pronounced awakening of the public conscience to a system of anarchy and
outlawry which had grown during a series of ten years to be so common,
that scenes of unusual brutality failed to have any visible effect upon
the humane sentiments of the people of our land.

Beginning with the emancipation of the Negro, the inevitable result of
unbribled power exercised for two and a half centuries, by the white man
over the Negro, began to show itself in acts of conscienceless outlawry.
During the slave regime, the Southern white man owned the Negro body and
soul. It was to his interest to dwarf the soul and preserve the body.
Vested with unlimited power over his slave, to subject him to any and all
kinds of physical punishment, the white man was still restrained from such
punishment as tended to injure the slave by abating his physical powers
and thereby reducing his financial worth. While slaves were scourged
mercilessly, and in countless cases inhumanly treated in other respects,
still the white owner rarely permitted his anger to go so far as to take a
life, which would entail upon him a loss of several hundred dollars. The
slave was rarely killed, he was too valuable; it was easier and quite as
effective, for discipline or revenge, to sell him "Down South."

But Emancipation came and the vested interests of the white man in the
Negro's body were lost. The white man had no right to scourge the
emancipated Negro, still less has he a right to kill him. But the Southern
white people had been educated so long in that school of practice, in
which might makes right, that they disdained to draw strict lines of
action in dealing with the Negro. In slave times the Negro was kept
subservient and submissive by the frequency and severity of the scourging,
but, with freedom, a new system of intimidation came into vogue; the Negro
was not only whipped and scourged; he was killed.