against the blacks. Charles was one of the bishop's disciples and
evidence has been found that seems to indicate they were in
correspondence.

This was all that the _Times-Democrat_'s reporters could find after the
most diligent search to prove that Charles was the fiend incarnate which
the press of New Orleans and elsewhere declared him to be.

The reporters of the _New Orleans Picayune_ were no more successful than
their brethren of the _Times-Democrat_. They, too, were compelled to
substitute fiction for facts in their attempt to prove Charles a
desperado. In the issue of the twenty-sixth of July it was said that
Charles was well known in Vicksburg, and was there a consort of thieves.
They mentioned that a man named Benson Blake was killed in 1894 or 1895,
and that four Negroes were captured, and two escaped. Of the two escaped
they claim that Charles was one. The four negroes who were captured were
put in jail, and as usual, in the high state of civilization which
characterizes Mississippi, the right of the person accused of crime to an
indictment by legal process and a legal trial by jury was considered an
useless formality if the accused happened to be black. A mob went to the
jail that night, the four colored men were delivered to the mob, and all
four were hanged in the court-house yard. The reporters evidently assumed
that Charles was guilty, if, in fact, he was ever there, because the other
four men were lynched. They did not consider it was a fact of any
importance that Charles was never indicted. They called him a murderer on
general principles.


+DIED IN SELF-DEFENSE+