Ramirez commented that he would make "no comment on these notices because many people in this city know Salvador Valdez, and know his character better than I do." In the same edition, on February 8, 1855, Ramirez wrote of two other lynchings, both "Americanos" and observed "
Lynch law ...
The South would employ the
lynch law -- the lynching of Negroes to preserve its way of life as much as possible.
On one hand, I read Frances Willard as saying something akin to: "Shut up, or I'll have you bound over to the big court!" More charitably, I read her as a white, well-connected woman willfully misrepresenting Ida and playing a womanly possum vis-a-vis the implicit
lynch law agency of white American womanhood.
She admits the strangeness of going abroad when, logically, more good might come of such a campaign in the US, save that "we, as a race, cannot get a hearing in the United States" where both "[t]he press and pulpit" are silent about, and thus complicit in,
lynch law (131).
progress, not just the index but the glittering proof of national civilization, in this passage Douglass anticipates the irony, and the crisis, entailed for such an endeavor by
lynch law's horror.
When people begin to believe that organized society is unwilling or unable to impose upon criminal offenders the punishment they "deserve," then there are sown the seeds of anarchy--of self help, vigilante justice, and
lynch law.
His devious scheme almost sparked
lynch law and broke Angela's heart.
The revolution made it more difficult to correct these faults manifest in crime waves,
lynch law, and the Civil War.
Wells's Southern Horrors:
Lynch Law in all its Phases (1892) and Frances E.
For the remainder of his life Tillman fiercely defended the segregated society he had helped shape from all threats, both internal and external, championing
lynch law as the ultimate expression of the white man's determination to rule.
Paramilitaries are most to be feared not when they hate the government but when they are its allies, as when the Ku Klux Klan dominated Democratic politics in the South from the era of
lynch law to the early 1960s.