw, to be dealt with as any other feral creature. ”

“ Brothers in outlawry, separated from the balance of mankind by an impassable gulf which they have created themselves, they have learned to hate the representatives of law and order, and their defiance is not to be despised. ”

“ Accuracy has been sought among the confusing statements purporting to constitute the record [Pg viii] in such historic movements as those of the "vigilantes" of California and Montana mining days, and of the later cattle days when "wars" were common between thieves and outlaws, and the representatives of law and order,—themselves not always duly authenticated officers of the law.
No one man can have lived through the entire time of the American frontier ”

“ Every one of these, with scarcely an exception, must, in order to be fully understood, be read reversed; outfit is fit out, outfall is fall out, outburst is burst out, etc. Outlaw does not mean outside the law, but lawed out by some legal process. ”

“ Of these therefore the chattels and also the lives are known to be in the hands of those who seize them, nor can they for any reason pertain to the King." [11] ("Dialogus de Scaccario," x.) .
An outlaw, as such, was incapable of exercising the most ordinary rights—he could not devise, inherit, own, or sell lands or houses. Civilly, he was dead. The only question is whether these disqualifications attached to him as the effects of felony or the resultant outlawry. ”

“ Not only do these "friends" not go abroad to plunder, but when their confederates who "do the work" commit a deed of outlawry in their vicinity, they first conceal the robbers, and then turn out as leaders of the hunters of the outlaws. ”

“ They said that no man could be an outlaw all his life, that was not a condition contemplated by their laws. They said that he had been outlawed first in 1011 for the slaying of Skeggi, and that he had been in outlawry ever since, which made nineteen years. ”

“ The outlaw, the broken soldier returning penniless from the wars, found shelter and wages in the train of the greater barons, and furnished them with a force ready at any moment for violence or civil strife. The same motives which brought the freeman of the tenth century to commend himself to thegn or baron forced the yeoman or smaller gentleman of the fifteenth to don the cognizance of his powerful neighbour, and ask for a grant of "livery," or to seek at his hand "maintenance" in the law-courts, and thus secure his aid and patronage in fray or suit. ”

“ Now the law, or custom which was the same as law, for there was no written code, was that when one man had been killed, the next of kin was bound to prosecute the slayer and obtain from him money compensation, or outlawry, or else he might kill the slayer himself, or one of his kin. ”

“ But in these early feudal periods where a man’s life and property were in fact and theory protected by the power of his immediate lord, to whom he was bound by the strongest ties then recognized, to be “free” might be very close to being an unprotected outlaw. ”

“ The gate banging behind her, the high spiked wall and the barred windows in the side of the courthouse building so near her, all these things of a sudden spelled menace, a threat direct against her. The spirit of outlawry that had grown within her these past few days of tumbled incidents was potent to make her believe the law's eyes could read outlawry on her features. ”

“ The stories of modern train-robbing bandits and outlaw gangs are taken partly from personal narratives, partly from judicial records, and partly from works frequently more sensational than accurate, and requiring much sifting and verifying in detail. ”

“ But when the times grew peaceable, this bloody maxim wore out, and in the beginning of Edward the Third’s reign, it was resolved by all the judges, that the putting any man to death, except by the sheriff, and even by him without due warrant in law, however outlawed and convicted, was murder; and since the forementioned times, as the number of people encreased, and the opportunities of concealment and absconding along with them, it has been found necessary to grant the process of outlawry in many civil actions. ”

“ Upon the social horizon now appeared the sinister figure of the trained desperado, the professional bad man. The business of outlawry was turned into a profession, one highly organized, relatively safe and extremely lucrative. ”

“ There was not an officer of the law in sight. If one were present it would be his manifest duty to apprehend the outlaws as soon as they appeared, and the plan was to allow them to fight out their quarrel and perhaps kill each other. ”

“ He shows us that crime does not always imply sin, that a social heresy may be the assertion of a native right, that an offence which leads to conventional outlawry may be merely the rebellion of a generous nature against conventional tyranny. ”

“ In the country the outlaws frequently band together and then they bid defiance to the authorities, and when they are arrested the officials fail to punish them, if the necessary inducements are offered for their release. ”

“ Life, indeed, had become impossible without fixed compact with the powers of lawlessness. There was hardly a family in Rome which did not number some notorious criminal among the outlaws. Murder, sacrilege, the love of adventure, thirst for plunder, poverty, hostility to the ascendant faction of the moment, were common causes of voluntary or involuntary outlawry ”

“ But who has told you that the English had signed the decree of outlawry launched against the Americans? — Brave Germans, you have been deceived ; do not degrade by such a suspicion a nation which has produced great men and fine laws, which long nourished in her bosom the sacred fire of liberty, and which deserves, from these claims, consideration and respect. — Alas ! in the British Isles, as in the rest of the world, a small number of ambitious men stir up the people, and produce public calamities. ”

“ Our Lady of Mercy, Order of.
A Spanish Order of Knighthood, instituted in 1218 by James I of Aragon. Its special mission was to work for the deliverance of captives in the hands of the Moors.
Outlawry.
Among the Norsemen certain crimes, such as the violation of a temple, or secret or unprovoked murder, could not be atoned for by “weregild,” and were punished by confiscation of all property and loss of all rights, the criminal becoming an outlaw. A man was also outlawed if he or his family were unable to pay “weregild.”
Overton’s Plot. ”

“ The code of independence that fostered personal violence and justified killings—in contradistinction to murders—and that ran to excess in outlaws naturally fostered the criminal lawyer. His type is now virtually obsolete. ”

“ These pages are written in no spirit of vindictiveness, for all who give the subject consideration must concede that far too serious is the condition of that civilized government in which the spirit of unrestrained outlawry constantly increases in violence, and casts its blight over a continually growing area of territory. ”