It would be tedious as well as useless to recount the horrors of all of
them. Those, happening in the State of Mississippi and at St. Louis
are, perhaps, the most dangerous in example and revolting to humanity.
In the Mississippi case they first commenced by hanging the regular
gamblers--a set of men certainly not following for a livelihood a very
useful or very honest occupation; but one which, so far from being
forbidden by the laws, was actually licensed by an act of the
Legislature passed but a single year before. Next negroes suspected of
conspiring to raise an insurrection were caught up and hanged in all
parts of the State; then, white men supposed to be leagued with the
negroes; and finally, strangers from neighboring States, going thither
on business, were, in many instances, subjected to the same fate. Thus
went on this process of hanging, from gamblers to negroes, from negroes
to white citizens, and from these to strangers, till dead men were seen
literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every roadside, and in
numbers almost sufficient to rival the native Spanish moss of the
country, as a drapery of the forest.

Turn, then, to that horror-striking scene at St. Louis. A single
victim only was sacrificed there. This story is very short, and is
perhaps the most highly tragic of anything of its length that has ever
been witnessed in real life. A mulatto man by the name of McIntosh was
seized in the street, dragged to the suburbs of the city, chained to a
tree, and actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from
the time he had been a freeman, attending to his own business and at
peace with the world.

Such are the effects of mob law, and such are the scenes becoming more
and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of law and
order, and the stories of which have even now grown too familiar to