The following morning, after the lynching, the same paper printed in its headlines:
AWFUL REBUKE TO THE COURTS
They Have Temporised With the Criminal Classes Until Patience was Exhausted
I cite these facts to show the underlying conditions in Springfield; a soil richly prepared for an outbreak of mob law—with corrupt politics, vile saloons, the law paralysed by non-enforcement against vice, a large venal Negro vote, lax courts of justice.
Gathering of the Lynching Mob
Well, on Monday afternoon the mob began to gather. At first it was an absurd, ineffectual crowd, made up largely of lawless boys of sixteen to twenty—a pronounced feature of every mob—with a wide fringe of more respectable citizens, their hands in their pockets and no convictions in their souls, looking on curiously, helplessly. They gathered hooting around the jail, cowardly, at first, as all mobs are, but growing bolder as darkness came on and no move was made to check them. The murder of Collis was not a horrible, soul-rending crime like that at Statesboro, Ga.; these men in the mob were not personal friends of the murdered man; it was a mob from the back rooms of the swarming saloons of Springfield; and it included also the sort of idle boys “who hang around cigar stores,” as one observer told me. The newspaper reports are fond of describing lynching mobs as “made up of the foremost citizens of the town.” In few cases that I know of, either South or North, except in back country neighbourhoods, has a mob been made up of what may be called the best citizens; but the best citizens have often stood afar off “decrying the mob”—as a Springfield man told me—and letting it go on. A mob is the method by which good citizens turn over the law and the government to the criminal or irresponsible classes.
And no official in direct authority in Springfield that evening, apparently, had so much as an ounce of grit within him. The sheriff came out and made a weak speech in which he said he “didn’t want to hurt anybody.” They threw stones at him and broke his windows. The chief of police sent eighteen men to the jail but did not go near himself. All of these policemen undoubtedly sympathised with the mob in its efforts to get at the slayer of their brother officer; at least, they did nothing effective to prevent the lynching. An appeal was made to the Mayor to order out the engine companies that water might be turned on the mob. He said he didn’t like to; the hose might be cut. The local militia company was called to its barracks, but the officer in charge hesitated, vacillated, doubted his authority, and objected finally because he had no ammunition except Krag-Jorgenson cartridges, which, if fired into a mob, would kill too many people! The soldiers did not stir that night from the safe and comfortable precincts of their armoury.
A sort of dry rot, a moral paralysis, seems to strike the administrators of law in a town like Springfield. What can be expected of officers who are not accustomed to enforce the law, or of a people not accustomed to obey it—or who make reservations and exceptions when they do enforce it or obey it?
Threats to Lynch the Judges
When the sheriff made his speech to the mob, urging them to let the law take its course they jeered him. The law! When, in the past, had the law taken its proper course in Clark County? Some one shouted, referring to Dixon: