“Turn then to that horror-striking scene at St. Louis. A single victim only was sacrificed there. This story is very short, and is perhaps the most highly tragic of anything of its length that has ever been witnessed in real life. A mulatto man by the name of McIntosh was seized in the street, dragged to the suburbs of the city, chained to a tree, and actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from the time he had been a freeman attending to his own business and at peace with the world.

“Such are the effects of mob law, and such are the scenes becoming more and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of law and order, and the stories of which have even now grown too familiar to attract anything more than an idle remark.”[[167]]

The following paragraph appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in the year 1839 (5: 218): “Forty years ago, the practice of wreaking private vengeance, or of inflicting summary and illegal punishment for crimes, actual or pretended, which has been glossed over by the name of Lynch’s Law, was hardly known except in sparse, frontier settlements, beyond the reach of courts and legal proceedings.”

The above quotations set forth clearly the condition of affairs in the United States at this time. It was the spirit of the times, rather than any particular cause, which brought about recourse to lynch-law practices. Lynch-law was invoked for no particular offense to the exclusion of all other offenses; neither was it peculiar to any one section of the country. From having been practised only in the border settlements as a temporary means of suppressing lawlessness until the civil regulations could be established, lynch-law methods had come to prevail even in well settled communities. Those writers who expressed the opinion about 1830 that lynch-law was dying out did not foresee the great popular excitement which existed during Jackson’s administration. The anti-slavery agitation acted as a spark in a tinder-box and seemed to beget a spirit of lawlessness in every part of the country. To the inflamed imagination of the popular mind the slightest provocation seemed a serious offense. The law did not reach such offenses, or they were deemed to be inadequately punished by the law, and this seemed to the people a justification for summary punishment.

In the slave States such punishment was generally a whipping or flogging, often followed by tarring and feathering, inflicted upon abolitionists or any persons suspected of “tampering with the slaves,” or distributing “incendiary tracts.” In cases of a suspected conspiracy for an insurrection among the slaves the supposed leaders were often summarily punished, sometimes by the infliction of the death penalty.

Along the Mississippi River, the gamblers had aroused the resentment of the peace-loving portion of the community by their vices and excesses of various kinds. In many places they were able to bid defiance to the civil authorities and laugh at threats of enforcing the law against them. Here again the exigencies of the situation seemed to the people to justify the adoption of lynch-law. This case of the summary treatment of the gamblers may be regarded as a transition from the frontier type of lynch-law to the sporadic and epidemical type which later prevailed in the well settled States.

The author of a book published in London in 1837 wrote: “The Lynch-law, is not, properly speaking, an opposition to the established laws of the country, or, is at least, not contemplated as such by its adherents; but rather as a supplement to them,—a species of common law, which is as old as the country, and which, whatever may be the notion of ‘the learned in the law,’ has nevertheless been productive of some of the happiest results.”[[168]]

In 1839, F. Marryat wrote: “The Lynch law of the present day, as practiced in the States of the West and South, may be divided into two different heads: the first is, the administration of it in cases in which the laws of the States are considered by the majority as not having awarded a punishment adequate, in their opinion, to the offence committed; and the other, when from excitement the majority will not wait for the law to act, but inflict the punishment with their own hands.”[[169]]

Occasionally innocent persons suffered the violence of lynching mobs,[[170]] and sometimes damages were secured through the courts for having suffered lynch-law. Cases of this nature were not uncommon in the early history of the operation of lynch-law in Virginia,[[171]] and in the later thirties similar suits were instituted in the courts. On September 4, 1835, certain inhabitants of Brownsville, Tennessee, constituted themselves a lynch court for the trial of Anson Moody, suspected of being a kidnapper, or slave stealer. They seized him in the dead of night, tried him, convicted him, and then proceeded to punishment by inflicting one hundred lashes with a “cowskin,” branding him on the cheek with the letter R and commanding him to leave the country. A jury in the Circuit Court of the United States for the District of West Tennessee gave him a verdict of $2,000 and costs against five of the members of the Lynch court.[[172]]

In Yazoo, Mississippi, a Mr. Harris, for some real or supposed offense, was “severely lynched” by H. W. Dunn, C. W. Bain, and others. He prosecuted those two individuals for the outrage, and the case was tried in the circuit court of Yazoo County. The jury returned a verdict for the plaintiff of $20,000.[[173]]