The use of the word lynch in a story entitled “Jack Long; or lynch-law and vengeance,” which appeared in the American Whig Review for February, 1845, purporting to be a true story of frontier life in Shelby County, Texas, fully bears out the assertion that “to lynch” was generally understood at that time to mean to whip or to maltreat. According to the story a band of men calling themselves “Regulators,” led by a ruffian, terrorized the county. Once they lynched, that is, lashed to a tree, whipped and beat, Jack Long, leaving him for dead. He recovered and left the county in obedience to their orders, but later came back and shot all but two of the “Regulators.”
It should be said, however, that the instances of the application of lynch-law which are given in Niles’ Register and the Liberator from 1830 to 1860 show an increase in the severity of the punishment administered. As the slavery controversy went on and the breach widened between the North and the South, it was but natural that such should be the case. Many people in the South felt that no punishment was quite severe enough for an abolitionist. Crimes committed by negroes were also treated with greater severity. The following extract from a private letter, dated Houston, Texas, August 23, 1860, to a friend in Hartford, Connecticut, expresses a sentiment felt at that time in many sections of the South: “Tell your abolition friends to go on and soon they will have the pleasure of seeing the negro reduced to such a state of hopeless bondage that they may well pity them. I solemnly declare that to-day the negro is not as free as he was two or five years ago; and why? Simply because his master has been goaded on to desperation by incendiary acts and speeches. Now he fears the negro, and binds him down as you would a savage animal. One year ago, all was peace and quietness here. The negro was allowed to go out, to have dances and frolics; to-day one dare not show his head after nine o’clock in the evening. Seven companies of patrols are organized and guard the city each night, sixteen horse-patrol scour the country around. Forty-eight vigilance men say live, banish or die, as the proof may go to show. And so it is all over the country. Men are hung every day by the decision of planters, lawyers, judges and ministers. It is no hot impetuous act, but cool, stern justice. It is the saving of wife and daughter, mother and sister from the hand of desecration. It is the stopping of scenes that would make the Druses and Turks blush for shame.”[[184]]
At the time this letter was written, and during the three years preceding, there was a great deal of excitement in Texas. Vigilance societies were in active operation against desperadoes and abolitionists. In 1857 a vigilance committee in the “upper country,” as it was then called, was “raking the country fore and aft and swinging every horse-thief and murderer,” that could be found. A traveler saw twelve bodies suspended from one tree and on another tree five.[[185]] In the summer of 1860 there was an insurrection and conspiracy in Dallas, Ellis, Tarrant and Denton counties, in northern Texas. The three ringleaders, Sam, Cato, and Patrick, were hung by a vigilance committee on July 24. Twenty-two insurrectionists in all were said to have been hanged.[[186]] This condition of affairs must be taken into consideration in connection with the statements made in the above letter and the fears and prejudice therein expressed.
When drawing any conclusions from the instances recorded in the newspapers as to the history of lynch-law during this period, there is another fact to be kept in mind. During the later years the facilities for obtaining news were greatly increased; the means of communication between different parts of the country were very much improved and the number of newspapers published had rapidly increased. There were no doubt many cases of the administration of summary justice in the remote districts during the thirties and the early forties which never came to the notice of either the Liberator or Niles’ Register. There is, however, abundant evidence to make the conclusion a safe one that lynch-law was more and more resorted to during this period and that the punishments administered under that name by vigilance committees and mobs came to be more and more severe, death being frequently inflicted during the later years.
The Parkville (Mo.) Democrat made the following statement in the year 1856: “Deeds of daring and outrages perpetrated by negroes, are constantly becoming more frequent. We hope that the proper authorities will see to it that all such cases are punished to the extent of the law.”[[187]] The Liberator for May 2, 1856 (p. 72) contains an item which reads in this way: “In Hancock County, La., Samuel L. Watson, a negro overseer, whipped one of the negroes under him, and a few days after, the negro caught him in a field and beat him with a club till he died. The tragedy closed in the usual way, by the summary hanging of the negro by the populace.” There are indications, therefore, that crime was on the increase among the negroes at this time and that the whites had cause for inflicting more rigorous punishment.
The following editorial appeared in the Liberator, December 19, 1856 (p. 204): “A record of the cases of ‘Lynch Law’ in the Southern States reveals the startling fact, that within twenty years, over three hundred white persons have been murdered upon the accusation—in most cases unsupported by legal proof—of carrying among slave-holders arguments addressed expressly to their own intellects and consciences, as to the morality and expediency of slavery.” If this figure may be accepted as reliable for the whites, it is within the truth to say that a considerably larger number of negroes met with summary capital punishment during the various insurrection excitements which occurred.
The summary execution of negroes did not, however, become a serious evil previous to the Civil War. So long as the negroes were valuable as slaves, it was a direct economic loss to the slave-holder if an able-bodied slave were put to death. In general, it was only in cases of real or supposed conspiracy against the whites, or in cases of insurrection, that the negroes were killed in a summary manner. Such was the case in Virginia at the time of the Nat Turner insurrection; such was the case in Mississippi in 1835 when it was discovered that the Murrell gang had laid plans for a general uprising among the slaves. A similar condition of affairs existed in northern Texas in 1860, when it was thought that strychnine had been distributed among the negroes and they had been instructed to put it in the wells and in the food of their masters.
Damages were sometimes claimed by owners for the loss of their slaves through illegal procedure. A suit was instituted in the year 1857 in the Jefferson Circuit Court of Kentucky against the city of Louisville for the value of the slaves George, Bill, and Jack, the murderers of the Joyce family. George and Bill had been hung by an infuriated mob, and Jack had cut his own throat in jail, in order to escape the fate which befell his companions. $1,500 each was claimed as damages by the owners of the negroes. The Louisville Courier in commenting upon the case said the suit would be of interest and importance, involving some delicate principles of law.[[188]] In 1858 a vigilance committee was established in Shelby County, Kentucky, whose method of procedure was described as follows: “They order white men and free negroes who have been concerned in evil deeds, to leave the county within three days. Any property belonging to a white man is to be appraised by three disinterested persons, and the price paid, after such person has been directed to leave the county. Slaves who are vicious must be removed, also, from Shelby county, by their masters.”[[189]] The property right in the slaves was generally recognized in cases where they committed offenses against a neighbor or a neighbor’s slaves. A common way of settling such matters was for a number of the planters to meet together and decide upon the amount of damages to be paid and what should constitute an equitable settlement, without going through any formal legal procedure. In Louisiana a tribunal formed in this way tried and gave sentence of death upon two negroes for violating the person of a young white girl on Christmas eve, 1856.[[190]]
An examination of the files of the Liberator shows that, during the ten years 1830–1840, in cases where masters, overseers, or mistresses were murdered by slaves, the law was allowed to take its course almost without exception. The same is true in the case of rape committed upon white women by negroes. The record stands, three slaves and one free negro legally executed for rape and two slaves legally executed for attempted rape. There are some instances reported of summary punishment, not death, being administered to negroes for inducing white girls to run away with them, or for living with white women.
There were also three instances of burning negroes at the stake during this period. These cases have been described above: one was the burning of two slaves near Mobile, Alabama, for murdering two children; another was the burning of the free mulatto at St. Louis for killing an officer; and the other was the burning of a slave in Arkansas for the murder of his master.