member of Congress from New Hampshire, provoked a quarrel which resulted in his being challenged and killed by Graves, a member from Kentucky.' Altercations in the legislature and in Congress were not uncommon. Elections were frequently scenes of petty civil war." Fires were regular occasions for a fight between rival fire companies, who often let the buildings burn while they were settling their differences. In 1834 came the burning of the Ursuline Convent, within sight of Bunker Hill monument, by an anti-Catholic mob, who drove out the nuns and their pupils, with the eventual loss of two lives; and the only prisoner convicted for a share in the outrage was pardoned by the governor. The negroes in the northern cities, as the poorest and most friendless of the population, usually suffered from any mob, no matter what had been its original occasion; and the abolitionists came in for the most determined assaults of these lawless efforts to secure law and order. Foreign immigration, which pushed men out of previous employment, organization of strikes on a larger scale than had been known before, attempts to get political control of city governments, all contributed to this reign of misrule. Perhaps the most decisive reason for it was the weakness of the local governments: not a single city had a disciplined 1 Mass. Hist. Soc., Proceedings, 2d series, XII., 287–292. ' Ibid., 503-508; Mrs. Whitney, Burning of the Convent. police force, and the state militia could not be relied upon to fight a mob. In the south the few cities were no better governed than those of the north, and there was a greater indifference to human suffering, and brutal treatment of prisoners and other defenceless people. Alongside the strength, vigor, and hopefulness of the frontier was the uncouthness, the ignorance, the prejudice, and the latent barbarism of the man who spent his life in conquering nature and the savage.1 1 2 This was shown in the ordinary administration of the criminal law: at a time when the Pennsylvania separate-cell penitentiary was known throughout the world as a model of humane treatment, the Georgia state-prison was a dirty place where "a piece of cooked meat was laid on the table for each prisoner without knives, forks, or plates.' An abolitionist inmate of the Missouri penitentiary from 1841 until 1845 found it an awful place of cruelty and wretchedness, in which the warden came home drunk at midnight to drag white men out of their cells to be whipped before him, and where white women prisoners were sometimes chained to the wall. As late as 1854 a traveller saw a pillory and stocks in a Mississippi town, and was told that “a white man had been recently stripped, whipped and 'See Turner, New West (Am. Nation, XIV.), chaps. iv.-viii. Saxe-Weimar, Travels, II., 20. *Thompson, Prison Life, passim. branded with a red hot iron by officers of the law." 1 The worst prison, however, was more merciful than lynch law. During the Revolution there was an actual Judge Charles Lynch in Virginia who took the responsibility of whipping loyalists, and gave his name to a system; but after 1830 the term “Lynch Law" came to be applied also to killings. The one justification of such a system is that frontier communities which have not provided themselves with the machinery of the law are subject to desperate and organized malefactors, and hence the practice gained headway in the west and southwest; but in the south the thing grew while the chief reason for it was disappearing. At first applied to ordinary criminals, such as murderers and gamblers, it soon began to reach negroes: one was burned alive by a mob near Greenville, South Carolina, in 1825, and fifty-six ascertained cases of lynching negroes occurred between 1823 and 1860. If one looks for the most distinctive feature of the American people in 1830, it will not be home life or social disorder, but the religious and philanthropic life and experiences of the time. Depravity and crime were common enough from end to end of the Union, and though people were squeamish about theatres and dancing, social life was in most ways 1 Olmsted, Back Country, 246. 2 Cutler, Lynch Law, 23-40, 116. 'Stuart, North America, II., 169; Cutler, Lynch Law, 98-100. |