“There is also a company of Regulators near Vincennes, who have broken up a notorious gang of coiners and thieves who had fixed themselves near that place. These rascals, before they were driven off, had parties settled at different distances in the woods, and thus held communication and passed horses and stolen goods from one to another, from the Ohio to Lake Erie, and from thence into Canada or the New England States. Thus it was next to impossible to detect the robbers, or to recover the stolen property.
“While I was staying at the house of a Mr. Mulligan in Illinois, thirty miles from St. Louis, one of the men, who had belonged to the gang near Vincennes, was taken up on the charge of passing counterfeit money....
“This practice of Regulating seems very strange to an European. I have talked with some of the chief men of the Regulators, who all lamented the necessity of such a system. They very sensibly remarked, that when the country became more thickly settled, there would no longer be any necessity for such proceedings, and that they should all be delighted at being able to obtain justice in a more formal manner. I forgot to mention, that the rascals punished, have sometimes prosecuted the Regulators, for an assault. The juries however, knowing the bad characters of the prosecutors, would give but trifling damages, which divided among so many, amounted to next to nothing for each individual.”[[128]]
In a book entitled “Letters from the West,” which was published in London in 1828, Judge James Hall wrote on the subject of lynch-law as follows:
“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. Mounted, armed, and commanded by a leader, they proceeded to arrest such notorious offenders as were deemed fit subjects of exemplary justice; their operations were generally carried on in the night. Squire Birch, who was personated by one of the party, established his tribunal under a tree in the woods, and the culprit was brought before him, tried, and generally convicted; he was then tied to a tree, lashed without mercy, and ordered to leave the country within a given time, under pain of a second visitation. It seldom happened, that more than one or two were thus punished; their confederates took the hint and fled, or were admonished to quit the neighborhood. Neither the justice nor the policy of this practice can be defended; but it was often resorted to from necessity, and its operation was salutary, in ridding the country of miscreants whom the law was not strong enough to punish. It was liable to abuse, and was sometimes abused; but in general, it was conducted with moderation, and only exerted upon the basest and most lawless men. Sometimes the sufferers resorted to courts of justice for remuneration, and there have been instances of heavy damages being recovered of the regulators. Whenever a county became strong enough to enforce the laws, these high-handed doings ceased to be tolerated.”[[129]]
In the above extracts we have a fair description of the operation of lynch-law as it was carried westward by the emigrants from Virginia and the neighboring States. The weakness and inadequacy of the civil regulations, and the presence of such criminals as the horse-thief, the counterfeiter, the robber, and the desperado, who find the frontier both a retreat from the consequences of past crime and a new theater for the perpetration of crime, gave a constant justification for recourse to lynch-law.
The usual manner of proceeding was for the settlers to consult together and in a more or less formal way to establish “the institution of Regulators.” Sometimes the Regulators were small bodies of men chosen by the people to look after the interests of the community—in effect, they were committees of safety. At other times, the Regulators were bodies of men who voluntarily assumed the duty of policing a district. The duties of such companies, whether known as Regulators or as Rangers or by some other name, were to ferret out and punish criminals, to drive out “suspicious characters,” and to exercise a general supervision over the interests of the settlements in which they lived. Their statute-book was the “code of his honor, Judge Lynch”[[130]]; their order of trial was similar to that of a “drum-head court-martial”; the principles of their punishment were certainty, rapidity, and inexorability. They were in themselves judges, juries, witnesses, and executioners.
These bodies of men bound themselves by a regular compact, to the people and to each other, to rid the community of all thieves, robbers, plunderers, and villains of every description. Such compacts were usually verbal but they were sometimes in writing.[[131]] The compact entered into by the Regulators of North Carolina has already been cited. If the agreement of 1780 in Virginia, to which the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger gave his indorsement, be accepted as genuine, we have a record of another such compact. There is recorded, also, a compact entered into by a company of Regulators in Illinois in 1820. It reads as follows:
“Know all men by these presents:
“That we (here follow twelve names), citizens of —— settlement, in the state of Illinois, have this day, jointly and severally, bound themselves together as a company of Rangers and Regulators, to protect this settlement against the crimes and misdemeanors of, all and singular, every person or persons whomsoever, and especially against all horse-thieves, and renegades, and robbers. And we do by these presents, hereby bind ourselves, jointly and severally as aforesaid, unto each other, and to the fellow-citizens of this settlement, to punish, according to the code of his honor, Judge Lynch, all violations of the law, against the peace and dignity of the said people of —— settlement; and to discover and bring to speedy punishment, all illegal combinations—to rid the country of such as are dangerous to the welfare of this settlement—to preserve the peace, and generally to vindicate the law, within the settlement aforesaid. All of which purposes we are to accomplish as peaceably as possible: but we are to accomplish them one way or another.