There can be nothing more horrifying to a refined, honest, fairminded,
law abiding, upright christian gentleman than the riddling with
bullets, hanging and burning of an innocent man, and yet this
is possible under a system of lynch law. Indeed I regret to state
that this has occurred. The lynchers can hardly justify themselves
by saying that the man confessed his crime. He did not do so in
a lawful assembly nor in the presence of lawful witnesses. For
these men, themselves, were assembled for the purpose of committing
an unlawful act. Before the bar of civilized opinion, they stand
charged of the foulest murder known to the annals of history,
and hence, I gravely doubt that they are competent witnesses.
The great American liberty-loving people will not wait much longer
for these outrages to stop. They will arise in their majesty and
might and demand a halt to these savage outrages.
The action of these mobs show that they are not after a mere
punishment of these crimes, but that they are seeking in the most
barbarous manner, revenge. For they hang, shoot and burn. Either
one of these deaths is barbarous enough. I think that no tribunal
on earth would give sentence for more than one of these at the
time and yet our civilized, christian people give all of them
at once. This shows that these men are utterly unprepared to take
the law into their hands. If they are justifiable in one case,
they would be justifiable in all.
Pushing this argument further to its logical conclusion we would
have no need for courts to administer the law, for Legislatures,
nor Congress to make laws, and hence every lawful assembly would
be destroyed in our country and every man would be a law unto
himself and would punish crime as his senseless passion might
dictate. Indeed, no man in this country would be safe.
Law is that principle which governs a people and regulates their
affairs and promotes their truest. Wise and equitable laws, fairly
interpreted and impartially administered, will meet every emergency
of a people. Happily for us, we can boast of such laws and there
is absolutely no need to over-ride them. Lynch law is a sad reflection
upon the courts. The lynchers in effect say that the officers
of the law are unreliable; dishonest and cannot be relied on to
punish criminals in accordance with their oath. Surely the lynchers
will not presume to say that they know more about the law than
the officers of the law. I ask, therefore, in all seriousness,
what is the objection to the law taking its course? I have yet
to see or hear a reasonable excuse for lynching and surely a thing
for which not a single reason can be given ought to be abandoned.
Full
text (Library of Congress/African-American Perspectives: Pamphlets
from the Daniel A.P.Murray Collection, 1818-1907)
