characterized the people of Paris, Texas, and adjacent communities on the
first of February, 1893. The cause of this awful outbreak of human passion
was the murder of a four-year-old child, daughter of a man named Vance.
This man, Vance, had been a police officer in Paris for years, and was
known to be a man of bad temper, overbearing manner and given to harshly
treating the prisoners under his care. He had arrested Smith and, it is
said, cruelly mistreated him. Whether or not the murder of his child was
an art of fiendish revenge, it has not been shown, but many persons who
know of the incident have suggested that the secret of the attack on the
child lay in a desire for revenge against its father.

In the same town there lived a Negro, named Henry Smith, a well-known
character, a kind of roustabout, who was generally considered a harmless,
weak-minded fellow, not capable of doing any important work, but
sufficiently able to do chores and odd jobs around the houses of the white
people who cared to employ him. A few days before the final tragedy, this
man, Smith, was accused of murdering Myrtle Vance. The crime of murder was
of itself bad enough, and to prove that against Smith would have been
amply sufficient in Texas to have committed him to the gallows, but the
finding of the child so exasperated the father and his friends, that they
at once shamefully exaggerated the facts and declared that the babe had
been ruthlessly assaulted and then killed. The truth was bad enough, but
the white people of the community made it a point to exaggerate every
detail of the awful affair, and to inflame the public mind so that nothing
less than immediate and violent death would satisfy the populace. As a
matter of fact, the child was not brutally assaulted as the world has been
told in excuse for the awful barbarism of that day. Persons who saw the
child after its death, have stated, under the most solemn pledge to truth,
that there was no evidence of such an assault as was published at that
time, only a slight abrasion and discoloration was noticeable and that