At the hands of the mob, however, her shrift would
presumably have been short and sure.
[Footnote 38: For examples of these see above, pp. 460-463.]
[Footnote 39: _Calendar of Virginia State Papers_, V, 328.]
[Footnote 40: _Southern Banner_ (Athens, Ga.), June 14, 1860. Other
instances, gleaned mostly from _Niles' Register_ and the _Liberator_, are
given in J.E. Cutler, _Lynch Law_ (New York, 1905), pp. 90-136.]
[Footnote 41: Harriett Martineau, _Retrospect of Western Travel_ (London,
1838), I, 262-267; V. Debouchel, _Histoire de la Louisiane_ (New Orleans,
1841), p. 155; Alcee Fortier, _History of Louisiana_, III, 223.]
The violence of city mobs is a thing peculiar to no time or place. Rural
Southern lynch law in that period, however, was in large part a special
product of the sparseness of population and the resulting weakness of legal
machinery, for as Olmsted justly remarked in the middle 'fifties, the whole
South was virtually still in a frontier condition.[42] In _post bellum_
decades, on the other hand, an increase of racial antipathy has offset the
effect of the densification of settlement and has abnormally prolonged the
liability to the lynching impulse.
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