Essay No. 10
An International Lesson
An Article on
LAWLESSNESS IN AMERICA
(Reprinted by kind permission of the "Japan Daily Mail.")
THE States of Tennessee and Kentucky—and, to a lesser extent, almost all the Southern States of the American Union—have for some time past been seething with that particular form of lawlessness exemplified in the doings of the "nightriders." Kentucky seems to be the original home of this murderous movement, but the burden of notoriety was shifted to the adjoining State in consequence of a peculiarly atrocious crime. "On the night of Oct. 19th," as recorded by an American journal, "Capt. Quentin Rankin and Col. R. Z. Taylor, officers of the locally hated West Tennessee Land Company, were summoned from their beds in a little backwoods hotel on the shore of Reelfoot Lake by a band of masked and cloaked nightriders. Captain Rankin was hanged to a tree and shot, while Colonel Taylor broke away and escaped in the darkness amid a storm of bullets."
The offence of the murdered man, and of his companion who narrowly escaped with his life, was that they occupied official positions in the West Tennessee
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Land Company, which had acquired possession of Reelfoot Lake and had set restrictions upon fishing privileges long enjoyed by the fisherfolk of the district. While, therefore, as a Union City correspondent points out, the primary object of the band may have been to combat a real or imaginary injustice in the community, it soon became an instrument of tyranny and personal vengeance, with a record of crimes of constantly increasing magnitude and brutality. Thus, from the burning of docks and other private property they progressed to midnight whipping—their victims being women as well as men —and finally to murder.
At last the brutal assassination of Captain Rankin compelled action on the part of the civil authorities. The trial which resulted was among the most remarkable in the legislative history of the Southern States. "Every witness against the nightriders," says the correspondent from whom we have already quoted, "spoke with the knowledge that he was endangering not only his own life, but the lives of those dear to him. Many of these witnesses had to be guaranteed free transportation out of the State, so sure were they of assassination at the hands of the prisoners' friends and sympathisers. The same danger lurked for each member of the jury. Two shots were fired at Attorney-General Caldwell in the streets of Union City during the trial, and it was known that Judge Jones was among those sentenced to death by the
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band. Throughout the trial a guard of armed soldiers was in constant attendance in the courtroom."
In the district, in view of the local sympathy with the prisoners, a disagreement among the jury was fully expected. The most sanguine of the friends of law and order dared not hope for a verdict of " guilty," and the Atlanta Journal shuddered to think what the effect of a mistrial or an acquittal might be. Fortunately for the reputation of the Southern States, and fortunately for the interests of public safety and morality, the authority of the law was upheld. A verdict of "guilty " was returned. Six of the ringleaders were sentenced to death and two others to twenty years' imprisonment. All praise is due to those who, at considerable risk to themselves, conducted the trial without fear or favour, for the condemned men represent but a small fraction of the whole gang. Twenty of the "Reelfoot Lake Nightriders " are still in prison awaiting trial, and some two hundred are yet at large.
In the neighbouring State of Kentucky, the situation is hardly as favourable, as the Louisville Courier Journal regretfully admits :—
" The law has not yet avenged the assassination of Hiram
Hedges. The pathetic picture of that husband and father
shot down in his own front door, for no other reason than
that a band of ruffians considered it good tactics to commit a murder to put intimidation upon a firmer footing and make more clearly understood their utter contempt for the law and its representatives, remains fixed in the mind's eye of every-
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one in Kentucky who is above the endorsement of assassination as a business policy. The spectacle of a widow and orphans without redress cannot be blotted from the imagination.
"A short time before the Reelfoot Lake murder a negro family was slaughtered near Hickman by a mob of Kentucky ruffians—an offshoot of nightriderism enjoying a frolic under the protecting wing of the organisation. What has been done about it ? What is to be done about it ? In Southern Kentucky an unoffending negro was called from his bed, marched into the high road, commanded to run, and shot in the back. The crime was surely not less worthy of punishment than the murder of Captain Rankin ! It is as unnecessary as it is humiliating to recite the list of unpunished nightrider crimes in this State."
The lynching of negroes is an evil so closely identified with the United States as to be recognised as almost an American institution. It has been the custom to explain it away as a consequence of the particular vices of the negro, and to some extent an outgrowth of racial prejudice in the Southern States. But the North can claim no immunity from this fiendish trait, and the bloody hands of lynchers have taken the lives of white men too frequently for any explanation to meet the case other than the inherent lawlessness of the American character, as shown in certain classes and parts of the country. It is perhaps not too much to say that the American people, as a whole, have an exaggerated, and somewhat distorted, conception of liberty, which they have set up as a golden image without discovering that it has feet of clay.
Now those observers who are other than superficial, who believe in going to the beginnings of
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things, are led to inquire : "The boy is father to the man—what of the American youth ? " Here, in the opinion of many, lies the explanation of the matter—in the American home and school. When such principles of home education pass current as that once expressed by an American woman of distinction—" I never correct or check my child, whatever he does . . . . restraint of any kind is bad for a growing nature," and when the whole system of academical discipline is sicklied o'er with similar views, is it any ground for surprise that the American child is too often precocious and wilful, the youth loud, self-assertive to the point of offensiveness, headstrong and heedless ? Can any thinking man deny that there is some connection between these methods of erudition and such a disagreeable fact as that America is preeminently the land of juvenile crime ? From time to time the world is shocked by a murder committed deliberately by a stripling who has not yet attained to years of discretion. Yet the system which can produce such a youthful ogre stands unchallenged However, signs are not wanting that, in recognising that all is not for the best in their much-lauded educational system, our American friends are "getting there." Public opinion is beginning to be exercised on the score of the teachers in American schools, who are nearly all women. The New York Educational Review, after declaring that " Women are the teachers of the American youth," opines that, while this may
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not he a bad thing for young children, "for boys of eighteen to be taught by women not much older than themselves is an altogether different matter," and men seem to have confided to the writer that having been at that period of their lives under women teachers has wrought them serious injury. Similarly, the efficiency of co-education in higher elementary and secondary schools is called in question, as tending to give the majority of boys in later life "a certain moral slackness which makes it easy for a corrupt minority to ride roughshod over them." As an attempt to explain the alleged widespread corruption in the public services of the United States this may pass muster, but to account for the recklessness, the tendency to violence, the absence of consideration culminating in cruelty, which go to make the nightrider, the train-wrecker, the lyncher, one must go deeper. The seeds of such a character are sown at a very much earlier age, and the true remedy would be for American parents and teachers of the young to pay more regard to the homely principles of erudition laid down by that wise king and profound student of humanity who said, "Train up a child in the way he should go, and, when he is old, he will not depart from it."
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