There had been so many lynchings in the South that it had ceased to be a crime—for crime, the weed, cultivated—grows into a flower to those who do the tending.
Many of the lynchings, it is true, were honest—the frenzy of outraged humanity to avenge a terrible crime which the law, in its delay, often had let go unpunished. The laxity of the law, the unscrupulousness of its lawyers, their shrewdness in clearing criminals if the fee was forthcoming, the hundreds of technicalities thrown around criminals, the narrowness of supreme courts in reversing on these technicalities. All these had thrown the law back to its source—the people. And they had taken it in their own hands. In violent hands, but deadly sure and retributory.
If there was ever an excuse for lynching, the South was entitled to it. For the crime was the result of the sudden emancipation of ignorant slaves, who, backed by the bayonets of their liberators, and attributing a far greater importance to their elevation than was warranted, perpetuated an unnameable crime as part of their system of revenge for years of slavery. And the South arose to the terribleness of the crime and met it with the rifle, the torch and the rope.
Why should it be wondered at? Why should the South be singled out for blame? Is it not a fact that for years in every newly settled western state lynch-law has been the unchallenged, unanimous verdict for a horse thief? And is not the honor of a white woman more than the hide of a broncho?
But from an honest, well intentioned frenzy of justice outraged to any pretext is an easy step. From the quick lynching of the rapist and murderer—to be sure that the lawyers and courts did not acquit them—was one step. To hang a half crazy old woman for burning a mill was another, and the natural consequence of the first.
And so these people flocked to the burning—they who had helped lynch before—the negro-haters, who had never owned a negro and had no sympathy—no sentiment for them. It is they who lynch in the South, who lynch and defy the law.
The great mill was in ruins—its tall black smokestacks alone stood amid its smoking, twisted mass of steel and ashes—a rough, blackened, but fitting monument of its own infamy.
They gathered around it—the disorderly, the vicious, the lynchers of the Tennessee Valley.
Fitful flashes of flame now and then burst out amid the ruins, silhouetting the shadows of the lynchers into fierce giant forms with frenzied faces from which came first murmurs and finally shouts of:
“Lynch her! Lynch her!”