CHAPTER XIV
THE REASON FOR LYNCH LAW
A FEW weeks before my arrival there, Downieville had been the scene of great excitement on one of those occasions when the people took on themselves the administration and execution of justice.
A Mexican woman one forenoon had, without provocation, stabbed a miner to the heart, killing him on the spot. The news of the murder spread rapidly up and down the river, and a vast concourse of miners immediately began to collect in the town.
The woman, an hour or two after she committed the murder, was formally tried by a jury of twelve, found guilty, and condemned to be hung that afternoon. The case was so clear that it admitted of no doubt, several men having been witnesses of the whole occurrence; and the woman was hung accordingly, on the bridge in front of the town, in presence of many thousand people.
For those whose ideas of the proper mode of administering criminal law are only acquired from an acquaintance with the statistics of crime and its punishment in such countries as England, where a single murder excites horror throughout the kingdom, and is for days a matter of public interest, where judicial corruption is unknown, where the instruments of the law are ubiquitous, and its action all but infallible,—for such persons it may be difficult to realize a state of things which should render it necessary, or even excusable, that any number of irresponsible individuals should exercise a power of life and death over their fellow men.
And no doubt many sound theories may be brought forward against the propriety of administering Lynch law; but California, in the state of society which then existed, and in view of the total inefficiency, or worse than inefficiency, of the established courts of justice, was no place for theorizing upon abstract principles. Society had to protect itself by the most practical and unsophisticated system of retributive justice, quick in its action, and whose operation, being totally divested of all mystery and unnecessary ceremony, was perfectly comprehensible to the meanest understanding—a system inconsistent with public safety in old countries—unnecessary, in fact, where the machinery of the law is perfect in all its parts—but at the same time one which men most naturally adopt in the absence of all other protection; and any one who lived in the mines of California at that time is bound gratefully to acknowledge that the feeling of security of life and person which he there enjoyed was due in a great measure to his knowledge of the fact that this admirable institution of Lynch law was in full and active operation.
There were in California the élite of the most desperate and consummate scoundrels from every part of the world; and the unsettled state of the country, the wandering habits of the mining population, scattered, as they were, all over the mountains, and frequently carrying an amount of gold on their persons inconvenient from its very weight, together with the isolated condition of many individuals, strangers to every one around them, and who, if put out of the way, would never have been missed—all these things tended apparently to render the country one where such ruffians would have ample room to practice their villainy. But, thanks to Lynch law, murders and robberies, numerous as they were, were by no means of such frequent occurrence as might have been expected, considering the opportunities and temptations afforded to such a large proportion of the population, who were only restrained from violence by a wholesome regard for the safety of their own necks.
And after all, the fear of punishment of death is the most effectual preventive of crime. To the class of men among whom murderers are found, it is probably the only feeling which deters them, and its influence is unconsciously felt even by those whose sense of right and wrong is not yet so dead as to allow them to contemplate the possibility of their committing a murder. In old States, however, fear of the punishment of death does not act with its full force on the mind of the intending criminal, for the idea of the expiation of his crime on the scaffold has to be preceded in his imagination by all the mysterious and tedious formalities of the law, in the uncertainty of which he is apt to flatter himself that he will by some means get an acquittal; and even if convicted, the length of time which must elapse before his ultimate punishment, together with the parade and circumstance with which it is attended, divests it in a great measure of the feelings of horror which it is intended to arouse.
But when Lynch law prevails, it strikes terror to the heart of the evil-doer. He has no hazy and undefined view of his ultimate fate in the distant future, but a vivid picture is before him of the sure and speedy consequence of crime. The formalities and delays of the law, which are instituted for the protection of the people, are for the same reason abolished, and the criminal knows that, instead of being tried by the elaborate and intricate process of law, his very ignorance of which leads him to over-estimate his chance of escape, he will have to stand before a tribunal of men who will try him, not by law, but by hard, straightforward common-sense, and from whom he can hope for no other verdict than that which his own conscience awards him; while execution follows so close upon sentence, that it forms, as it were, but part of the same ceremony: for Californians were eminently practical and earnest; what they meant to do they did “right off,” with all their might, and as if they really meant to do it; and Lynch law was administered with characteristic promptness and decision. Sufficient time, however, or at least what was considered to be sufficient time, was always granted to the criminal to prepare for death. Very frequently he was not hanged till the day after his trial.
An execution, of course, attracted an immense crowd, but it was conducted with as little parade as possible. Men were hung in the readiest way which suggested itself—on a bough of the nearest tree, or on a tree close to the spot where the murder was committed. In some instances the criminal was run up by a number of men, all equally sharing the hang-man’s duty; on other occasions, one man was appointed to the office of executioner, and a drop was extemporized by placing the culprit on his feet on the top of an empty box or barrel, under the bough of a tree, and at the given signal the box was knocked away from under him.