Patience under such circumstances is not a virtue. If the negroes
themselves do not apply the remedy without delay it will be the duty of
those whom he has attacked to tie the wretch who utters these calumnies
to a stake at the intersection of Main and Madison Sts., brand him in
the forehead with a hot iron and perform upon him a surgical operation
with a pair of tailor's shears.

Acting upon this advice, the leading citizens met in the Cotton Exchange
Building the same evening, and threats of lynching were freely indulged,
not by the lawless element upon which the deviltry of the South is usually
saddled--but by the leading business men, in their leading business
centre. Mr. Fleming, the business manager and owning a half interest the
_Free Speech_, had to leave town to escape the mob, and was afterwards
ordered not to return; letters and telegrams sent me in New York where I
was spending my vacation advised me that bodily harm awaited my return.
Creditors took possession of the office and sold the outfit, and the _Free
Speech_ was as if it had never been.

The editorial in question was prompted by the many inhuman and fiendish
lynchings of Afro-Americans which have recently taken place and was meant
as a warning. Eight lynched in one week and five of them charged with
rape! The thinking public will not easily believe freedom and education
more brutalizing than slavery, and the world knows that the crime of rape
was unknown during four years of civil war, when the white women of the
South were at the mercy of the race which is all at once charged with
being a bestial one.

Since my business has been destroyed and I am an exile from home because
of that editorial, the issue has been forced, and as the writer of it I
feel that the race and the public generally should have a statement of the