"Lynch law" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and magistrates, and killing without scruple those who interfered with them. The good men in such a case banded themselves together as regulators and put down the wicked with ruthless severity, by the exercise of lynch law, shooting and hanging ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... the arrest, but Judge Miller, of the Beaver County circuit, who was in Clarendon that day, used his influence to discountenance any disorder, and promised a speedy trial of the prisoner. The crime was not the worst of crimes, and there was no excuse for riot or lynch law. The accused could ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... were as bitter toward me as the apprentices, and that the latter were probably set on by the former, I found my only chances for life was in flight. I succeeded in getting away, without an additional blow. To strike a white man, was death, by Lynch law, in Gardiner's ship yard; nor was there much of any other law toward colored people, at that time, in any other part of Maryland. The whole sentiment ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... least, such are all that Captain Bonneville had the patience to collect; for he was so deeply grieved by the failure of his plans, and so indignant at the atrocities related to him, that he turned, with disgust and horror, from the narrators. Had he exerted a little of the Lynch law of the wilderness, and hanged those dexterous horsemen in their own lasos, it would but have been a well-merited and salutary act of retributive justice. The failure of this expedition was a blow to his pride, and a still greater blow ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... conflict was unintelligible—they understood nothing of it, although otherwise they were thoughtful and intelligent enough. These were mostly people who had come in from the provinces at a somewhat advanced age; indeed some had been small employers there. For them trades unionism was a sort of lynch law, and they profited by the strike in all simplicity in order to obtain well-paid employment. When they were reviled as strikebreakers or "gentlemen," they laughed like little children who are threatened with a revolver. Slow-witted as they were, in this respect, they took the consequences ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... that I haven't got the power to arrest these fellows, and hang them without a trial? They deserve punishment, yet there is no evidence by which they can be convicted. Your California lynch law would work wonders here in a ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... neither did I," he admitted. "Lynch law is a horrible thing; don't make any mistake about that. But there's one thing more horrible, and that's no law at all. And that is the present situation ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper
... the terror they inspire by threats to shoot their critics. This recognition of the right of the individual to punish, by the infliction of death, the person who has injured him, puts the community at the mercy of the worst elements in it. It is the extension of the barbarism of lynch law. It makes every man, who wants to be one, a mob. It develops the idea of savagery in revenge to such an extent that the individual executioner of the offender against himself does not hesitate to wreak his vengeance ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... table was set and the steak was frying. Inez and Judith winked at each other when Mr. Fowler said grace but otherwise the meal progressed decorously enough. It was Inez who brought up the tabooed subject. They had been sitting round the stove listening to a tale of old lynch law which the preacher told with real skill, when Inez interrupted ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... robbery and violence could not be suppressed. We have all heard of the way in which the decent element finally got together, formed special laws and executed offenders in short order. No one of course approves lynch law in the abstract, but when the circumstances of the case are taken into consideration, it is difficult to condemn very severely the men who made it possible for San Francisco to become ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... truth struggled for a hearing, but then as now traveled more slowly than error. In the North American for July, 1892, Frederick Douglass wrote vigorously of "Lynch Law in the South." In the same month George W. Cable answered affirmatively and with emphasis the question, "Does the Negro pay for his education?" He showed that in Georgia in 1889-90 the colored schools did not really cost the white citizens a cent, and that in ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley |
