Three American Frontiers by Thomas D. Clark Holman Hamilton

Author:Thomas D. Clark, Holman Hamilton [Thomas D. Clark, Holman Hamilton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Americas, United States
ISBN: 9780813187921
Google: hko-MwEACAAJ
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-11-21T05:00:00+00:00

THE DAY GOES BY LIKE A SHADOW ON THE HEARTClosely allied with the problems of race and law enforcement was that of lynching. A lynching made sensational news, and few Southern country editors could resist giving the full details of what happened. No one knew better than they, however, the conflicting forces mob violence released. . . .

Some editors perhaps published details of lynchings in an effort to make them so horrible that public opinion would stamp out the practice. Others approved of lynchings as punishments for certain crimes, especially when it seemed to protect and further white supremacy. . . .

The country editor was always in a dilemma in respect to the whole subject. His community’s moral reputation was at stake, but his readers always wanted sensational stories. There were enough lynchings and to spare. . . .

Opponents of lynching argued—often with apparent justice—that it accomplished nothing good that the courts could not do as well. Colonel W. P. Walton in the upper South was direct in his views on lynching. In 1877 he vigorously denounced mob rule. “The infernal mob business,” he wrote, “showed itself this week in Fayette County. A negro hit a white man named John Denton, on the head with an ax, giving him probably a fatal wound. The negro was arrested and taken before a magistrate and held to await the result of Denton’s wound. That night a mob took the negro from the officers of the law and hung him to a neighboring tree. Each man engaged in that cowardly work, is a murderer and the law should see that they do not go unpunished. There is no palliation for the deed. The negro had committed a horrible crime but he was in the hands of the law, and would certainly have gotten the full punishment for it. Mobs are always cowardly and as great breakers of the law as the criminals they propose to take into their hands to punish.”

Public opinion was sometimes opposed to lynching, and this fact appeared in the weekly papers. It was difficult, however, to determine what part of the population of a county was involved in a lynching. Mobs varied in size. If the crimes which they punished were widely publicized, some of the participants were often drawn in from other communities, even from other counties. . . .

Even where mobs were opposed, they were not easy to stop. Take as an example the Mississippi mob of 500 men who broke into the Carroll County jail. Bessie McCroy, her son Belfield and daughter Ida, who were being held for the murder of Mr. and Mrs. Talliferro, were seized by the mob, taken to the edge of the town of Carrollton and hanged and their bodies riddled with bullets. While the mob was at work the Honorable W. S. Hill and Judge W. F. Stephens stood on the jail steps with their arms around the leaders begging them to desist in favor of the courts. Soon after, Governor Andrew Longino arrived on the scene and delivered a long lecture in which he condemned lynching.

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