But it was enough to stir up the mob spirit. It was Saturday night, July 25th, and the usual crowd from all over the county had gathered in the town. Among the crowd were many coal miners, who had just been paid off and were drinking. As in Springfield, the town had a very large number of saloons, ninety-one within a radius of five miles, to a population of some 25,000. Most Northern towns are far worse in this respect than the average Southern town. It was a hot night; mobs work best in hot weather. Statistics, indeed, show that the great majority of lynchings take place in the summer, particularly in July and August.
It was known that the sheriff had brought his Negro prisoner to the jail, and the crime was widely discussed. The whole city was a sort of human tinder-box, ready to flare up at a spark of violence.
Well, the spark came—in a saloon. Metcalf, a Negro, had words with a well-known white butcher named Henry Gatterman. Both had been drinking. The Negro drew a revolver and shot Gatterman dead. Instantly the city was in a furor of excitement. The police appeared and arrested Metcalf, and got him finally with great difficulty to the police station, where he was locked up. A mob formed instantly. It was led, at first, by a crowd of lawless boys from sixteen to eighteen years old. Rapidly gathering strength, it rushed into the city hall, and although the mayor, the chief of police, and nearly the entire police force were present, they got the Negro out and hanged him to a telegraph-pole in the main street of the town, afterward shooting his body full of holes.
Intoxicated by their swift success and, mob-like, growing in recklessness and bloodthirstiness, they now turned upon the jail determined to lynch the Negro Wilson. It was a much uglier mob than any I have hitherto described; it was a drunken mob, and it had already tasted blood. It swarmed around the jail, yelling, shooting, and breaking the windows with stones.
A “Strict” Sheriff
Sheriff Hardy H. Whitlock of Vermilion County had never been looked upon as an especially remarkable man—except, as I was told everywhere, he had a record as a strict sheriff, as a man who did his best to enforce the law in times of peace. He and the state’s attorney were so industrious that they caught and punished four times as many criminals in proportion to population as were convicted in Chicago. The sheriff was a big, solid, deliberate man with gray eyes. He was born in Tennessee. His father was an itinerant Presbyterian preacher, always poor, doing good for everybody but himself, and stern in his conceptions of right and wrong. His mother, as the sheriff related, made him obey the law with peach-tree switches. His history was the commonest of the common; not much education, had to make his living, worked in a livery stable. He was faithful at that, temperate, friendly. They elected him constable, an office that he held for seven years. He was faithful at that. They elected him sheriff of the county. He went at the new task as he had at all his other work, with no especial brilliancy, but steadily doing his duty, catching criminals. He found a great deal to learn and he learned. The extradition laws of the states troubled him when he wanted to bring prisoners home. There was no compilation of the laws on the subject. Here was work to be done. Although no lawyer, he went at it laboriously and compiled a book of five hundred pages, containing all the extradition laws of the country, and had it published at his own expense.
Defending a Jail With a Riot-gun
And when the crisis came that night with the mob howling around his jail, Hardy Whitlock had become so accustomed to doing his duty that he didn’t know how to do anything else. Here was the jail to be protected: he intended to protect it. He sent for no troops—there was no time anyhow—nor for the police. He had a couple of deputies and his wife. Though the mob was breaking the windows of the house and the children were there, his wife said:
“Give me a gun, Hardy, and I’ll stay by you.”
The sheriff went out on the porch, unarmed, in his shirt-sleeves, and made them a little speech. They yelled at him, threw stones, fired revolvers. They brought a railroad rail to break in the door. He went out among them, called them Bill, and Jim, and Dick, and persuaded them to put it down; but others took it up willingly.