As to the comparative accomplishment of light and dark Negroes after leaving school, the evidence is so confusing that I would not dare to enter upon a generalisation: that question must be left to the great scientific sociologist who will devote a lifetime to this most interesting problem in human life.

CHAPTER IX

Before I take up the account of specific cases an analysis of the lynchings for the years 1906 and 1907 will help to show in what states mob rule is most often invoked and for what offences lynchings are most common. Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Georgia—the black belt states—are thus seen to have the worst records, and the figures here given do not include the men killed in the Atlanta riot which would add twelve to the Georgia record for 1906:

Following is the comparative number of lynchings for the two years.

Of those lynched in 1907, 49 were Negro men, three Negro women and four white men. By methods:

The offences for which these men and woman were lynched range from stealing seventy-five cents and talking with white girls over the telephone, to rape and murder. Here is the list:

In making my study I visited four towns where lynchings had taken place, two in the South, Statesboro in Ga. and Huntsville in Ala.; and two in the North, Springfield, O., and Danville, Ill.

I.—LYNCHING IN THE SOUTH

Statesboro, Ga., where two Negroes were burned alive under the most shocking circumstances, on August 16, 1904, is a thrifty county seat located about seventy miles from Savannah.

For a hundred years a settlement has existed there, but it was not until the people discovered the wealth of the turpentine forests and of the sea-island cotton industry that the town became highly prosperous. Since 1890 it has doubled in population every five years, having in 1904 some 2,500 people. Most of the town is newly built. A fine, new court-house stands in the city square, and there are new churches, a large, new academy, a new water-works system and telephones, electric lights, rural free delivery—everywhere the signs of improvement and progress. It is distinctly a town of the New South, developed almost exclusively by the energy of Southerners and with Southern money. Its population is pure American, mostly of old Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia stock. Fully 70 per cent. of the inhabitants are church members—Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists—and the town has not had a saloon in twenty-five years and rarely has a case of drunkenness. There are no beggars and practically no tramps. A poorhouse, built several years ago, had to be sold because no one would go to it. The farms are small, for the most part, and owned by the farmers themselves; only 8 per cent. of them are mortgaged. There are schools for both white and coloured children, though the school year is short and education not compulsory.

In short, this is a healthy, temperate, progressive American town—a country city, self-respecting, ambitious, with a good future before it—the future of the New South.

Character of the Negro Population

About 40 per cent. of the population of the county consists of Negroes. Here as elsewhere there are to be found two very distinct kinds of Negroes—as distinct as the classes of white men. The first of these is the self-respecting, resident Negro. Sometimes he is a land-owner, more often a renter; he is known to the white people, employed by them, and trusted by them. In Statesboro, as in most of the South, a large proportion of the Negroes are of this better class. On the other hand, one finds everywhere many of the so-called “worthless Negroes,” perhaps a growing class, who float from town to town, doing rough work, having no permanent place of abode, not known to the white population generally. The turpentine industry has brought many such Negroes to the neighbourhood of Statesboro. Living in the forest near the turpentine-stills, and usually ignorant and lazy, they and all their kind, both in the country districts and in the city, are doubly unfortunate in coming into contact chiefly with the poorer class of white people, whom they often meet as industrial competitors.

Danger from the Floating Negro

In all the towns I visited, South as well as North, I found that this floating, worthless Negro caused most of the trouble. He prowls the roads by day and by night; he steals; he makes it unsafe for women to travel alone. Sometimes he has gone to school long enough to enable him to read a little and to write his name, enough education to make him hate the hard work of the fields and aspire to better things, without giving him the determination to earn them. He has little or no regard for the family relations or home life, and when he commits a crime or is tired of one locality, he sets out, unencumbered, to seek new fields, leaving his wife and children without the slightest compunction.

About six miles from the city of Statesboro lived Henry Hodges, a well-to-do planter. He had a good farm, he ran three ploughs, as they say in the cotton country, and rumour reported that he had money laid by. Coming of an old family, he was widely related in Bullock County, and his friendliness and kindness had given him and his family a large circle of acquaintances. Family ties and friendships, in old-settled communities like those in the South, are influences of much greater importance in fixing public opinion and deciding political and social questions than they are in the new and heterogeneous communities of the North.

The South is still, so far as the white population is concerned, a sparsely settled country. The farmers often live far apart; the roads are none too good. The Hodges home was in a lonely place, the nearest neighbours being Negroes, nearly half a mile distant. No white people lived within three-quarters of a mile. Hodges had been brought up among Negroes, he employed them, he was kind to them. To one of the Negroes suspected of complicity in the subsequent murder, he had loaned his shot-gun; another, afterward lynched, called at his home the very night before the murder, intending then to rob him, and Hodges gave him a bottle of turpentine to cure a “snake-graze.”

Story of the Murder

On the afternoon of July 29, 1904, Mr. Hodges drove to a neighbour’s house to bring his nine-year-old girl home from school. No Southern white farmer, especially in thinly settled regions like Bulloch County, dares permit any woman or girl of his family to go out anywhere alone, for fear of the criminal Negro.

“You don’t know and you can’t know,” a Georgian said to me, “what it means down here to live in constant fear lest your wife or daughter be attacked on the road, or even in her home. Many women in the city of Statesboro dare not go into their backyards after dark. Every white planter knows that there is always danger for his daughters to visit even the nearest neighbour, or for his wife to go to church without a man to protect her.”

It is absolutely necessary to understand this point of view before one can form a true judgment upon conditions in the South.

When Hodges arrived at his home that night, it was already dark. The little girl ran to join her mother; the father drove to the barn. Two Negroes—perhaps more—met him there and beat his brains out with a stone and a buggy brace. Hearing the noise, Mrs. Hodges ran out with a lamp and set it on the gate-post. The Negroes crept up—as nearly as can be gathered from the contradictory stories and confessions—and murdered her there in her doorway with peculiar brutality. Many of the crimes committed by Negroes are marked with almost animal-like ferocity. Once aroused to murderous rage, the Negro does not stop with mere killing; he bruises and batters his victim out of all semblance to humanity. For the moment, under stress of passion, he seems to revert wholly to savagery.

The Negroes went into the house and ransacked it for money. The little girl, who must have been terror-stricken beyond belief, hid behind a trunk; the two younger children, one a child of two years, the other a mere baby, lay on the bed. Finding no money, the Negroes returned to their homes. Here they evidently began to dread the consequences of their deed, for toward midnight they returned to the Hodges home. During all this time the little girl had been hiding there in darkness, with the bodies of her father and mother in the doorway. When the Negroes appeared, she either came out voluntarily, hoping that friends had arrived, or she was dragged out.

“Where’s the money?” demanded the Negroes.

The child got out all she had, a precious five-cent piece, and offered it to them on condition that they would not hurt her. One of them seized her and beat her to death.

I make no excuse for telling these details; they must be told, else we shall not see the depths or the lengths of this problem.

Burning of the Hodges Home

The Negroes then dragged the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Hodges into their home and set the house afire. As nearly as can be made out from the subsequent confessions, the two younger children were burned alive.

When the neighbours reached the scene of the crime, the house was wholly consumed, only the great end chimney left standing, and the lamp still burning on the gate-post.

Well, these Southerners are warm-hearted, home-loving people. Everybody knew and respected the Hodges—their friends in the church, their many relatives in the county—and the effect of this frightful crime described in all its details, may possibly be imagined by Northern people living quietly and peacefully in their homes. When two of the prominent citizens of the town told me, weeks afterward, of the death of the little girl, they could not keep back their tears.

The murder took place on Friday night; on Saturday the Negroes, Paul Reed and Will Cato, were arrested with several other suspects, including two Negro preachers. Both Reed and Cato were of the illiterate class; both had been turpentine workers, living in the forest, far from contact with white people. Cato was a floater from South Carolina. Reed was born in the county, but he was a good type of the worthless and densely ignorant Negro.

It is a somewhat common impression that a whole town loses itself in a passion of anarchy, and is not satisfied until the criminals are killed. But in spite of the terrible provocation and the intense feeling, there yet existed in Statesboro exactly such a feeling for the sacredness of law, such intelligent Americanism, as exists in your town or mine. Not within the present generation had a lynching taken place in the town, and the people were deeply concerned to preserve the honour and good name of their community. In the midst of intense excitement a meeting of good citizens, both white and black, was called in the court-house. It was presided over by J. A. Brannan, one of the foremost citizens. Speeches were made by Mayor Johnstone, by the ministers of the town, and by other citizens, including a Negro, all calling for good order and the calm and proper enforcement of the law.

Attempts to Prevent the Lynching

And the regular machinery of justice was put in motion with commendable rapidity. Fearing a lynching, the Negroes who had been arrested were sent to Savannah and there lodged in jail. A grand jury was immediately called, indictments were found, and in two weeks—the shortest possible time under the law—the Negroes were brought back from Savannah for trial. To protect them, two military companies, one from Statesboro, one from Savannah, were called out. The proof of guilt was absolutely conclusive, and, although the Negroes were given every advantage to which they were entitled under the law, several prominent attorneys having been appointed to defend them, they were promptly convicted and sentenced to be hanged.

In the meantime great excitement prevailed. The town was crowded for days with farmers who came flocking in from every direction. The crime was discussed and magnified; it was common talk that the “niggers of Madison County are getting too bigoty”—that they wouldn’t “keep their places.” Fuel was added to the flame by the common report that the murderers of the Hodges family were members of a Negro society known as the “Before Day Club,” and wild stories were told of other murders that had been planned, the names of intended victims even being reported.

On the Sunday night before the trial, two Negro women, walking down the street are said to have crowded two respectable white girls off the sidewalk. A crowd dragged the women from a church where they had gone, took them to the outskirts of the town, whipped them both violently, and ordered them to leave the county.

“Let the law take its course,” urged the good citizen. “The Negroes have been sentenced to be hanged, let them be hanged legally; we want no disgrace to fall on the town.”

How the Lynchers Themselves Defend a Lynching

But as the trial progressed and the crowd increased, there were louder and louder expressions of the belief that hanging was too good for such a crime. I heard intelligent citizens argue that a Negro criminal, in order to be a hero in the eyes of his people, does not mind being hanged!

Another distinct feeling developed—a feeling that I found in other lynching towns: that somehow the courts and the law were not to be trusted to punish the criminals properly. Although Reed and Cato were sentenced to be hanged, the crowd argued that “the lawyers would get them off,” that “the case would be appealed, and they would go free.”

Members of the mob tried to get Sheriff Kendrick to promise not to remove the Negroes to Savannah, fearing that in some way they would be taken beyond the reach of justice.

In other words, there existed a deep-seated conviction that justice too often miscarried in Bulloch County and that murderers commonly escaped punishment through the delays and technicalities of the law.

A Habit of Man-killing

And there is, unfortunately, a foundation for this belief. In every lynching town I visited I made especial inquiry as to the prevalence of crime, particularly as to the degree of certainty of punishment for crime. In all of them property is safe; laws looking to the protection of goods and chattels are executed with a fair degree of precision; for we are a business-worshipping people. But I was astounded by the extraordinary prevalence in all these lynching counties, North as well as South, of crimes of violence, especially homicide, accompanied in every case by a poor enforcement of the law. Bulloch County, with barely twenty-five thousand inhabitants, had thirty-two homicides in a little more than five years before the lynching—an annual average of one to every four thousand five hundred people (the average in the entire United States being one to nine thousand). Within eight months prior to the Hodges lynching, no fewer than ten persons (including the Hodges family) were murdered in Bulloch County. In twenty-eight years, notwithstanding the high rate of homicides, only three men, all Negroes, have been legally hanged, while four men—three Negroes and one white man—have been lynched.

It is well understood that if the murderer has friends or a little money to hire lawyers, he can, especially if he happens to be white, nearly always escape with a nominal punishment. These facts are widely known and generally commented upon. In his subsequent charge to the grand jury, Judge Daley said that the mob was due in part to “delays in the execution of law and to the people becoming impatient.”

I am not telling these things with any idea of excusing or palliating the crime of lynching, but with the earnest intent of setting forth all the facts, so that we may understand just what the feelings and impulses of a lynching town really are, good as well as bad. Unless we diagnose the case accurately, we cannot hope to discover effective remedies.

Psychology of the Mob

In the intense, excited crowd gathered around the court-house on this Tuesday, the 16th of August, other influences were also at work, influences operating in a greater or less degree in every lynching mob. We are accustomed to look upon a mob as an entity, the expression of a single concrete feeling; it is not; it is itself torn with dissensions and compunctions, swayed by conflicting emotions. Similarly, we look upon a militia company as a sort of machine, which, set in operation, automatically performs a certain definite service. But it is not. It is made up of young men, each with his own intense feelings, prejudices, ideals; and it requires unusual discipline to inculcate such a sense of duty that the individual soldier will rise superior to the emotions of the hour. Most of these young men of Statesboro and Savannah really sympathised with the mob; among the crowd the Statesboro men saw their relatives and friends. Some of the officers were ambitious men, hoping to stand for political office. What would happen if they ordered the troops to fire on their neighbours?

And “the nigger deserved hanging,” and “why should good white blood be shed for nigger brutes?” At a moment of this sort the clear perception of solemn abstract principles and great civic duties fades away in tumultuous excitement. Yet these soldier boys were not cowards; they have a fighting history; their fathers made good soldiers; they themselves would serve bravely against a foreign enemy, but when called upon for mob service they failed utterly, as they have failed repeatedly, both North and South.

Up to the last moment, although the crowd believed in lynching and wanted to lynch, there seemed to be no real and general determination to forestall the law. The mob had no centre, no fixed purpose, no real plan of action. One determined man, knowing his duty (as I shall show in another story), and doing it with common sense, could have prevented trouble, but there was no such man. Captain Hitch, of the Savannah Company, a vacillating commander, allowed the crowd to pack the court-house, to stream in and out among his soldiers; he laid the responsibility (afterward) on the sheriff, and the sheriff shouldered it back upon him. In nearly all the cases I investigated, I found the same attempt to shift responsibility, the same lack of a responsible head. Our system too often fails when mob stress is laid upon it—unless it happens that some strong man stands out, assumes responsibility, and becomes a momentary despot.

How the Soldiers Were Overpowered

A mob, no matter how deeply inflamed, is always cowardly. This mob was no exception. It crowded up, crowded up, testing authority. It joked with the soldiers, and when it found that the jokes were appreciated, it took further liberties; it jostled the soldiers—good-humouredly. “You don’t dare fire,” it said, and the soldiers made no reply. “Your guns aren’t loaded,” it said, and some soldier confessed that they were not. In tender consideration for the feelings of the mob, the officers had ordered the men not to load their rifles. The next step was easy enough; the mob playfully wrenched away a few of the guns, those behind pushed forward—those behind always do push forward, knowing they will not be hurt—and in a moment the whole mob was swarming up the stairs, yelling and cheering.

In the court-room, sentence had been passed on Reed and Cato, and the judge had just congratulated the people on “their splendid regard for the law under very trying conditions.” Then the mob broke in. A brother of the murdered Hodges, a minister from Texas, rose magnificently to the occasion. With tears streaming down his face, he begged the mob to let the law take its course.

“We don’t want religion, we want blood,” yelled a voice.

The mob was now thoroughly stirred; it ceased to hesitate; it was controlled wholly by its emotions. The leaders plunged down the court-room and into the witness chamber, where the Negroes sat with their wives, Reed’s wife with a young baby. The officers of the law accommodatingly indicated the right Negroes, and the mob dragged them out. Hanging was at first proposed, and a man even climbed a telegraph-pole just outside the court-house, but the mob, growing more ferocious as it gathered volume and excitement, yelled its determination:

“Burn them! burn them!”

They rushed up the road, intending to take the Negroes to the scene of the crime. But it was midday in August, with a broiling hot sun overhead and a dusty road underfoot. A mile from town the mob swerved into a turpentine forest, pausing first to let the Negroes kneel and confess. Calmer spirits again counselled hanging, but some one began to recite in a high-keyed voice the awful details of the crime, dwelling especially on the death of the little girl. It worked the mob into a frenzy of ferocity.

“They burned the Hodges and gave them no choice; burn the niggers!”

“Please don’t burn me,” pleaded Cato. And again: “Hang me or shoot me; please don’t burn me!”

Burning of the Negroes

Some one referred the question to the father-in-law of Hodges. He said Hodges’s mother wished the men burned. That settled it. Men were sent into town for kerosene oil and chains, and finally the Negroes were bound to an old stump, fagots were heaped around them, and each was drenched with oil. Then the crowd stood back accommodatingly, while a photographer, standing there in the bright sunshine, took pictures of the chained Negroes. Citizens crowded up behind the stump and got their faces into the photograph. When the fagots were lighted, the crowd yelled wildly. Cato, the less stolid of the two Negroes, partly of white blood, screamed with agony; but Reed, black and stolid, bore it like a block of wood. They threw knots and sticks at the writhing creatures, but always left room for the photographer to take more pictures.

And when it was all over, they began, in common with all mobs, to fight for souvenirs. They scrambled for the chains before they were cold, and the precious links were divided among the populace. Pieces of the stump were hacked off, and finally one young man—it must be told—gathered up a few charred remnants of bone, carried them uptown, and actually tried to give them to the judge who presided at the trial of the Negroes, to the utter disgust of that official.

After Effects of Mob-law

This is the law of the mob, that it never stops with the thing it sets out to do. It is exactly like any other manifestation of uncontrolled human passion—given licence it takes more licence, it releases that which is ugly, violent, revengeful in the community as in the individual human heart. I have heard often of a “quiet mob,” an “orderly mob,” which “went about its business and hanged the nigger,” but in all the cases I have known about, and I made special inquiries upon this particular point, not one single mob stopped when the immediate work was done, unless under compulsion. Even good citizens of Statesboro will tell you that “the niggers got only what they deserved,” and “it was all right if the mob had only stopped there.” But it did not stop there; it never does.

All the stored-up racial animosity came seething to the surface; all the personal grudges and spite. As I have already related, two Negro women were whipped on the Sunday night before the lynching. On the day following the lynching the father of the women was found seeking legal punishment for the men who whipped his daughters, and he himself was taken out and frightfully beaten. On the same day two other young Negroes, of the especially hated “smart nigger” type, were caught and whipped—one for riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, the other, as several citizens told me, “on general principles.” But this was not the worst. On Wednesday night an old Negro man and his son—Negroes of the better class—were sitting in their cabin some miles from Statesboro, when they were both shot at through the window and badly wounded. Another respectable Negro, named McBride, was visited in his home by a white mob, which first whipped his wife, who was confined with a baby three days old, and then beat, kicked, and shot McBride himself so horribly that he died the next day. The better class of citizens, the same men who would, perhaps, condone the burning of Reed and Cato, had no sympathy with this sort of thing. Some of them took McBride’s dying statement, and four white men were arrested and charged with the murder; but never punished.

Indeed, the mob led directly to a general increase of crime in Bulloch County. As Judge Daley said in his charge to a subsequent grand jury:

“Mob violence begets crime. Crime has been more prevalent since this lynching than ever before. In the middle circuit the courts have been so badly crowded with murder trials that it has been almost impossible to attend to civil business.”

Another evil result of the lynching was that it destroyed valuable evidence. The prosecutors had hoped to learn from the convicted Reed and Cato whether or not they had any companions and thereby bring to justice all the other Negroes suspected of complicity in the murder of the Hodges. If the Before Day Club ever existed and had a criminal purpose (which is doubtful) most of the members who composed it were left at large, awaiting the next opportunity to rob and murder.

Mob Justice and the Cotton Crop

Mob-law has not only represented a moral collapse in this community, but it struck, also, at the sensitive pocket of the business interests of the county. Frightened by the threatening attitude of the whites, the Negroes began to leave the county. It was just at the beginning of the cotton-picking season, when labour of every sort was much needed, Negro labour especially. It would not do to frighten away all the Negroes. On Thursday some of the officials and citizens of Statesboro got together, appointed extra marshals, and gave notice that there were to be no more whippings, and the mob spirit disappeared—until next time.

But what of the large Negro population of Statesboro during all this excitement? The citizens told the “decent Negroes”: “We don’t want to hurt you; we know you; you are all right; go home and you won’t be hurt.” Go home they did, and there was not a Negro to be seen during all the time of the lynching. From inquiry among the Negroes themselves, I found that many of them had no voice to raise against the burning of Reed and Cato. This was the grim, primitive eye-for-an-eye logic that they used, in common with many white men:

“Reed and Cato burned the Hodges; they ought to be burned.”

Even Cato’s wife used this logic.

But all the Negroes were bitter over the indiscriminate whippings which followed the lynching. These whippings widened the breach between the races, led to deeper suspicion and hatred, fertilised the soil for future outbreaks. In the same week that I visited Statesboro, no fewer than three cotton-gins in various parts of Bulloch County were mysteriously burned at night, and while no one knew the exact origin of the fires, it was openly charged that they were caused by revengeful Negroes. None of these terrible after-effects would have taken place if the law had been allowed to follow its course.

A Fighting Parson

The overwhelming majority of the people of Bulloch County undoubtedly condoned the lynching, even believed in it heartily and completely. And yet, as I have said, there was a strong dissenting opposition among the really thoughtful, better-class citizens. All the churches of Statesboro came out strongly for law and order. The Methodist church, led by a fighting parson, the Rev. Whitely Langston, expelled two members who had been in the mob—an act so unpopular that the church lost twenty-five members of its congregation. Of course, the members of the mob were known, but none of them was ever punished. The judge especially charged the grand jury to investigate the lynching, and this was its report:

“We deplore the recent lawlessness in our city and community, specially referred to by his Honour, Judge A. F. Daley, in his able charge. We have investigated the matter in the light of information coming under our personal knowledge and obtained by the examination of a number of witnesses, but we have been unable to find sufficient evidence to warrant indictments. We tender thanks to his Honour, Judge Daley, for his able and comprehensive charge.”

A feeble attempt was made to discipline the military officers who allowed the populace to walk over them and take away their guns. A court-martial sat for days in Savannah and finally recommended the dismissal of Captain Hitch from the service of the state; but the Governor let him off with half the penalty suggested. Two lieutenants were also disciplined.

In the state election which followed the lynching, numerous voters in Bulloch County actually scratched the name of Governor Terrell, of Georgia, because he ordered the troops to Statesboro, and substituted the name of Captain Hitch. Sheriff Kendrick, who failed to protect Reed and Cato, was re-elected without opposition.

It was in a tone of deep discouragement that Mayor G. S. Johnstone, of Statesboro, said to me:

“If our grand jury won’t indict these lynchers, if our petit juries won’t convict, and if our soldiers won’t shoot, what are we coming to?”

Revolution of Opinion in the South on Lynching

Conditions at Statesboro are, perhaps, typical of those in most Southern towns. In most Southern towns a lynching would be conducted much as it was in Statesboro; there would be the same objecting but ineffective minority of good citizens, the troops would refuse their duty, and the lynchers would escape in much the same way. And yet, if we were to stop with the account of the Statesboro affair, we should overlook some of the greatest influences now affecting the lynching problem in the South. No one who visits the South can escape the conviction that, with its intensified industrial life, and the marvelous development and enrichment of the whole country, other equally momentous, if less tangible, changes are taking place. Public opinion is developing along new lines, old, set prejudices are breaking up, and there is, among other evident influences, a marked revolution in the attitude of the Southern people and the Southern newspapers on the lynching question. I turn now to the lynching at Huntsville, Ala., which reveals in a striking manner some of the features of the new revolt in the South against mob-law.

Photographed by Collins & Son

COURT HOUSE AND BANK IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE AT HUNTSVILLE, ALABAMA

The Negro, Maples, was lynched by being hung to the elm tree at the corner
of the court house, near the extreme right of the picture.

A Negro Crime at Huntsville, Ala.

One evening in September, 1904, a Negro of Huntsville, Ala., asked an old peddler named Waldrop for a ride. Waldrop was a kindly old man, well known and respected throughout Madison County; he drove into the city two or three times a week with vegetables and chickens to sell, and returned with the small product of his trade in his pocket.

Waldrop knew the Negro, Maples, and, although Maples was of the worthless sort, and even then under indictment for thieving, the peddler made room for him in his waggon, and they rode out of the town together. They drove into a lonely road. They crossed a little bridge. Tall trees shaded and darkened the place. Night was falling. The Negro picked up a stone and beat out the brains of the inoffensive old man, robbed him, and left him lying there at the roadside, while the horse wandered homeward.

How a murder cries out! The murderer fled in the darkness but it was as if he left great footprints. The next day, in Huntsville, the law laid its hand on his shoulder.

Now, Huntsville is one of the best cities in Alabama. No other city, perhaps, preserves more of the aristocratic habiliments of the older South. It was the first capital of the state. Seven governors lie buried in its cemetery; its county house, its bank, some of its residences are noble examples of the architecture of the ante-bellum South. And while preserving these evidences of the wealth and refinement of an older civilisation, few cities in the South have responded more vigorously to the new impulses of progress and development. Its growth during the last few years has been little short of amazing. Northern capital has come in; nine cotton-mills have been built, drawing a large increase of population, and stimulating the development of the country in every direction. It is a fine, orderly, progressive city—intensely American, ambitious, self-respecting.

Relation of Lynching to Business Success

Huntsville has had its share of lynchings in the past. Within twenty years seven Negroes and one white man had been the victims of mobs in Madison County. The best citizens knew what a lynching meant; they knew how the mob began, and what invariably followed its excesses, and they wanted no more such horrors. But this revolt was not wholly moral. With awakening industrial ambition the people realised that disorder had a tendency to frighten away capital, stop immigration, and retard development generally. Good business demands good order. This feeling has been expressed in various forms and through many channels. It existed in Statesboro, but it was by no means as vigorous as in this manufacturing city of Huntsville. We find, for instance, Congressman Richardson of Alabama, a citizen of Huntsville, saying in a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives:

“Why, Mr. Chairman, we have more reason in the South to observe the law and do what is right than any other section of this Union.”

The Atlanta Constitution presents the same view in vigorous language: